Do you ever get tired of being treated like an absolute
idiot and blatantly lied to? After a few days of testing out the customer
service departments of various virtual currency companies I reached a breaking
point. Do you ever get tired of being treated like an absolute
idiot and blatantly lied to? After a few days of testing out the customer
service departments of various virtual currency companies I reached a breaking
point.
I was on Gamepal.com’s site doing the test purchase for our review. The owner
of which, Eric Smith, has historically had close ties to IGE (used to be a
supplier early on before starting his own company). I heard some rumors that he
had fled the company (with its debts and workers who filed a lawsuit against
him) and had to sell a customer service center in the Philippians to Atlas
Technology Group (IGE/MySuperSales) to make ends meet. Anyways, I go through
our normal testing policy and order some sample currency, however when I go to
pay it directs me to Atlas Technology Group’s PayPal. Then when I go to the customer
service prompt I notice they use the exact same system, setup, and network
(even canned responses and greetings) that IGE uses. So I ask the customer
service agent if Gamepal got bought out or is affiliated with IGE:
Johnard L: IGE is not affiliated with GamePal.
I then asked why the PayPal was Atlas Technology Group (the same as IGE):
Johnard L: The Atlas Technology Group is an independent payment processing
company that handles all of our online payments and other financial
transactions on our behalf. Atlas serves a number of e-commerce businesses with
their payment outsourcing solutions.
Johnard L: We
have no association or affiliation with any of the other companies that employ
Atlas' services.
That could be a possibility, if I didn’t know that the customer service agents were the same for both (well the same) companies and they were drawing from the same stock supplies and backend. So, as a little test since I know virtual chat agents often have multiple customers at the same time I head on over to IGE’s website and open up a virtual chat request, and guess who pops up? Johnard L, who then proceeds to use the exact same canned catchphrases and when I ask him about the Gampal.com affiliate he denies it. At this point I confront him, and reveal that I’m actually the same person talking to him in both chat windows:
Johnard L: I could be possible that they are using same chat names.
Right, and use the same catchphrases, the same backend, the same PayPal, the same everything. When I confronted him with this I got the typical response that all Atlas Technology Group agents use when you ask too many questions and they realize you aren’t an idiot:
Johnard L: As much as I want to answer your claims, I am not privy to that
information.
How are you not privy to your own identification? Atlas Technology Group denies
their workers selfhood? Then just to make things a bit more fun I decided to
talk a bit more to “both” customer service agents and ended up confusing poor
Johnard L so that he responded to a question in a Gamepal window in the IGE
window fatally confirming that it was in fact the same person and Gamepal is
just a front for IGE (with much more expensive prices).
When I asked Gamepal for a refund, because I told them I didn’t trust a company that lied to me I was told to send an e-mail not to a gamepal e-mail address, but to: cs@readyclickpay.com
And to add insult to injury the domain name information for readyclickpay.com indicated that it was registered to none other than: Atlas Technology Group.
All, I can ask is why? Why lie when it is so obvious that you are the same company? What type of company does that? Are they just trying to trick loyal Gamepal customers who don’t mind paying the 30-40% markup over IGE’s typical prices for the exact same customer service, delivery, and product? Either way it’s unethical and insulting to the consumer’s intelligence. Hopefully Atlas Technology Group addresses these claims and stops these deceitful practices. I thought all of that was behind them and the company had matured a bit more. Maybe not...