drriley

I am now into week #9 of waiting for a lost card replacement from Paxum. This entire process has, in my opinion, turned into a fiasco. Surely this sort of delay cannot be an industry standard? I know it would not take this long to get a replacement for a lost bank card or standard Visa or MC credit card. Maybe this is standard for companies like Paxum? If it is, then they need to change that standard.

The moral of my story is: Under no circumstances should you lose your Paxum MC card, as you may never get another one.

August 24th was when I reported the card lost. As I previously posted, it was actually taken by an ATM because, the ATM said, I had entered the wrong PIN 3 times. In fact, I was only asked once for the PIN and only entered a PIN once, and the card was immediately taken.

At the time of reporting, Paxum advised that they cannot replace a lost card. They must, apparently, close that Mastercard account and open a new one, and a new account cannot be opened until all pending charges on the old account have cleared, which takes up to 30 days. So ... a month of waiting for a $1.50 pre-auth charge to be cancelled (the only pending charge on the acct) and numerous days extra go by with no word from Paxum and no new card arriving.

I contact Paxum AGAIN and am told that now they will start the process to create a new MC account and have a new card issued. That process took approx. TEN DAYS! The last update was that a new card had been "shipped" (I'm told from Montreal) on Oct. 12th. This is now Oct 24th, no card has arrived, and it does NOT take this long for mail to arrive within Canada from Montreal. I've contacted Chris @ Paxum AGAIN to ask for a confirmation that the card was shipped, as claimed, and how it was sent (e.g., is there a tracking #), but have yet to receive a response.

Yes, I realize that I could have requested a wire transfer or the issuance of a cheque, however, given my experience with trying to obtain a new card I'm very hesitant to allow Paxum to put my money into any form of transit (wire or mail) as, if something goes wrong and the money never makes it to me, I can only imagine what would be involved to try and get the $ traced and/or cheque stop payment order issued, and/or new cheque issued, etc. ... If it didn't, in fact, turn out that the money was lost entirely and I was told there was no way to recover it!