Quick Update on the Moneybookers Issue

Well, in one of my earlier posts, I wrote on how you can use Moneybookers to transfer your online earnings safely to your DBBL bank account. The post got popular and many people were inspired, I believe. Moneybookers is indeed a very cost effective solutions for Bangladeshi free lance workers who are working online on different free lance sites/agencies like Scriptlance, Freelancer or oDesk. Moneybookers charges only $2.32 to transfer any amount to Bangladesh. But the situation worsened when some of the readers notified me about the high transfer fees which were applied to some transactions. I was also charged extra than the usual Moneybookers fees. I was surprised. Looking up the transaction gave me information that the money was passed through a bank in Germany. They charged around 12 EURO as a bank wire transfer fee! No doubt, I was damn unhappy! I was not the only one. Apparently most of the Bangladeshi moneybookers users ceased to withdraw cash via them.

I was not out of luck or helpless with Moneybookers. Rumman vaiya (my partner at JOTIL21) had a verified paypal account linked to his canadian bank account. He’s a canadian citizen. I used to transfer a lot of my earnings via him. But I was feeling very guilty to disturb him every now and then. On the other hand, I didn’t want to go for Payoneer debit card, since I hardly do any free lance projects these days. I need to receive money from my employer. So, I decided to knock MB customer care.

I sent them an email regarding the extra charges. They responded 6-7 hours later. They mentioned for some reasons, the transactions were processed in EUR. Thats the reason, I got charged extra! They also claimed that the issue was resolved now and they’ll charge the normal rate afterwards. Here’s the quote:

We would like to kindly inform you that your withdrawal has been sent out in EUR due to processing requirements. However, we have resolved the issues and again we process withdrawals in USD.

I was curious, I knocked them regarding why they were required to process the money in EUR. Here’s the heads up:

We appreciate your enquiry and would like to inform you that we have had processing issues with Standard Chartered bank which was processing our transactions in EUR. The situation has however been resolved and the transactions from your account will be processed in USD.

OK, so they claim that they had some sort of problem with the Standard Chartered Bank and they had to process the money via another bank. That makes sense! But they should have explicitly informed the users during the withdrawal. That would have helped us making an alternate decision or at least it would have made Moneybookers more credible as a money transfer solution!