Check Customer emails!!

#21 I know. I answered your e-mails. Unfortunately, I was at dinner for my non-profit when you sent them. But I answered them as soon as I saw them when I got home. I did answer them all at once rather than an individual reply to each one. I even included them in the support ticket as well as a link to this topic.

#22 As David Blake mentioned, we have had several people look into this issue as soon as we were made aware of it. Last night, we saw three "authorizations" from you via our internet shopping service. Our new shopping cart is extremely secure and does not allow anyone to purchase anything from our site without having the correct street address. This protects fraudulent users from using other people's stolen credit card information on the site. Because your address never matched your bank information, our shopping service marked this as a "fail." Your card was "authorized" (though not charged) since you tried to purchase iTorque with the wrong address, but those 3 authorizations should clear up in your bank account in the next few days.

We checked all of this information again this morning, and your purchases stand; we only see three authorizations, all of them failed, so we do not have any of your money. I know it is unfortunate, but you have to wait for the bank to clear those failed authorizations. We cannot control how your bank handles failed authorizations, and each bank is different on how they handle falsely entered credit card information.

As to the $10k plus charges you were seeing last night, we cannot find anything about those charges on our end. We only see the three failed attempts. I am not trying to give you the run around at all, but anything above your three failed attempts have nothing to do with our site, and we cannot help you. We only see the three original failed authorizations.

Please keep an eye on your records for the next few days, and if the original three authorizations ever actually get charged from your account, e-mail David Blake at support@garagegames.com. He has been as responsive as he possibly can be, even pinging me in the middle of the night to look into this. All authorizations (even the strange $10K ones which we have no records of) should go away within a few days, but if they don't, we can provide any records of your transactions to your bank if they need it.

I cannot reiterate how much we are sorry that this happened. We don't want your account to be locked up. At this point, we can only wait to see what your bank can do, and again, we will do anything we can do to clear up any false charges if they actually hit your bank account.

#23 As you can see, the 3 didn't fail, they CLR cleared, the money is gone, I have to wait on the other ones to reverse before I can do anything about the overdraft charges. If you are saying your new system isn't showing you have the money I have to unfortunately file fraud charges against GG so that they can reverse all 3 charges you say you don't have the money of. The money is out of my acoount and I verified that by calling the bank vs going by the web interface. They notified me that it is authorized payments to you and that you have the funds and I either A) have to have you re-imburse me or B) file faud against GG and have the bank research the charges which can take up to 30 days. In the mean time, my bank account is empty while they research it.

Now I am seriously stuck between a rock and a hard place, your stating you don't have the money, the bank says you do have the money, either way I am out the money.
Here is yet more proof of the 3 that went through:

Personal Account
1/21/2009 2:58:31 PM
$854.03 (NOTE: without showing the negative via the uncleared charges)

Date Type Description/Category Status Debit (-) Credit (+) Projected Balance
1/21/2009 GARAGEGAMES COM CLR ($500.00) $1,864.94
1/21/2009 GARAGEGAMES COM CLR ($500.00) $1,364.94
1/21/2009 GARAGEGAMES COM CLR ($500.00) $864.9

I have the correct information when I submitted it,(EDIT) removed address from forums.
All the other charges are still showing PND for pending, if you don't have my money, then who does?

Edit:
Just and FYI, I have yet to receive any messages from any GG email at my posted address on the tickets I submitted. Nothing in spam, nothing at all. So for some bizzar reason, I didn't receive any confirmation from anyone. I called my ISP and had them look at the mail delivery logs and scan for anything from garage games and nothing hit their mail router. It looks like I am having issues getting any email for any support ticket I create and according to them, it happens somewhere whent it leaves your network and never gets to my mail server.

This is odd because it is the same email on file for my account, and I DO get spam messages from you folks about products or promotional material. So how I am getting that and purchase information emails but no ticket emails is beyond me.

