Alexandra Alexandrou

I cannot describe how much I suffer because of Payoneer.
I do not have a choice because this is the service my company uses to pay me.

Like clockwork, every 3-4 months, my password (which is saved on my computer and has never changed) will not work and I will lose access to my account. Then they will send a verification code to a phone I do not own (because I have asked them to update my old phone at least 3 times but their system fails to save it) and then we will go around in circles again where a confused member of staff will tell me to wait while they resolve an imaginary problem. This time is especially bad, since what they are telling me is that I have lost access to my money.

What is worse and kind of cracks me up is that if you suspect that your account is hacked, the only way to contact their live chat and inform them of the emergency, is by signing into your account which has been hacked! XD

Yeah, at no point have I felt safe using Payoneer, and I only log in once a month to get my money out of there as fast as I can!

I hope I am able to take my money out this month, or else I will be facing paying late bills and the bank looking for me again just because Payoneer has failed me yet again.

The background:
I have been an Astril client since 2018 when I lived in China. When I moved out of China, I continued using Astril because I needed their Chinese client to continue doing some things within the country (some banking apps, entertainment apps etc)

Last month I updated my subscription and the Chinese client has since been removed. Since the service I was paying for was no longer provided,I asked for a refund. I received a flat "no".

They pointed me to a skeletal policy that says: "No 1: All purchases are final". I hopelessly tried to explain to customer service that beyond your policy, there is such a thing as customer protection law and you cannot take people's money and not offer services in return. I tried to explain that this is illegal. They could not care less.

So I looked into it. At first I was going to report the company to the according customer protection authorities as well as to the Apple store, but that would not get me my money back. I also looked into where the company operates from. Even though it is established as a British company, it actually operates as an offshore in the Seychelles for this exact reason. It gets around laws pertaining to internet usage and as a bonus to them, it makes it all the more difficult for consumers to file an official complaint against the company.

However, Astril uses an intermediary to complete its payments. I noticed that the invoice I received was from a different company. Unlike Astril, money handling intermediaries are subject to a lot stricter rules of conduct. Also, whenever you make a payment online, the intermediary bank will hold onto your money for a certain period of time until the purchase is finalised. The reason for this, is to avoid situations such as mine, where the customer did not received what he paid for.

Your solution:
Do not go to the Astril customer service and ask for a refund because you will not get it. Go to your emails, check the intermediary bank that send you the invoice and then visit their website. Usually there is a link on the invoice and you can click directly on it.

In my refund statement I declared that I had accidentally purchased something I did not want (which is true since the service was not available) and I got my money back within 3-4 hours.

I hope this helps. I am so tired of "clever" companies trying to swindle us out of our money. Sorry Astril, I was a dedicated customer until you tried to play dirty with me.

My partner has been using Coinbase for many years but recently they changed the process of buying a selling cryptocurrency by using their new intermediary app called Base.

Since we have been using cryptocurrency for a while and it is part of our daily routine and how we pay for some things, he keeps a large amount of money on the app which we access when we need. The last transaction we made was a week ago after which time the app completely blocked us from accessing our money and when I tried to access our account through my phone it simply crashed.

Since it is a large amount of money it has really affected our lives with us falling behind on important bills we had to pay and missing deadlines with our company obligations.

The exact details of the problem are that Coinbase used to use a 12 word passcode for extra security reasons, then they released a developer wallet which was like an "experiment" before they transitioned to the Base app which does not use the 12 word passcode. Our money is trapped in the developer stage wallet and there is nobody who can help us out. We are able to see the sum, but the app fails every time we try to sell the cryptocurrency or when we try to upgrade the wallet which is the process you follow to extract the amount you need.

Last week they told us it will be resolved by Friday, over the weekend we had no feedback and now they have told us it will be resolved by this coming Friday, but only maybe. Meanwhile our bills are pilling up.

I cannot warn enough against using Coinbase and Base. We have been punished severely for our trust in their services. We have been left at a very serious deficit for money, not being able to access our own savings and having to pay dearly in our daily obligations both as regards our rent and our business. You do not need this kind of fear and insecurity in your life. Use any other cryptocurrency service that is not experimenting with their app at your detriment.

Below I will continue posting the timeline of what has happened:

- 4th March: We had a five digit sum and the APP asked us to update, the update allows us to deposit money but not withdraw.

- 6th March: They had told us it would be resolved by this day, it wasn't.

- 9th of March: They tell us they are escalating the issue so that it will be resolved by the 13th of March.

- 10th March: My partner spends 4 hours on the phone with them but still no solution.

- 12th of March: One day before their deadline, they tell us they cannot resolve it unless we provide a transaction number, even though clearly the problem is that we cannot make a transaction.

