Paxum Unionpay card retained in local ATM
 

Hi guys,

So, my card was retained in a local ATM in Serbia. I tried to contact the bank which owns the ATM itself, and they said, the card issuer bank has to contact them directly via e-mail and they will return the card to me.

In this case, should I contact UnionPay directly, Paxum, or maybe both?

Do you have any experience with this?

Thank you in advance,
z

Banks are all thiefs...it will take ages to go through the bureaucratic process with them. Probably easiest to cancel the card and get paxum to send you a new one.

Yeah, that's what I thought. It will take ages till I get my card back. I'm trying to reach out to a friend of mine who actually works at the local bank if we can speed things up and somehow get around the whole process, so will see.

I'm thinking about sending the same message to paxum and unionpay as well, and let them decide who needs to take action in this case. I'm pretty sure it's Unionpay, but as non of their international hotlines are available, I'm not sure if anyone will ever respond to e-mails.

Will see.

Cheers,
z

It probably does not hurt to send to both.

Hi,

So, I was able to get in touch with the manager of the bank in the city, but sadly he is not able to do anything in my case. All retained cards are reported to the National Bank automatically and it is mandatory for the issuer bank to contact them via mail or email. There are no exceptions.

For now, I contacted support@paxum and ruth@paxum and also [email protected] which is the main office in Hungary for Hungarian and Balkan citizens, [email protected], another office in Europe, and [email protected] which is the biggest office in Europe.

Hopefully, someone will guide me in the right direction soon.

If not, I will have to request a new card.

That's about it for this case.

I'll update this thread once everything is resolved in case someone gets into the same situation as me.

Cheers,
z

Thanks for the update and good luck brother!

Hey zerovic,
I'm sorry you encountered this situation. I can see that our support team has already responded and escalated your query to the cards team for investigation.
Best,
Ruth

Hi zerovic,
 

Hi zerovic,
I just saw your post :( can you please tell which atm you were using? I'm asking this because I'm from Serbia too and also using Paxum Unionpay(last time about 10 days ago and everything went fine) but now I'm concern :( please keep us updated with your case. Thanks.

Damn thats some serious bureaucracy right there.

I once had my card accidentely taken by ATM here in Canada... they went to the back of the machine and got me the card in a couple minutes.

Hope you are able to get it resolved. I can't stand all the pointless rules that just waste everyones time.

Chinese card in Serbia with a [email protected] as a contact email address. What could possibly go wrong in a current situation :)

New rule says 2 days max:

https://www.danas.rs/vesti/ekonomija...-vise-nedelja/

OTP Bank Serbia. As that's the only ATM where Unionpay works for me.

Lucky you. It doesn't seem to work this way in my country. -.-

This is new to me. Never heard of this before. Thank you very much for posting this! I just forwarded the link to the bank manager!

Hey guys,

I got my card back today. No one contacted me from the bank itself, however, they had the mail from Paxum where they asked them to return my card asap.

I also asked about the official statement from the Serbian National Bank, which states, that all detained cards must be returned within 2 business days, but the response wasn't too good from OTP. They said the service team can't jump on every single request daily if a card gets detained and they don't even care about the official statement. lol

Anyway, Paxum reacted almost immediately and I was able to get the card back.

So, for anyone who gets in the same boots as me, contact [email protected] and they will sort everything out in no time!

Cheers,
z

Sorry to hear of your troubles, and I'm glad the issue seems to have been resolved.

This is a sobering reminder of how "economic sanctions" can be summarily imposed upon ANY individual, at any time.

Good to hear that Paxum stepped up.

Glad everything solved ok with your card