I did get an email from Blake that I will respond in great detail tonight (about 2 hours, when I get home from work to give a complete breakdown of everything I did). I got it about 30 minutes ago actually. I will respond to him from my gmail account tonight just incase there is any other issues with my jbwws account not getting anything from GG.

Just sent test email from my gmail account to Blake in response to his request, I just don't want to see me having to wait on the bank 30 days uio.. that won't be any fun.

#24 You replied to the e-mail that I sent to your regular address (the one that you filed the support requests with), not your gmail account. It even included the quoted reply from me. I do not know your Gmail account to reply to since the only correspondence that I have has come from the regular e-mail. Plus, I sent it about 15 hours ago or so.

That's just weird. Are you popping your e-mail over to GMail and didn't realize it?

Just thought I'd let you know here since I'm not sure where your mail is going/coming from and you're checking this topic.

#25 I replied via the gmail account as a direct reply to your email, I pop it over from my main email to my gmail since I get that on my iPhone. I will send you a new direct message from the gmail account instead of just a reply. My mail goes to my jbwws account, and is pop pulled to my gmail, when I respond it is pushed out with the same header data back to the sender, this at least proves that some emails from GG get to me if sent directly, I don't know what system the support system uses to send emails, but it doesn't appear I get emails from your support system but I get direct emails from you. Are you using internal GG mail server or external? Putting together a list of answers now for your list of questions.

#26 I get the e-mails in the support queue and answer them directly. I did not send you a separate reply for each e-mail simply because one would do the job of answering your multiple submissions. You really only had one issue even though you had multiple submissions.

#27 Ok, well I just replied again via gmail and I included the gmail account just incase it shows from my jbwws account. It has all the detail in it I think you are looking for at the moment. Let me know if I forgot something.

#28 I haven't received another response from you, did you get my email with all the detail you were looking for? What other information do I need to supply?

#29 @Jonathan

Those can still be authorizations are your account. Your bank may be as shitty as mine and not distinguish between authorizations and an actual transactions. To my bank both are the same and both mean bye bye money, until the authorization disappears and the money comes back.

#30 Yup. Just replied a short while ago. You caught me having dinner again. Curse this stomach of mine being hungry.

#31 LOL sorry again about that David.
@Chip, I don't know what to think at this moment, all I know is ultimately no matter what I have to really wait another 24 to 48 hours until I know ultimately where I stand with the GG charges and my bank.

#32 Man this sucks for you. GG knows about the problem, and all those transactions had to come from their server, whether it's logged or not.

If I were GG I'd show some goodwill and head over to Western Union, give the guy some cash back until this is resolved. He said he has 3 kids and can't even feed them or pay the bills because he's $10K in the hole. This is enough to take legal action, because ultimately GG is responsible for their system, and I think he's being quite reasonable.

Guess I'm glad I couldn't find the content packs I was looking for the other night -- content packs that used to be on the old site. I'd hate to have to explain something like this to the family. Insane...

#33 On another note, you should edit your previous post and remove your address and zip code. We're not all GG employees in this forum. ;)

#34 No need for me to go that deep. Automation is automation no matter how you look at it. Your right though, I should remove the addresses. They need a new billing system that doesn't try to compare addresses since a persons address can be represented a dozen ways depending on the road. TC could be T.C. on there system or it could be T C on their system, it could be TC Jester or it could be T C Jester, or even T.C. Jester, could be BLVD or could be Boulevard or even BVD in their checking system. There are way to many ways the card could be represented. On top of that my old address that is hooked to the card could have extra space at the end, middle or beginning and their system wouldn't pick it up right. You should never include the physical address in the checking but instead just the ZIP of the address, the card number and the security code, that is more than sufficient. Odds are if someone has my card, they got it and know my address, zip, everything anyway. So all that extra precaution is really for not. Even gas stations only ask for your zip now, not even your security code.