- 13th of March: The problem still remains unresolved and we have started looking how to follow a legal route in order to get our money back. We have filed a formal complaint with the company, if the issue is not resolved within 45 days (as is the requirement), we will escalate it to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

- 14th of March: They put us in touch with one of the superiors who works in their New York office. He tells us that 5 engineers are working on the issue now, he cannot provide us with a timeline and when asked about compensation he tactfully brushes the issue aside.

- 16th of March: Once a request is escalated to this level, you cannot reach them via phone call. We sent a total of 3 emails asking them to give us a timeline or give us our money. They finally replied today merely saying "We are working on it". Meanwhile we are getting warnings of temporary company closure because it has been over 10 days now and we have sustained serious financial damages at this point.

- 18th of March: I am reaching out to the apple store to report the "Base" app as unsafe for its users.

- 20th of March: They released an update that allowed us to take out our money. Though I am extremely grateful that they resolved the issue, at the same time I feel we have learned our lesson. We were lucky to avoid company closure by the skin of our teeth and it was an experiment I do not want to repeat.

If you google virtual number to receive sms from South Africa, Sonetel comes up. Then you sign up and they tell you they do not do the thing you signed up for. Great....thanks for wasting my time Sonetel. I did not even know you before today, but now I sure do!

I went onto this website to explore what courses they had. In order to see the breakdown price you need to first input your phone number. Ever since they got my phone number they have been pestering me. Even though I told them I did not request a call they still call me and spam my inbox with a bunch of messages.
I regret ever even browsing their courses, now I have to deal with the headache of getting them off my back.
I had considered taking one of their courses, but not anymore! Sorry I ever stumbled upon this website.

Microsoft 365 is a relic of the past trying to fool us by boasting "new" features. From signing in, to changing your settings, everything involves a convoluted, user-unfriendly process that leads you to dead end pages and multiple errors. Their help page advice is as pointless as their service with explanations that do not reflect reality and which lead to crashing pages and failed log in attempts. I found out that if I wanted a passkey for my account I had to use Safari instead of Chrome to sign in. Too bad that Microsoft365 does not recognise my account when I am using Safari...

The only reason I have ended up using this dinosaur is because my email, which I purchased on GoDaddy, was transferred there despite my wishes. In order to make my life much less miserable, I am probably going to cancel my company subscription and move my entire operations to a different email provider rather than have to deal with this degree of frustrating incompetence on a daily level.

It has been months upon months of security issues crashes and hiccups. Both my team and myself are at our wits end. The bugs are impossible to deal with and every month we are set back by some new problem that the security team deals with over the course of 1-2 very slow weeks. The sheer amount of money this project has lost just trying to work around this impossible web hosting has convinced us that it is time we move on if we ever want to see this website launch.

If it is DPD it will never arrive.
I have been trying to get a simple parcel delivered to me from Amazon.co.uk. Unfortunately the seller only uses DPD. I originally ordered it to come to Japan because this is where I live. I order things from the internet all the time yet somehow DPD could not find my address and thus sent my parcel back.
After this, I decided to order the exact same thing and have it delivered to Greece to my relatives so that they could ship it from there, using a different - hence reliable - delivery service. This time I added every detail to my address from phone numbers to backup phone numbers and details as to how to find the place (not that it is hard).
Unsurprisingly, DPD failed yet again to deliver. For an entire week amazon staff reached out to them, the seller tried to get hold of them, I was calling their registered phone numbers non stop yet nothing came of it. I managed to get hold of one DPD employee on the uk site and explained the situation to her. She told me that there is no internal communication between offices and departments and that she also could not get in touch with DPD Greece for me!!!
The parcel was sent back yet again and I am in shock at just how bad this very simple business model is run. I did not know of this company until this "delivery problem" showed up in my life, which has lasted 3 months already! I have since gone online and read what other users have written and I can only hope that sellers phase out using DPD for the sake of everyone's sanity.

If it is DPD then it will never arrive. I did not even know this company existed until this year. The reason I know it exists is because the only parcels that never arrive are the ones "being delivered" by DPD. They also wont pick up their phones. They wont answer their messages or emails. There is also no internal communication between departments and offices. I contacted DPD UK to help me get in touch with the Greek department and the UK office told me they had no way to get in touch with them!!!

For whatever reason it does not work. I tried with two phones, an iphone and android and I followed the steps very diligently. Also the SIM card that you have in your phone at the time, may affect your interface. So I made a point of swapping them around in order to get things working.
Three hours later all that I achieved was having watched a number of youtube videos on how to create an APN and wasted both my morning and 25£. No refund is available.
Maybe this is a service specific to US phones. But given how unreliable it is and might end up with you wasting your holiday time and your money, I would definitely not recommend it.
Save yourselves the pain and just get a prepaid sim card from a booth when you land at an airport in Japan. Both Narita and Haneda have these.

