iKobo Nightmare

Where are they?

[NickMM]

I setup my website to use iKobo. I email support with questions and it has taken up to 10 days to get a reply. I was told a month ago that my ikobo card was sent but still have no card. I emailed trying to get another card and did not get a reply. I have money I paid to test my system in my account and can not get it back without the card. I made four $10 purchases and my account says my balance is $20? I also noticed the site says that only $1,000 a month may be withdrawn from the account. What happens if you have a successful site that does $10,000 a month? I also noticed a pic of their "Visa" ATM card had no Visa logo on it.

Stay away! iKobo is a nightmare!

[fire2004]

ha ha,......... you are unlucky, I have very good expereience with them, in stead. i have the same porblem with the limit issue, however, I solved that by fax them my company proof. at the beginning, I were also angry about that. After all, I can understand they don't want some people cheat money from consumers.

[Jake25r]

I think it was a hard time for you ... cause a friend of mine sent me 200$ and i withdrew those very easily with the ikobo card.

[nicknj]

Wait until they freeze your account without explination!

I am setting up a new site, verified my address with ikobo and hired a programmer to make an ipn script. The site is complete except for the ikobo ipn. Since I can not pay myself to test the script the programmer registered. The programmer could not use their ikobo account. After a week of mailing support they received no replies from ikobo. The only thing stopping me from launching my site was the testing of the ipn script. Then ikobo froze my account without explination! The ikobo info stated...

"iKobo has developed an intelligent computer system that identifies suspicious activity. In some cases, the system will block accounts belonging to legitimate iKobo customers."

Very intelligent! A system that can shut down your account and in effect shut down your site even if you are a legitimate customer. Then you have to wait a week or more for support to tell you that they are not allowed to tell you why the account was froze?

You will find out for yourself some day! Do you want to use such an unstable unreliable company?

[nicknj]

Can you all tell me where there are other bulletin boards to warn webmasters of the nightmares associated with ikobo? Or maybe you can post of my experience with the losers?

[Morocco]

sitepoint.com
WebProworld.com

[Corey Bryant]

[small-business-forum.com...]
[hosthideout.com...]
[cre8asiteforums.com...]

-Corey

[Jake25r]

Their anti-fraud system is in fact very good. All you had to do is send them a copy of your ID or your phone bill and your account would have been immediately unfrozen. It happened to me too but I sent those copies and very fast since that day my account worked perfectly. You have to understand they do that for the customers protection so practically for your own protection.
Also if you have a PayPal account and need to send money where PayPal's coverage doesn't exist (in fact everywhere in the world :) ), you can use your iKobo account to transfer the money from PayPal balance account. Go to www.iKobo.com for more details.

[gringolerdo]

Despite the reservations I had about ikobo, I decided to give it a try anyway since I am located outside the US and it was exactly what I needed. Yesterday, my most important client attempted to make a purchase from me (for $200) using ikobo while I was present in his office. On the first screen he received after clicking on the payment link, along with the other information, such as name etc. it requested a password. He was confused by this because it was not at all clear if this was a password he was already supposed to have, or if it was one he should create, or why a password was required. The next screen he received after hitting the Submit button said that the account was "Blocked for security verification" or something to that effect. The rest of this screen was very confusing as it was not clear if the account that was blocked was the "account" of my client (he did not know he was creating an account) or my account as a merchant. From the wording, it appeared more likely that it referred to my merchant account (why the purchaser should receive this sceen intended for the merchant I do not know).

The message on this screen said that he? should call customer service or send or fax them a message for security verification. We tried to call, but after an hour of trying, the number remained busy. Also, during the last month, I have tried to contact ikobo by email (3 times), and online chat (twice) and the only response that I have gotten from any of this was one automated reply from an autoresponder.

From this experience it seems evident that ikobo is not really in the business of accepting payments, yet they continue to spam online forums with phony posts written in bad English praising ikobo attempting to induce people to visit their website (some of which appear on this forum). If their business is not actually receiving and transferring money as they claim, then what is it?
They have the ideal setup for stealing credit card numbers since they get not only the number, but also the associated security information.

Now my client and myself are living in mortal fear of what use they may make of his credit card number.

It appears likely that it is a one man, or very small operation, because some portions of their website are written in imperfect english that is very similar to the style of the phony poster on these forums. Both appear to be written by the same person. Well, you know the old saying about things that appear to be too good to be true. What a shame! Too bad this service is not available from a legitimate provider.

[asinah]

Hi everyone.

You should stay in fear because they operate out of Antigua. If the card is lost you have to call Antigua and Barbuda at 268.480.2240 - Anyone can set-up a bank in Antiguage that cost you around USD 50,000

Their partner bank is Global Bank of Commerce in Antigua and they work with ikobo. I am not surprised at all. They use the Georgia office only to make it look like they are based in the US but in fact they clear everything offshore.

[globalbank.ag...]

If you have been scammed or whatever, I would suggest you to call the above number and make a complain or better contact the Antigua and Barbuda government directly.

[Corey Bryant]

Interesting article. There are a lot of other forums that can really benefit from this information.

-Corey

[asinah]

You can redistribute it.

If anyone else had problems with ikobo (by the way kobo stands for Nigerian cent) they can send me a sticky mail.

Seems to be also that ikobo no longer accepts Amex and Master Card and they actually accepted for a very short period of times paypal last month. Only Visa is left at this moment and we filed a complain with visa against ikobo out of Canada.

They wouldn't like to listen first but after they heard that Amex and Master no longer make business with ikobo, they promised to look into it.

We also cancelled our visa card as we are very worried about identity theft. We ask our bank to issue a letter that we will not be responsible for any future charges and are now issuing a new visa card.

So anyone that has a problem with ikobo, send me a sticky mail with a short description about the problems and I will sticky back another url to a forum where a discussion has started about ikobo.

[gramski]

Ikobo has a rather unpleasant reputation as far as I can see. They seem to have a lot of new users posting on web forums saying they are OK but the posters are never long standing users of those forums. I haven't ever seen a user with a longstanding reputation post anything good about them.

If any user with a longstanding webmasterworld profile would like to comment about their experiences using Ikobo I would be very interested to hear what you have to say.

[plumsauce]

I posted a query about his possible affiliation
to the organisation to one new user who kept dropping
in with positive things to say any time there was
a negative post. It seemed to his main topic of
interest here.

He of course impugned my motives in doing this.

You can draw your own conclusions.

What I *do* know is that AMEX issues a new card
called a travelcard which is a preloaded card
that can be reloaded anytime by anybody. The
USPS is their main affiliate. They've been
piloting this since late last year.

+++

[Corey Bryant]

Ikobo has a rather unpleasant reputation as far as I can see. They seem to have a lot of new users posting on web forums saying they are OK but the posters are never long standing users of those forums. I haven't ever seen a user with a longstanding reputation post anything good about them.
If any user with a longstanding webmasterworld profile would like to comment about their experiences using Ikobo I would be very interested to hear what you have to say

Something like this: [hosthideout.com...]

I have not seen anyone in any forum say they have had a positive experience with Ikobo that has less than 5 posts. There is even one forum now that even banned ikobo from their word list so now everything shows up as *****

-Corey