The World of Warcraft forums are flaming and they are buzzing with complaints from players claiming that their World of Warcraft accounts have been suspended because of chargebacks. Chargebacks from PaymentOne filed against them by the company that they have no connection with. As if this was not enough trouble, to add to the problem, is that the company behind the charges is unresponsive to complaints! So many players don’t know what to do in order to get their accounts re-authorized unless they pay these bills they don’t think they owe. So if you are like the multiple players that have received the following message when trying to figure out why their account is currently inaccessible: “Access to the World of Warcraft account *********, has been temporarily disabled due to a chargeback filed against the account’s past payment(s) which were billed to a telephone number via PaymentOne.” PaymentOne is a payment service provider, and has a system in place to bill players’ ISP accounts for their WoW subscriptions. Chargebacks are not normally used in this manner. Chargebacks are normally used as a method of consumer protection—a last line of defense against shady retailers. In a nutshell, when a consumer disputes a charge on their debit/credit card statements and the issuing bank or credit card company will forcibly return the disputed funds to the person. Exactly why and how these chargebacks were applied to the these players affected accounts is still unknown. The worst part, PaymentOne isn’t giving any clarification. So in turn they’ve caused the players accounts to have negative balances with Blizzard. This leads to their account suspension until the issue is resolved. Here’s another main problem with this fiasco, many of the players have never used PaymentOne or signed up for the company’s services. While some others World of Warcraft players have previously used the service, most of their accounts with PaymentOne were used over a year ago and were canceled. There is evidence, via posts in the forum, that show that Blizzard is willing to discuss the unauthorized charges. But still there have not been any definde results from pursuing this course of action. What I find even stranger though, is multiple posts stating that players have contacted both their phone companies and their broadband providers and are being told that they have no chargebacks on their account. After doing a quick Google search on PaymentOne the results show this isn’t the first time that allegations of fraud and unexpected charges have been leveled against the company. The biggest injustice that PaymentOne is not only unwilling to help players reach a solution; they are holding players accounts hostage by only offering to clear their accounts unless they agree to paying these unathorized charges. There are hundreds of posts on the these threads with complaints that they’ve either been hung up on when they call the PaymentOne, or are being transferred back to Blizzard. I myself put in two calls to PaymentOne seeking a simple comment. The result: the first call I was placed on eternal-hold and the second call they outright disconnected me. DO NOT USE PAYMENTONE FOR YOUR WoW Subscription Under ANY circumstances! In fact beware of using any of their services, this is a rip off company and should be avoided at all costs!