This is a review for Native Camp Japanese. I am sad to give such a low score to a company that I think is doing a great job to providing affordable lessons to students and an easy employment outlet for many teachers.

I signed up for Japanese and was offered one month for free, then I got charged 200 dollars for the next month. I was charged before the date indicated on my profile page, which upset me a bit due to the lack of sincerity and also since I was not willing to pay that 200 dollars and was planning to pay as I went along with classes.

In the meantime, I messaged customer service twice but they never got back to me. I did not ask for a refund. What I asked was if there was another scheme I could pay for. I think 200 dollars is a bit expensive for me, so I wanted to know if there was a way to pay per booked class. They never replied to me.

I still wanted to use Native Camp so I looked through their website and found the option to buy coins which you exchange for lessons. Even though there is a list of coin offers and you can buy packets with different prices, the moment you click on any of those packets, it takes you to the same page where you are asked to sign up for 200 dollars a month.

I tried various links and also tried their FAQ section to try and buy those coins, but time and time again, I just got sent to the same page.

Eventually I just quit Native Camp and signed up with a different online company that allows you to pay for the number of lessons you are comfortable with.

I am very sad about this, because I honestly liked the teachers on Native Camp and had got to know some of them pretty well. But it is impossible to buy the classes and also there is no customer service. I don't know why and how they can ignore their clients this way.

Absolutely exceptional service!
I am a difficult client but IMEX Legal went above and beyond my expectations.

This office indeed functions in the current century.

My family and I recently faced a wall of paperwork which came at an unexpected time for us. I spent about a week reaching out to legal offices in the UK desperately trying to get certain paperwork processed while my obligations demanded of me to be in a different country. Had I not run across IMEX, I would have had to spend thousands of pounds travelling to the UK for processes that you are legally entitled to complete via a representative. Regardless of this, all other offices simply refused to follow through and asked me to be there in person.

My family and I honestly owe a lot to IMEX. I know we may not stand out in their crowd of clients, but for what it's worth I am honestly grateful to their pro-active approach and the invaluable help offered to us at a critical time of need.

Thank you once again, and I wish you all the best in your future success. You are a company that stands out in the best of ways.

I recently deleted my bad review because they got back to me via trustpilot and I felt bad for doubting this company. However, now I am writing a fresh review because it turns out my initial impression was indeed correct.

4 months later and they are still processing my teacher's profile! The first bad review I wrote here was shortly after my interview. They told me they would get back to me in a couple of days, I waited 1,5 month and then found out that they had blocked my email! Meanwhile, the page where my application was being processed was merely stuck. Though I sent multiple emails, all of which were blocked, I wrote a bad review here and then finally heard back from them. My application was processed instantly.

But that lasted for a moment. Since then, it has been another month and my application is now stuck on another page. They have made me go through all the training but never really processed my profile. Also my bank info keeps getting rejected though it is an international bank that works like a charm with all other teaching sites. I have since spent what must have been a total of 3 hours or more watching their training videos over and over again and going through their very limited teacher profile menu to try and find where my schedule is. The teacher's schedule is literally the most basic thing you need.

If you are trying to get an "urgent job" the way this was advertised, do not hold your breath. It is utterly infuriating and extremely dysfunctional. A very simple example of how the platform functions would be me reaching out to one of the staff asking "Where do I go to change my working hours?" and getting the reply "You can change your working hours from the 3rd to the 19th of every month". This reply took 3 days to get to me. If you believe you can make money on this platform, be my guest.

PS: I wish I could share screenshots on trustpilot that prove all that I am saying, but that does not seem to be an option unfortunately.

Νομίζω μας κοροϊδεύουν. Μετά από 3 μήνες ακόμα παρακαλάμε να έρθουν να τραβήξουν την οπτική ίνα που βρίσκεται ακριβώς απέξω από το παράθυρο μας. Επικοινωνήσαμε με την τεχνική υποστήριξη και μας είπαν ότι δεν υπάρχει οπτική ίνα στην περιοχή. Όταν τους είπαμε ότι είναι ακριβώς απέξω, επειδή την εγκατέστησε ο γείτονας, σαστίσαν και μου κλείσαν το τηλέφωνο στα μούτρα. Ταυτόχρονα δηλώσαν online ότι το αίτημα μου λύθηκε! Τώρα κοιτάμε να αλλάξουμε εταιρία...

Its a fraud, they just take your money. Stay clear. My bestie lost €100.

I would advise extreme caution if you are considering to take out health insurance with Cigna.

Over the past few months, there has been a back and forth between myself and the representatives of the company that wished to sell me the insurance package. In this time, I have received a cascade of emails, most of them being part of multiple countdowns to offers missed, yet the offers would be given to me again in a week or two and the countdown would start again with spam email regularly being sent to me about how I was missing out on great and unique deals.

