: www.dace.co.uk :
payment, and the strange case of the disappearing money
Payment methods
I can currently only accept the following payment methods: sterling cheque drawn on a UK bank; or international money order.
I no longer use YowCow, and because of the threat of bird 'flu I can no longer accept money tied to the legs of carrier pigeons.
How the YowCow ate my money
Update February 2012
I am contacted by the new owner of the YowCow domain name. I am informed that his business has no connection whatever with the now defunct YowCow international payments business, and for all I know those bikers I read about on the net may have caught up with the miscreant by now. It doesn't really bear thinking about.
Anyway, it is only fair to say that as far as I can tell the new YowCow web site has nothing to do with the Aussie swindler and appears to be a USA-based site advertising anything whatsoever. For example, you can get a 1940s dresser with mirror for $125 from someone in Hemlock, MI (is that Missouri or Michigan? It's not Middlesex anyway).
To call a town Hemlock suggests to me it was founded by someone made bitter by an unfortunate sequence of events. I imagine him sitting on his own in a saloon bar in the dusty town of Tumbleweed, downing another bourbon, when the sheriff walks in.
'Hear you're going to start a new town over beyond Rattlesnake Creek?'
'Yup. Ain't nothin' left fer me where I come from. Injuns burned ma skunk farm down t'the ground and the sheriff did nothin'. Nobody did nothin', like they was pleased t'see me go. No accountin' fer some folks. Then the dang dawg ran off with ma wife.'
'This new town, what ya gonna call it?'
'Hemlock.'
(As you can see I know nothing about the wild west.)
Update February 2006
I have received emails from others who have had money removed from them by the YowCow. Please don't send me any more. I am not going to take any action.
Update
The YowCow web site is no longer on-line, so with luck no-one else will have their money stolen by this organisation.
My advice remains, if using a financial institution, use one that is subject to the financial and legal jurisdiction of the country that you live in. Caveat emptor, or in this case, beware of the cow.
Strange dealings down under
This used to be my YowCow international payments page, except that the YowCow ate my money. See above for information about my current payment methods.
My problem was and is sending and receiving money. I wanted to be able to receive credit card payments without having to pay a huge bill every month to the credit card company. Also I wanted to be able to send small sums of money to friends abroad without having to pay a bank charge that is almost as much as the amount of money I want to send. Some people were recommending YowCow (an Australian equivalent of PayPal) on the internet, so I opened an account.
Another way of sending small sums of money would be just to go to a bureau de change, change the money into the relevant currency, fold it carefully inside a letter and post it, or indeed attach it to a passing pigeon. I'm not recommending this, just saying that there would be a modest chance that it would reach the intended recipient.
At first, all seemed to go well. The system was slow and difficult to use, according to one of my US customers, but it worked. She sent money to YowCow from her credit card, and it appeared in my YowCow statement.
I then sent money to another person in the US. This money was duly received by my friend, not merely in her YowCow account: she also managed to transfer it from there into her own US bank account. So far, so good.
Then things started to go wrong. I funded my YowCow account from my credit card, and tried to transfer money to the same person again. One transaction went through, but the recipient was unable to retrieve it from her YowCow account. Meanwhile I sent a small sum in Euros to a friend in Greece. YowCow told her she would have to pay $30 to receive 18 Euros.
Subsequent payments to my friend in the USA were deducted from my credit card in favour of YowCow, but my friend was unable to retrieve the money. It seemed that my money was somehow stuck in YowCow, so I decided to try to retrieve it.
The YowCow web site told me they needed to verify I was who I said I was, despite having gone through their security procedures. They were to mail me a pin number which I was then to enter on-line in order for them to process the transaction. I requested this on 25 April 2005. I did not receive it until 27 May following two reminders.
YowCow then emailed me to say: Now that we have confirmed your address, you'll be able to withdraw funds in whatever manner you choose. YowCow stated that they would deduct $30 to wire the money, so for that sort of money I would have expected the money pretty soon. They claimed delay on all transactions prior to 23 May. I pointed out that my transaction had been initiated after 23 May. Their next excuse (on 14 June) was: When checking your account I see that the account was funded by creditcard. We do not send checks to persons who have funded the account by creditcard. You need to contact the card company and have them do a chargeback to the card.
This of course is quite extraordinary. I was informed by my bank that the law prevents them from initiating a chargeback on transactions more than a certain time after the credit card transaction took place, and some of the money owing to me had been placed in my YowCow account too long ago for a chargeback to be applied.
I emailed YowCow (via their on-line form, because their mailbox was full) on 18 June: Please confirm that you intend to let me have my money. They did not reply. I emailed them again on 5 July: I have not heard from you. Please confirm that you intend to let me have access to my money. If you are honest people you will explain to me how to withdraw the remainder of the funds owing to me in a timely fashion. If I do not hear from you I shall draw the reluctant conclusion that you have, in effect, stolen my money.
No reply.
My bank (Egg) extracted what they could from YowCow using the unorthodox method requested by YowCow, and Egg gave me some of the rest as a good will gesture (apparently for technical reasons my transactions did not come within the provisions of the Consumer Credit Act, so they were not obliged to help me). It did take a while to persuade my bank that another bank taking my money and not giving it back again might not be entirely proper, but they saw the point in the end.
YowCow still has money of mine that doesn't belong to it. I sent the money I owed my friends another way (but not using a pigeon).
postscript
This page now appears in the first page of results if you type YowCow into Google.