I deal with Wirecard professionally in the day job - and have seen the serious issues + outages they’ve had over the last year. As a result I don’t completely trust them to look after my money. Thus, the way I tend to use Mondo at the moment is to top up often, and irregularly, generally just before I want to purchase something.
Today my Mondo card started declining all transactions, without any notification of the decline in the app. Just repeated declines at the terminal / PoS.
After chatting with support via the app I was told there was a ‘technical issue with my account’. Before they could resolve the ‘technical issue’, they wanted to know my DOB + PostCode (first time the in-app support have ever asked me this).
A couple of hours later, the problem was resolved. I asked support if they could explain the issue was, and if there was anything I could do to avoid it - however the response I got surprised me:
"I can’t speak on the particulars of the technical issue, but generally we recommend topping up for weekly of month budgets to get the best Mondo experience.
This to me strongly smells like I triggered some kind of fraud/laundering filter, and my particularly use of the app (irregular top-ups as required) was enough to lock my account, until they had further confirmed my identity (hence the DOB + PostCode questions).
I’m surprised they couldn’t just say I’d got locked out though - I presume they’re purposefully trying to keep their fraud policies in the dark… but just a ‘you triggered a suspicious filter’, would have been enough.
Any one else experienced this?
Is this a new ‘feature’?
Hmm lack of transparency where it matters is slightly concerning
I agree it definitely stinks of fraud rules which again concerns me as I don’t like to have too much money in :mondo: just in case and also got my mortgage offsetting.
Until we are a bank we have to follow the rules set out by our issuing bank. The lack of transparency we are allowed to give frustrates us as well. We put a lot of effort into reducing the false positive rate and every week we ship changes to reduce it.
I have had similar issues before, quite a few times, and I also too top up quite frequently and with wildly irregular amounts (spanning £10 — into the £hundreds).
I had a similar response from the support team, but haven’t been asked for DOB / Postcode at all. I experienced most of these problems when I went abroad and all within a short time span of around ~2weeks.
I had a similar feeling when I just had ‘there was a technical problem’ — it did make me feel a bit concerned and not reassured, so I would echo the sentiment of a bit more specific feedback for reassurance.
I know how you feel, I had the same message myself - deep down I suspected it was a fraud filter and would of preferred if Mondo had said. However I have worked in a few places where I have had to do credit checks and run fraud checks and we were never allowed to tell customers that they had failed the fraud screening process so I suspect it’s a similar case here and possiblly wire cards terms and conditions with mondo prevent mondo from telling customers this information.
