E.A Support - Yet even more incompetence (Banned Account)

Oh dear, how incompetent is this company.

My Tigerwoods online account has been permanently banned.

The reason?....

I tried to purchase a monthly membership via Paypal.

I completed the transaction to discover the amount deducted from my Paypal account was not that which I authorised when making the payment through the Paypal screen.

I contacted E.A support who told me:

I have checked your purchase and found that this order is yet to be completed successfully. Further I would request you to wait for next 24-48 hours to let the order to be completed. Once it get processed, you may contact us back regarding this issue.

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I personally thought this was unfair, they would have received the money instantly, so why should I wait 48 hours to then have to contact them again.

So, I filed a Paypal dispute.

Within less than 20 hours, E.A had responded to my dispute and agreed to refund me. They could have disputed this if they wanted but they chose to refund me.

Great I thought, I try becoming a member again to discover my account is "inactive" and to contact support.

I contact support and am told:

I have been assigned to your issue and would be happy to assist you in this matter. As a gamer myself, I understand how frustrating this can be.

Notes : 2011-04-16 12:10:29.0Account Status Update Account has been banned for fraudulent activity in POGO - Fraud Management

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FRAUD, POGO?

I reply back with:

I am confused.
How did I commit fraud?
What has happened?
Many Thanks.

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They reply with:

EA "Support" said:

Thank you for your reply. As I do not have any further information on this please note that this action cannot be overturned.

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So, they think I have reported myself to Paypal for fraud and have banned me for doing so?

They issued the Paypal refund and I detailed in the dispute what had happened and I wanted to become a paying member once this was sorted.

They choose to give ME a refund then BAN myself for fraud?

It was not even a chargeback which I could possibly understand a ban for but a Paypal dispute which they agree to?

Seriously, they are beyond incompetent.

I have replied AGAIN asking them if they actually read any of the information I send them and why they insist on banning accounts for spurious reasons as of late.

I do not have much confidence, the replys they give can barely pass as readable english.

For a company of their size, they should be ashamed of their incompetence.

Obviously, customer service a crazy.

I will email their billing department on the Paypal dispute, maybe they are not customer facing but would be interesting to hear what they have to say too.

I am totally ****** off though as I have spent hours on the game since closed beta and stats have stayed persistent although when I try to give them money, it all goes wrong and they end up with an unhappy customer. Should have carried on playing for free

Feel free to post this where ever you think it will get the most attention, they receive soo much bad publicity over banned accounts yet still refuse to acknowledge they have a problem.

EA are awful. A complete joke. Why they fail to take a leaf out of a company like Valve's book is beyond me.

its like they are trying to be the worst company.

The communication between people in the company appears to be non existent.

thanks to their crappy downloader and their even crappier support, i ended up grabbing an iso of bf2-sf off thepiratebay and using the key they supplied me with on that.

Although technically legal (in my mind) i still feel this is a bit of a grey area, and im not happy at all that i had to jump through several hoops to get what i wanted

I'd like to say I'm surprised, but I'm not!

I feel sorry for the OP. I currently have no faith in EA support, so I avoid them, at least until confidence has been returned.

Phone them instead if possible, their chat support is nothing short of a joke.

like all companies you can deal with some right idiots, you need to get the number for someone higher up, i had a dispute at a local comet, so i rang their head office and all was sorted in 2 hours, the guys who where being really rude to my grandma had to apologise and refund us.

Agree with post above; go as high as you can in all instances and basically just tell them what you have told us. A old fashioned strongly worded letter does still get attention.

Yep and sign up to some larger gaming news sites and spread the word. Let them have a thrashing.

Maybe you should post this over on RPS, it might get some attention from EA that way and they may be quicker to help you.

Edit: Nevermind, you have

I had a similar thing with my old steam account - though in my case paypal filed a chargeback without contacting me in any way. Steam support refused to help, however.

At that point I just cut my losses - filed chargebacks for everything I could and used the refunds to purchase a new account. Ended up with most of my games back and possibly even a slight profit due to the discounts on things like the valve complete pack/etc.

Just another tale of completely useless EA support.
Could get a book of them by the end of the year.

Hang on...

You contacted them regarding an issue with a payment, and they asked you to let them investigate it, and if it was not resolved within 48 hours, to contact them again.

So, instead of following their advice, you decided to file a PayPal dispute (which probably was handled by a different department within EA) and when they looked at your account had seen that you'd already contacted them. Upon seeing that you were told to wait for them to resolve it, but you decided to try a PayPal dispute, they have blocked your EA account on account of fraud.

I don't think EA are in the wrong here - it is you who have acted suspiciously.

to be honest Confused ive worked in email support and it was probably a template posted back and nothing would have been done. Same situation probably would have came about as from what ive heard ea support it awful

Fortunately ME2's Cerberus Network DLC was a simple "enter code - here's your download links with self-extracting exe". I can't imagine being shackled to EA's awful online account-protected DLCs...

Am on the phone to E.A via their corporate office in California.

They have mentioned giving me free membership, am trying to see if they can unlock my old account.

Will post back when I have more.

EDIT:

Nope, looks like the guy cant help after all... after ½ hour on the phone.

Round we go again

EDIT 2:

They did give me a free membership code which was nice but I am still without my account.

They have escalated to tier 3 although it is tier 3 whose incompetency caused this in the first place.

They admitted it has been a problem on their behalf but they do not have the power to unblock user accounts.

He advised to await 72 hours for a callback and if that does not materialise then to make more noise.

We shall see.

Confused said:

they asked you to let them investigate it

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No, they said to callback in 48 hours has the payment had not been cleared.

The money had left my Paypal account and Paypal confirmed it had been sent to them.

Plus, by getting the transaction cancelled early, it means Paypal do not raise the direct debit from my bank

neoboy said:

The communication between people in the company appears to be non existent.

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a few months ago, i bought BC2 second hand. I went on EA live chat to ask them for a code for multiplayer(didn't hold out much hope) They said that they would not give me a new one.
A few hours later, i did the exact same thing again, speaking to a different member of CS, and they just gave me a code right there and then! As i thought i might just be lucky talking to a reasonable person, i asked for the code for vietnam as well, and they gave me that too.

I was happy overall, but there must be no communication.