However, when I sent an email to clarify the conditions of me signing up and asking for a copy of their standard contract, nobody replied to me. I know I am a geek who knows a few things about how the law and contracts work so I think I was not the ideal customer worth convincing over what already seemed like a very dodgy sales pitch.

There were some very clear red flags that caught my attention:
1. I was first informed of Cigna via an agent. One of the first concerns I raised was cancer treatment, because after all, it's the one thing you can't pay for yourself. The agent became very agitated and asked if I had cancer (I do not) because in his words "Cigna will not cover that since it is usually a precondition". He was not able to answer my question of how many years down the line does it stop being a "precondition".

2. My suspicions grew worse when I looked at the reviews on trustpilot, the positive ones merely describe the smooth broker experience, the bad ones describe not being covered at times of emergencies and being told they have a "precondition". What was worse, all the replies to the negative comments are fully automated by a bot.

3. Though a copy of a contract was never sent to me, I read through the process on the Cigna website. Unlike other health insurance providers, Cigna does not demand you undergo a preliminary health check before signing on. How can they offer you health insurance if they do not know what is already wrong with you? This proves, that indeed Cigna will not offer you a full rounded health insurance coverage, and will indeed claim that various ailments are a "precondition" covering themselves both legally and financially.

I will still wait for a reply from the Cigna brokers. I will also wait for a reply of the automated bot that will write this under my review:

Hi Alex,
We're sorry to hear that you've had a bad experience with us. We'd like to investigate the issue fully and resolve where possible.

We'll share your review details with our Customer Service team so they can look into this for you.

Alternatively, you can share any questions or doubts with us at -------- with your policy ID.

Many thanks,
Cigna Healthcare

In the meantime, I hope people can read my review and be cautious in their choice. This seems like a blatant marketing trap and consumers should not be expected to be legal experts in order to protect themselves and maybe in some instances even their lives.

Stay away!

My ordeal with this company started about 5-6 years ago when their platform essentially merged my account with the account of another girl. I do not know if she noticed it her end, but I kept getting notifications about reservations and bookings that I had not made. I was very lucky at the time because even though these were made in my name, by card was not charged. Also this was back in the day when Booking.com still had customer service, so I was able to get through to a representative and verify that indeed I was not charged for the hotels this other client of their was staying at.

Since then I never used Boooking.com again and removed my cards from their platform (if you have ever tried to close your account, you have probably found that it is near impossible to do so.)

Unfortunately for me, I took a leap of faith when we recently visited Japan with my partner. Japan is famous for its extremely well mannered and kind people, yet we truly had some bad luck with our accommodation. We booked a serviced apartment for 15 days and when we arrived at the location we shocked to see that there was nothing there! I started sending emails and making phone-calls to try and reach the properly, already getting worried that we might be the victims of some scam. The emails all bounced back and the phone number provided on the website did not work.

It started getting dark, and we were now just sitting on the side of the road, when I finally got a reply on the app, telling me that we did not show up and we were no longer welcome to check in. I tried to negotiate with the property but they simply did not reply to my messages. So once our booking was cancelled on behalf of their management, I felt relieved that we would not be charged for our booking.

During this ordeal, I also contacted the Boooking.com emergency helpline and sent multiple emails over the following days. I have never received a reply.

I thought this would be the end of our problems, but since our botched booking, that left us stranded, the property has been trying to charge my card. Every week they try to charge me 800 pounds and every week my banks flags it up as fraudulent. I am now in the process of freezing my card and issuing a new one in order to avoid these incessant attempts at stealing my money.

I tried to also write a review about our terrible experience on the actual website but you are only allowed to do so if given permission by the hotel itself.

I will now try once more to cancel my account so that there is no more information on me in their system. I have never been so scared for my money as I have been while using Boooking.com. If my experience does not convince you, then the least I would recommend is using a pre-paid card to reduce the risks of such dodgy service.

I have described this painful process so many times as this point. Trip.com may book your trips for you but it is barely an agent. There is no warning signs regarding the paperwork you need from one point to the next. So when you self transfer they do not tell you that you actually need a visa for that. Had I used any other middleman service, such information would have been a given and my partner and I would not have lost a fortune, missed our friends wedding and be told it was our fault all along.

I can't tell if this is a scam or if the people who run it are plain daft.

I live in Vietnam so I made a point of ordering from a Vietnamese website because I know there is a problem with customs. One of the options that came up was this website.

I followed the link that took me to their Vietnamese store.

They then shipped my parcel from the UK (eye roll) which of course got stuck in customs. In order for it to get out of customs, the sender needs to contact the office here, this of course they refused to do.

When I asked for a refund, they told me to go and pick up my parcel and send it back to them so that I can get my refund. (eyes roll again)

Wasted 50 pounds on an unprofessional website.