I had an interesting chat with someone from Scotia Bank today. I'll give you a little bit of a back story to lay out the situation.
A few weeks ago a received a call from Shakepay. They are basically a bitcoin/etherium wallet that will allow you to send them Canadian dollars via an email interact transfer to buy bitcoin or etherium with. I hadn't used the wallet before, but I had installed it on my phone and created a user account. They were calling just to inquire about why I hadn't bothered to try the service yet or if there were any problems.
I told them I just hadn't gotten around to trying their service because when I signed up the cost to transfer bitcoin was through the roof and I had just never bothered to give it a try since then. I said I'd try it out and let them know how I liked it.
So, I sent $50 over to them via an email money transfer. A few days had passed and I noticed that the money still hadn't gone into my account. I noticed this on Friday and decided to give it until Monday before I tried to contact them about it. I was beginning to think this was a ridiculous system if it takes so long to actually get the money transferred into my Shakepay account. Why would I send them money if it takes a week to get there? Bitcoin could go up thousands of dollars in that time.
Before I got a chance to call them, I noticed that the $50 had been credited back to my bank account so I didn't think anything of it. I figured there was some sort of error, either on my part or theirs, and everything was cool because I got my money back.
Then I started getting calls from Scotia Bank. Actually, they were calling @inkpixie about it because for some reason they don't have my cell phone number or email address even though they send me stuff all the time. Anyway, they wouldn't tell her any information about why they were calling except that there was some suspicious activity and that I needed to call them back. After she received a few of those calls, I finally decided to bite the bullet and deal with their ridiculous call center and talk to them.
After an awkward conversation with a computer, I finally got to talk to a real person. They, of course, had no idea why I was calling and had to go through a bunch of notes to finally see something that might be the case. It was about a canceled e-transfer for $50. I asked them if it was Scotia Bank who canceled the transaction or if it was Shakepay. She said it was Scotia Bank and she would transfer me over to their card security department to talk to them about it. It was supposed to be a 2-minute wait.
After about 10 minutes, the same person finally came back on the phone. They had told me that she had spoken with the card security department and that "Shakepay was blocked" from receiving e-transfers. I asked if I tried to send another transfer to them would it go through? Nope, Shakepay was blocked.
It was the strangest thing. This person was really helpful at the start while she was trying to figure out why Scotia Bank was calling me. She was giving me all kinds of reasons why Scotia Bank might have called. It could have been for a mortgage issue, a special offer, an overdue bill, etc. But then, once she told me that Shakepay was blocked, she became very vague and wouldn't answer any of my questions.
The way that her attitude changed, it became quite obvious that they do not want to let me send money to Shakepay because I'm going to buy Bitcoin with it and that is a threat. Much along the same lines that Visa and MasterCard canceled all their Bitcoin debit cards. Or the fact that some credit cards are blocking transactions from sites like Coinbase to "protect their customers." By that they probably mean protect their customers from stopping to use banks, not protect their customers from bad investments.
It's a little frustrating that I couldn't send the money over to them, and I'm going to try again. I was talking to the support from Shakepay and they say they don't usually have any issues with banks and that I should try again. They said they receive transfers from Scotia Bank all the time and there aren't any issues. So, I'll give it another try, but I'm now pretty skeptical that it will go through.
Any other Canadians out there in the Steem-o-sphere have any success using Shakepay?
Good or bad, I'd like to know. Is this just a random coincidence where a bank made a mistake and is accidentally blocking this, or are they acting as a gatekeeper to protect themselves from people finding ways around their money sucking behavior?
On a side note, I'm trying out Steempeak.com to write this post and it's quite refreshing. I'm especially liking the way you get a side-by-side preview of the post instead of having to scroll down every time you want to see how a picture turned out. If you haven't tried it out yet, give it a try. The stats on your account are reason enough to at least check it out.