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Party time
Sep. 13th, 2009 06:13 pmCuriouser and curiouser on the Party Poker cashout front. I received an email back from Paytech (Party's payment processors, a subsidiary of Party Gaming), within about three hours, apologizing and stating that the money would be put back into my Party account within 5 to 7 business days.
For people who assume decent customer response times and service, this might not seem a surprise. But, trust me, for a personalized response to come back from Party overnight on Saturday/Sunday is on a par with the Second Coming. Usually you have to go through the base camp level of customer service, who answer the simplest of queries from a FAQ sheet on their screen. Response to stuff such as stopped cheques and don't charge me the standard fee is not in the FAQ list of standard replies. Someone had to write the reply, in decent English, no less. At Party Customer Service, that's somewhere around senior vice-president level.
More interestingly, the reply continued "We notice you have a Neteller account. We suggest that you select Neteller as a cashout option for future withdrawals."
So, what's the story, I wondered? Here's my theory.
The cheques come to me in US dollars. I pay them into my Citibank account, which has a UK Sort Code. However, the ACTUAL bank is a branch in New York. Party, as you know, has pulled out of the US, so in theory it has no US players. I suspect that sometimes when their clearing bank (Barclays Corporate International) gets a Party cheque presented to it for payment to a bank with a New York address, alarm bells start ringing, and it gets "lost" in a system where it's in the interests of a number of people not to have to deal with the complexities involved.
At least, that's the only reason I can think of for Party suggesting to me a withdrawal system that costs them more than the system I have been using.
On the downside, it takes away one more option that I had been using to get money out of these sites in dollars. Neteller will only wire to UK banks, in GBP (and they use a rip-off exchange rate). I think that Stars remains an option, provided it's all "excess" money over and above that which I have paid in via Neteller (i.e., only my profit on Stars). I suppose I could start looking at the possibilities on Full Tilt.
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For people who assume decent customer response times and service, this might not seem a surprise. But, trust me, for a personalized response to come back from Party overnight on Saturday/Sunday is on a par with the Second Coming. Usually you have to go through the base camp level of customer service, who answer the simplest of queries from a FAQ sheet on their screen. Response to stuff such as stopped cheques and don't charge me the standard fee is not in the FAQ list of standard replies. Someone had to write the reply, in decent English, no less. At Party Customer Service, that's somewhere around senior vice-president level.
More interestingly, the reply continued "We notice you have a Neteller account. We suggest that you select Neteller as a cashout option for future withdrawals."
So, what's the story, I wondered? Here's my theory.
The cheques come to me in US dollars. I pay them into my Citibank account, which has a UK Sort Code. However, the ACTUAL bank is a branch in New York. Party, as you know, has pulled out of the US, so in theory it has no US players. I suspect that sometimes when their clearing bank (Barclays Corporate International) gets a Party cheque presented to it for payment to a bank with a New York address, alarm bells start ringing, and it gets "lost" in a system where it's in the interests of a number of people not to have to deal with the complexities involved.
At least, that's the only reason I can think of for Party suggesting to me a withdrawal system that costs them more than the system I have been using.
On the downside, it takes away one more option that I had been using to get money out of these sites in dollars. Neteller will only wire to UK banks, in GBP (and they use a rip-off exchange rate). I think that Stars remains an option, provided it's all "excess" money over and above that which I have paid in via Neteller (i.e., only my profit on Stars). I suppose I could start looking at the possibilities on Full Tilt.
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