Originally Posted by Naughty-Pages

I'm gonna butt into this convo about epass using the VV or even the physical card...

Using the VV and the physical card were like a roll of the dice for us... I still don't get it.. but some merchants we talked to said the issue was they were not authorized to accept International credit cards.

For the VV at least 30% of the merchants we used would pre-authorize them, but then decline them later. The first time this happened it was over several thousands of dollars we had spent online with numerous online retailers for X-mas shopping.. We did not know 30% of them later declined it until several days later.. the wife was pissed (trying to figure out what presents needed to be repurchased in time for x-mas). And the money that was declined was held up for several weeks... after that we rarely used the VV# for anything.. I used to use it for things that required manual payment rather than automatic, but then one day our electric company stopped taking the VV.. after that i pretty much gave up, primarily to hundreds or thousands being tied up for several weeks.

On the rare occasion any other credit card we have had a similar situation, they would release the funds within a few days.

The same went for using the physical card, if there we bought $6 in gas to fill a 2 gallon gas jug, $85 would be tied up for 3 weeks. And some places it would not work at all, but I have since noticed that a few of the gas stations in our area (a tourist area) have signs on the pumps saying that international cards need to be brought inside).

Now the really messed up part.. I had like 25k in my account from a couple big sales, and I wanted to pay off my Jeep Commander, so I called epass and talked to some Indian chick.. I asked her if there was a way I could use epass to pay the remaining 15k on our Jeep, she said no.. I would have to withdraw $1,000 a day via ACH for friggin 25 days to get the money or spend 40+ days at the ATM withdrawing $600 a day. And I explained to her that I would be getting even more sales in the upcoming weeks so it would take far longer to get all of my money out..

Skip to a couple weeks later, we were moving to a bigger place and we needed about $9k for some new furniture we were buying.. Just as a test I asked the furniture place to try the Epass card but run 9 separate charges of $1k through.. I did not expect it to work, based on what the Indian chick from epass said.. I figured the first 1k would go through, and then the next transaction would be decline.. but guess what? It fucking worked! all 9 charges went through.. I was kinda pissed because I could have done the same thing to pay off the Jeep instead of making constant daily withdrawals...