Monzo - worst customer experience ever!

Over the past few days I’ve had the worst customer experience with any company ever in my life. I’ve had these issues in order:

  • Can’t use my Starling debit card to pay friends with Apple pay through monzo.me. Since Starling are saying it’s not from their side, the only logical explanation is that monzo are intentionally blocking Starling Apple pay payments (guess why?).
    I contacted monzo’s support for this but they were very unprofessional and didn’t provide any help!

  • One of my friends whom I’ve invited to monzo few weeks ago had his account blocked because of incomplete identity verification. I was trying to help him by contacting support and telling them I invited him and that he used my bank card for his initial top-up and they can find all the verification info in my account’s previously verified info. Guess what, now my account is blocked too! They’ve mistakenly blocked my account thinking I was saying my account wasn’t verified!

  • Now I’ve been removed from monzo.me too!!

And, of course, monzo’s support take at least a day to reply to just one of my messages!

I’m an old monzo user, I’ve invited more than 20 or 30 friends to monzo. My account has “Enhanced Identity Verification”!
I used to be a loyal customer and I should be receiving your current account tomorrow. But really, what kind of sh*t is this quality of service you are providing?

@Naji

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Sorry to hear you’re upset

  • If I used somebody elses debit card -which undergoes some sort of KYC checks - for another named account with another phone number when it is already registered with Monzo on your account I think that would flag me up for potential fraudulent or money laundering problems which Monzo are presumably legally bound to stop under their banking licence (?)

  • I don’t see why Monzo would want to block a Starling card from Monzo. me what response did you get from customer support ?

  • I would assume you have been removed from Monzo.me because of the issue of using your card for another named account on another phone number ???

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This seems to be a recurring theme… https://twitter.com/is7s/with_replies

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If I used somebody elses debit card -which undergoes some sort of KYC checks - for another named account with another phone number I think that would flag me up for potential fraudulent or money laundering problems

I didn’t use anyone’s card. Please read my problem statement.

I don’t see why Monzo would want to block a Starling card from Monzo. me what response did you get from customer support ?

I got just some arrogance and some ignorance. But nothing helpful. They didn’t even say they’ll raise this issue with the technical team to investigate further.

I would assume you have been removed from Monzo.me because of the issue of using your card for another named account on another phone number ???

The card is already verified on my account.

Not totally sure that the one legacy card being used to top up two Monzo accounts is the issue. My First Direct debit card has been my top up card from the start, and it’s also been the top up card for a friend who can’t get a bank account due to recently arriving in the UK and not having a utility bill to open a bank account.

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This is taking it to a personal level. I’m requesting to remove this post now!

@alexs

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I did
and you said

"One of my friends whom I’ve invited to monzo few weeks ago had his account blocked because of incomplete identity verification. I was trying to help him by contacting support and telling them I invited him and that he used my bank card "

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Hey is7s, really sorry you’ve had this hassle. To follow up on the issues you’ve been having:

  • I can confirm we don’t block Starling cards from paying via Monzo.me. I’m not sure what the issue would be in this case, and I’m sorry we didn’t sort the problem when you got in touch before but we’ll take a look to check where things are going wrong. This one is best sorted out via the in app chat so we have your account details etc there.

  • In terms of your friends account, as you’d imagine we’re not able to discuss specifics of other people’s accounts, but given you’ve mentioned he’s topped up with your card it may well be that we need some verification from you in this case (we set this expectation out in our fair use policy available here) This is done so that we can make sure any payments made are authorised by the card holder. I understand it can be a bit of a faff to do, but it’s designed to keep both our users and other people’s funds safe.

  • I’m not sure what you mean by saying you’ve been removed from Monzo.me, does your monzo.me/[your username] link no longer exist? This is another one that would likely be best looked at via the in app chat where we have the tools available to help.

Again I’d like to say sorry for the unpleasant experience you’ve had here, we don’t want to cause people stress with our processes, I hope by explaining some of the though behind it and clarifying some things it’s helped.

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Hi @JarnoWolf, thanks for your reply.

I’m not sure what you mean by saying you’ve been removed from Monzo.me, does your monzo.me/[your username] link no longer exist? This is another one that would likely be best looked at via the in app chat where we have the tools available to help.

Yes, my username is not working with monzo.me. In short, my account has been blocked for not any valid reason. I do understand why you would block my friend’s account for incomplete identity verification but I couldn’t understand why my account has been blocked for just trying to help him out!

it may well be that we need some verification from you in this case

I’ve sent all the required documents with my friend to share it with you. I was trying to accelerate things by contacting support personally but I don’t understand why this blocks my account? Because it seems to me that if I hadn’t tried to help my friend my account would’ve been active normally.

Thanks for this reply. But a sad fact remains, I wasn’t able to get this decent reply except after posting my issue publicly on the forum. I hope this gets better.

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Thanks for getting back so quickly, I’ll pass this on to my colleagues who are working in the app chat so they get a more complete picture :+1:

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Weirdly this account has gone private.

So do you find a problem with a personal non-celebrity twitter account going private?

I’d like to take this change to give some updates:

  • My account is still blocked
  • I’m still not on monzo.me
  • Support take days to reply
  • I totally switched to Starling

All of this happened because they didn’t verify my initial top-up and the rest of top-up cards and they’re asking me to verify it now, after 1 year of membership! And to verify them they have to block me out of everything!
I imagine, can my normal bank ever do this?

This forum is dominated by monzo investors and monzo staff who really don’t like to hear any criticism about monzo. Yet they keep on criticizing and making fun of every other financial product in existence! For a normal monzo user, this forum doesn’t make any sense.

Yes - your legacy bank would be in the same situation now. It’s all to do with new EU money laundering rules.

Looks like you just need to verify. It takes minutes.

More details here: https://monzo.com/blog/2017/06/13/identity-verification-upgrade/

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Hopefully you and Starling will have a happy, peaceful relationship! :slight_smile:

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My identity is verified. They just want to verify my cards, and I’ve been in this process for 2 weeks.

Unfortunately the blocking was a side effect of new EU money laundering rules (edit as @tomsr has already said) . It’s a shame you’ve had a shit experience but I hope you have a better time with Starling.
Maybe give Monzo another try and the current account launches fully?

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