Horror Story with Payoneer and Mvola!

You know, I have been using Payoneer for years, I must be one of the first in the country to have popularized this payment method among freelancers. The service was good at the time, today it has become a mess where you have no chance of getting the slightest response! Payoneer gives you USD or Euro debit cards. And it was a bit of a hassle to withdraw the money, you could go through local banks, but the fees were enormous, etc.

Since Mvola launched its CB2Mvola, so the possibility of funding your Mvola account with a credit card, well, that makes life easier. And I have used it very regularly for several years. Orange also has a similar service, but Payoneer is now refusing Orange because there was too much fraud. I had about $79 in my account that I was saving for the end of the month. So, I logged in this Friday, May 17 to withdraw a little money and what was my horror to discover that I no longer had 79 dollars, but -52 dollars! My fucking balance was in the negative.

There had been two Mvola transactions, one for $2.69 and one for $129.87 that had gone through and emptied my account and turned it negative. I rush to my Mvola account and my last transaction was on May 11 for an amount of around 100,000 ar (around $25). Who made these two transactions?

Below is my transaction history with Payoneer, the red box shows the two invalid transactions:

My Payoneer transaction history with fraudulent direct debits

And below, my history via CB2Mvola and we see that the last transaction dates from May 11:

My transaction history with CB2Mvola

It’s total panic, because I know that contacting Payoneer customer service is like walking through a minefield blind in the dark. Already, their site is so poorly constructed that no direct contact link is provided. If you don’t already have the direct link, you will never be able to contact them. But I have the link directly via their Live support which is available during business hours. I explain the problem to them and they tell me that for their part, the transaction has been validated by Mvola and that they cannot do anything.

In fact, I contact this damn support several times trying to get different answers, it’s the same, I’m provided with my transaction history which you see in the image above, proving that the transaction of 129 dollars has passed and that it is a legitimate transaction.

So I rush to Mvola customer support and they respond quite quickly, but I hit a wall, because they tell me that if there is a transaction, it must appear in my Mvola history on CB2Mvola ( it is not there) and that it is impossible to have a direct debit and that only I can trigger it.

So, I find myself in this situation where on the one hand, Payoneer tells me that there is no error and that the transaction has been validated and on the other hand, Mvola tells me that they have no record of the transaction. And so, I find myself repaying nearly 550,000 ariary because your system sucks! I’ve spent all day with these materials and I always get ready-made answers, no one takes the time to do a thorough check.

Me, I’m poking around in these two transactions and I notice that compared to my normal transactions, they don’t have a timeline. Usually there is a date that I took the money and it takes a day or two for it to be validated. In fraudulent transactions, there is no timeline, indicating that it was forced automatically.

For me, the only one responsible for this mess is Payoneer, because if your balance is insufficient, then the transaction does not go through and that’s it. This has happened to me in the past. There, the transaction was made when there was not enough money and only the card provider, i.e., Payoneer, can force it in this way. The question is why was the transaction recorded in Mvola’s name?

For me, there are two possibilities:

• Either, the bank which manages the Mvola service, it is MCB or the BNI, made withdrawals twice that I had already made in the past and all the sums went through only once.
• Either, Payoneer really did some shit, it created these two fraudulent transactions to restore balance in its own accounts.
• Either way, it is pure and simple theft, abuse of trust and fraud.

I told Mvola that it is your name that is tainted by this story and you have the clout to put pressure on Payoneer to fix this mess. But Mvola’s customer support is mainly there to respond automatically without thinking about the seriousness of this situation.

And so, I sent inflammatory emails to both parties and I hope that this will escalate from customer support to their supervisor so that we can understand what happened. I didn’t withdraw this money, Mvola doesn’t have a trace of it, but Payoneer still makes me reimburse it to the last cent! Because of this shit, I am in a dark financial mess and I find myself paying a debt because of the incompetence and mediocrity of two services that are not capable of working properly.

My advice to make my story useful is if you can find alternatives to Payoneer, do it. The service works when it works, but when there is a problem, you will be in deep trouble. And if you have to use it, then don’t leave money in your account, as soon as you have some money, withdraw it as quickly as possible, that way the damage is less.

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