Is Swipe HQ heading towards a train wreck

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mattwnz

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#1449176 12-Dec-2015 13:44

I went through this when Paymex went under many years ago. Lost some money from it as deposits weren't in a trust account. People using it should be grateful their money is supposedly in one. It did restart up again under a new owner but the funds were gone. I suggest people get their own merchant account.

adw

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#1451398 16-Dec-2015 11:05

There's an article on http://idealog.co.nz/venture/2015/12/mobile-payment-system-swipe-goes-down-leaving-small-business-out-pocket saying they're in liquidation unfortunately.

freitasm

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#1451411 16-Dec-2015 11:18

Yes, the liquidation was pointed out in the previous page...

A few things: from the start I received lots of press releases about their device with claims such as (I save every email I receive so these are quotes from the release sent out 24 June 2012):

"A Kiwi technology company has created a new device which will revolutionise the way New Zealanders pay their bills and provide better cash flow for local businesses." and "The Kiwi company, owned by Manas Kumar, recently hit headlines when it became one of the first local technology companies to list on the German stock exchange." and "CEO Kumar says he created the new mobile credit card terminal to create better payment flexibility for both businesses and consumers in our increasingly cashless society."

Alarm bells went ringing. First it wasn't "new" as those mobile readers existed already and could be bought from Chinese websites. Claiming someone invented this locally was disingenuous.

Then "listed on the German stock exchange" but why not locally if he was so proud of being a kiwi creating this?

Then there was an incident on Geekzone where an account registered to the CEO was used to send me an abusive email. I complained to their PR team asking to never receive emails about this company again - just to them receive an apology from this person saying the email once belonged to the CEO but was since them used by their social media team to answer questions in forums so he wasn't sure who could be using this email account anymore.

This happened 6 March 2013. I stopped trusting the company so this development comes as no surprise.

And then looking at the Idealog link above I see they posted a notice about their outages on Facebook - and got 3140 "Likes". I mean, are people this dumb, to "like" an outage?

nate

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#1451530 16-Dec-2015 12:43

Interesting article about Swipe in the NBR (paid) from back in May:

The Kiwi, the mafia lawyer and the German share scam

miked

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#1452455 17-Dec-2015 18:25

Well, there we go.... they have been sold to CyberCom Global. Here's the email I just received:

Important news about your Swipe account.

Dear Mike,

We're writing to let you know that Cybercom Hospitality Limited has purchased the delivery of Swipe from Optimizer.

This email explains what that means for you and lets you know how your account will be managed in the future.

What does this mean for you?

Cybercom Hospitality Limited looks forward to continuing to build a lasting relationship with you. The team are already working hard to address the recent technical issues that have caused unreliability in the service and our goal is get services back to a high standard. Cybercom is a internet services provider specializing in Business Grade connections and WiFi solutions, established in 1995.

Currently there have been no changes to how you use the service, therefore you can continue to use it as you normally would. Please note that incoming funds from transactions continue to be fully settled less normal transaction fees, however due to the recent changes this has resulted in a delay to our normal settlement schedule. Any transactions made after 6pm on Thursday, 10/12/15, have not been settled yet. We aim to have all these transactions settled by Friday 18/12/15.

Moving forward we will be touch as we streamline the services that we support. If you have a mobile reader on your account, then you will receive a call from BNZ offering their PayClip service. We suggest that you look into this offer because at a later date we may not be supporting the current K1 reader you have. If you would like to get in touch with BNZ regarding this offer, please email them at Bnz_way2pay@bnz.co.nz.

The same support is available to you, should you have any questions or need any assistance, please feel free to contact us by phone on 0800 794 734 from a land-line, or +64 9 929 4915 from a mobile or send us a email at nzsupport@cybercomglobal.com

Yours sincerely,
Cybercom Support Team

This at least will answer most of the rumours and speculations, although I suspect things will continue to be rocky for a while even with new owners. Lots of customers have jumped ship, so it will be interesting to see if it ever recovers and becomes a stable service again...

Does anyone have any experience with CyberCom Global? Seem like a legit company so maybe it will be OK in the long run.... just not sure we'll stick it out long enough to find out.

Mike

freitasm

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#1452890 18-Dec-2015 11:11

A Manas Kumar profile now on Idealog.

Kumar has a colourful past of business dealings. He made headlines in 2012 when he publicly declared himself as one of the youngest CEOs to have a company listed on Germany’s Frankfurt stock exchange. This caused some confusion, as it turned out a separate Canadian company called Optimizer International that Kumar was the director of was the one that had achieved the listing, not the New Zealand company. The company was investigated for market manipulation and ended up closing.

The NBR also found Kumar had used a convicted Mafia lawyer in the US to help become listed on the Frankfurt stock exchange. Kumar said he had found the lawyer on LinkedIn and was unaware of his past, which the lawyer disputed. He said Kumar knew about his past early on.

There were plans for the New Zealand based Optimizer HQ company to list on the NZX in 2013, but they fell through.

Several staffers who worked under Manas Kumar at Optimizer HQ spoke to The Register on the condition of anonymity. They said the company was a strange environment to work in.