I would like to re-iterate, change your billing system so that it ONLY asks for card number, expiration date, zip code of billing address and security code. As I stated, being over cautious will only cause problems for people. My new address for example, the post office has brought me mail and I have seen my new address come in as 4 different things that represent the same address each time, you will see this a ton over time and no one besides you so far, have I ran across this stringent of rules for billing. This is bad practice on your companies part. If you make it so impossible for people to buy things, they won't bother because your site doesn't have a 'click here to call us to purchase items if you are having problems' instead it has a 'having issues, email us', with normal company turn around being an issue since although you probably respond immediate, like my email, I am lucky if I get a response at all because of some email issue one way or another. So take this entire situation to heart and update your billing system as soon as possible.

#35 Update on this issue:
All pending are now gone from the list, the 3 that were cleared are gone from the list and only 1 item in the list is showing as pending from GG. I sent in an email with this information to David with some other questions. My bank was able to clear them up after I filled out the paperwork and explained to them what happened. The funds that showed CLR as in cleared were actually rejected between bank transfers (my originating bank to my current bank, since my bank was purchased by another bank) I now only show 1 pending from GG which is fine, hopefully that one just clears since the funds now rebalance in my account -500 that is pending which GG can keep. (I had notified my bank to leave 1 of the charges since it was valid charge)

#36 It's great to hear that your bank was able to clear up the mess. Hopefully GG clears up their mess so it doesn't happen to anyone else.

#37 We didn't have a mess, really. We just had higher security settings than the bank on authorizations. We are trying to find a happy medium that will offer some sense of security to our customers while also working with some banks' lax security settings to promote convenience.

#38 This all boils down to automation. GG wants to protect our finances at the same time protecting there assets. Where things went awry in my case was some odd chatter between their billing system and my bank. Here is the flaw as I see it, GG tight and high level of authorization is above anything else out there. Everyone else's medium is as follows:

Full name on card that is being used
Billing zip code on card
Security Code on card
Full card number
month and year of expiration on card

You see, this is more than sufficient since obviously if a person has this much information about me and my card, odds are (probably along the lines of 99%) they have my home address also and stole the card out of my mail when I got a new one, so they have a convenient address on the label of the envelope.

Now comes the mix-up in this case. GG wants to know my billing address as it states on my card. My old bank (was purchased during all this y2k mess), sends me statements with my old apartment information, on these bank statements, I can see up to 3 different ways they have my address on file. This is because of the oddness of the street I lived on, it was actually know 5 different ways at one time and now it is even in a different city zip code, but my card is on the original zip code.

What GG wanted was everything
Full name on card
Address on card (note only 1 liner here, doesn't know about apartments or subdivisions or anything)
City on card
State on card
zip on card
card number
security code
full card number
month and date of experation

This is some serious overkill.
As with in my case, something went fubar along the lines, not sure what or where, but it wasn't human error, it was some computer along the lines. My original branch where I opened the account is where all transactions go through, that branch system then passes the transaction to its corporate office computer in turn passes it on to the new ownership corporate office who in turn returns transaction authorization, there are a few hops there and some delay. So what you have is branch saying my address is X, corporate saying my address is Y and new corporate saying my address is Z, depending on how it reports back, with my new address or my old address or something of a mixture who knows.

GG never did tell me which of my addresses I told them my billing was, was the one reported to their system so there is no way for me to know which one of the 3 it could have been.

#39

Quote:Full name on card
Address on card
City on card
State on card
zip on card
card number
security code
full card number
month and date of expiration

I shop online ALL the time, and this is the information that is always asked for(sometimes more). And one better be drunkclown sure to type it in correctly or the order will not pass.

If you lost your card and someone finds it (or steal it, or find a recite that have the card info...), they can not use it online without knowing the address that is on file for the card- also if the shipping address entered do not match the address on file with the CC it will also fail. This is all good stuff.

#40 I have to agree with Caylo, there's nothing on that list that isn't regularly required when I shop online. No doubt there's something needs sorting somewhere, but the information required isn't by any means abnormal for online shopping.