Why I Will Never Again Use Payoneer (And Neither Should You)

It's never easy to write bad things about someone or something. It's simply not professional. But sometimes someone gives you a very good reason to do it. I've personally had an experience like that and think it should be shared with everyone. After all, you don't want to look around for your hard earned money.

A month ago a client has pay for my services using Payoneer. It wasn't the first time, we already did that in January. That time, everything went smooth, though I didn't like the fact that it takes up to three working days for the funds to reach your account. But last months' case opened my eyes. Who's running all those online payment services? How are they regulated? What happens when something goes wrong? Well, I had to learn it the hard way.

When it comes to Payoneer you don't want something to go wrong. But it seems that things can go wrong when they want it. On May 5th my client paid for the services I've done for him. But that weekend I noticed something suspicious. The service said that my 'USD Balance has been disabled' and to contact them for further details. Wait, what? It turned out that after the payment was made they started internal review of my account and balances in all currencies were blocked. Need I say that there was no e-mail or any other notification about that? Of course there weren't.

The payment should have been loaded on May 9th so I decided to wait and see what happens. And you can guess that nothing happened. There was still no money on my account, it was still blocked and the payment history still had the same information about loading time. OK, I said, let's contact them. And that was very painful experience. First of all you can't find any category in support that matches 'blocked balance' and getting live help seems like forever. Because it takes forever. Three to four hours.

You wait and when you come to be first or second in the waiting line it just says 'Sorry, live help is not available at the moment'. Then I realized that, while I was waiting, I was automatically logged off. So, I logged on again, kept refreshing (clicking) every couple of minutes on both account and help tabs so I don't get logged off again, and still couldn't reach live help. After more than two hours I gave up but tried again tomorrow. Each time when I got to be first in line the system kicked me out and trying to open live help pop-up wouldn't work since they've had too many users waiting for help. Refreshing that pop-up got me back in the waiting line and after three attempts finally there was someone I could chat with.

The only thing I found out is that my account was under internal review and that I will be informed of the process via e-mail soon. Two days later I spent another three + hours waiting yet again to find out - nothing. I did find out that it takes 7 to 10 working days for my client to get money back. Seven to ten working days?! I admit, I've lost may temper that time and told them to *?"#$**. But there was nothing more that I could do. After more than ten working days I asked my client if he got his money back. Of course he hasn't...

Late May, 24 days after the payment was made, the money hasn't reach my account, it wasn't back in clients account and mine was still blocked. So, let's spend another four hours trying to get help. Again there was no helpful answer and at the time I decided to write this article. While writing this, it's been over a month after the payment was made, I didn't get the money and the funds got back to my client a month after the payment was made. Support tickets were gone from my request history and I haven't had another three to four hours to reach live help and find out nothing. Honestly, it's not a large amount that I've been waiting for (couple hundreds), but it still isn't something I could ignore.

After first two contacts with live help I've decided that they're dead to me and their 'service' looks like some sort of scam. After all, imagine how many cases like this one are active at this very moment. Imagine how much money is there on their accounts collecting interest while people can't get paid. Also imagine (I don't have to) what insults their underpaid support agents have to read because the Payoneer business policy is *?"#$?*&%*.

If you think that the service you're using now is taking too much money for transactions, read this article carefully once again. You'll realize that a couple of dollars less are not such a bad thing. After all, since my client lives in Turkey and I live in Croatia, the money could have reach me on the back of a mule by now. So good advice is to Google every payment service you want to use. Check out for problems, see how often they happen, lurk through forums, see if there's anything wrong with them.

I hope you find this interesting enough. Feel free to share your bad experience with Payoneer or any other payment service so far.