Also reading it looks like a spam operation too:

They said the email software used by the company, called Maxmail, sent spam all over the world, which got several computer servers in the company blacklisted. “It was disguised to make sure it had no ties back to Optimizer. Then one day, a spammer sent out a campaign that had US Government, Whitehouse and Pentagon email addresses and within an hour the entire Optimizer network went down due to a cyber attack from the US. Took us days to bring it back,” the staffer said.

With Optimizer’s Texta platform, which its website says is a “Bulk 2-way SMS marketing and communication platform”, the staffer said 30 cell phone mobiles were bought from China instead of New Zealand, with New Zealand sim cards put into them.

“After a week or so a card would get shut down by the Telco, so we would go down to the dairy downstairs and buy a new one and chuck the old one out,” they said. “This went on for some months until we had the Vodafone (might have been 2Degrees, can’t remember) Loss Prevention team show up at the office.” [sic]

arvis

98 posts

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#1854821 29-Aug-2017 14:45

I have received a marketing email from them and went to their website.

On their chat, they said: "The previous company went under liquidation in 2015. And CyberCom took over Swipe."

Has anyone used them recently? Have they improved?

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miked

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#1854829 29-Aug-2017 15:02

We've still be using them for web-based card transactions (particularly for recurring/subscription payments) right through all the mess from 18 months ago. All been working fine. All settlements happen on time and without fuss.

We lost the card machines for in-person transactions 18 month ago which was a shame, but the rest of the service is rock solid and reliable.

We do have another merchant provider we also use, (and had planned to drop SwipeHQ due to the liquidation of the previous company), but the service from SwipeHQ remained working just fine throughout so we never migrated the current ongoing subscriptions over to the new provider. I just checked, and we have put over $50,000 of transactions through SwipeHQ in the last 18 months without any issues at all.

Hope this helps.

arvis

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#1855365 30-Aug-2017 16:27

miked:

We've still be using them for web-based card transactions (particularly for recurring/subscription payments) right through all the mess from 18 months ago. All been working fine. All settlements happen on time and without fuss.

We lost the card machines for in-person transactions 18 month ago which was a shame, but the rest of the service is rock solid and reliable.

We do have another merchant provider we also use, (and had planned to drop SwipeHQ due to the liquidation of the previous company), but the service from SwipeHQ remained working just fine throughout so we never migrated the current ongoing subscriptions over to the new provider. I just checked, and we have put over $50,000 of transactions through SwipeHQ in the last 18 months without any issues at all.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for info! Very helpful.

What kind of web-based solution are you using? I'm using woocommerce.

miked

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#1855422 30-Aug-2017 17:42

We don't have SwipeHQ integrated anywhere.

We are using it mostly for repeat donations (we are a charity) so we manually email people a custom link so they can give a monthly or weekly automatically re-occurring donation of the amount they've specified. They use the link to enter their details once on Swipe's website, then Swipe automatically keeps taking the agreed donation every week or month until donor cancels the request. This is what is working perfectly for us with Swipe!

We have our other merchant gateway integrated into our website just fine for one-off donations, but they are not handling recurring donations yet do to problems with that other merchant (name of merchant not supplied to give them a chance to fix the problem - and this thread is about SwipeHQ which is working fine). Grrr!

Unfortunately we chose to switch merchants when we though Swipe was dying 18 months ago, and therefore have integrated that new merchant into the new website. Sadly, we'd have probably been able to integrate Swipe instead if we'd have know the new merchant would have troubles and Swipe would remain in service.

If new merchant doesn't pull finger out soon, we'll have to consider integrating Swipe instead.

Mike

myfullflavour

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#1855424 30-Aug-2017 17:49

Still wouldn't trust Swipe.

We've integrated with Stripe.

miked

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#1855440 30-Aug-2017 18:55

Big advantage for us as a charity is Swipe's 0.95% charity rate and no ongoing monthly fees. So there was no problem keeping the account live whether we use it or not....

We thought we were going to have to transfer all the recurring donations when the problems with SwipeHQ surfaced 18 months ago... hence scrambling to set up an alternative merchant (who we do pay a monthly fee to), but right through the problems, the money continued to arrive from Swipe without issue. As it happens we never got recurring donations integrated so we weren't able to take Swipe offline. But it means we got to see that Swipe remained reliable throughout, so we never pulled the plug.

Due to issues with new supplier, we are considering whether to move core one-off donations back to Swipe and to integrate them into our site. Will depend if our database supplier is prepared to integrate them for us or not.

We did the right thing to fire up a replacement as we needed certainty, but ironically Swipe never ended up causing us problems, but new supplier has instead! Hindsight is wonderful!

MichaelNZ

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#1878688 6-Oct-2017 21:00

Martin_NZ: Hi All,

Is there anyone else here the uses SwipeHQ for credit card / eftpos / mobile payment solutions.

Things seem to be going from bad to worse at breakneck speed.

LOL. Swipe has been a "train wreck" for as long as I can remember. My business started using Swipe in 2013 and switched to BNZ Currency Select in early 2016.

WFH Linux Systems and Networks Engineer in the Internet industry | Specialising in Mikrotik | APNIC member | Open to job offers

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