Prepaid Cards Make Life Easier? Not With Cash Plus (cashplus MasterCard)

Member Name: antoniakelly

Product:	cashplus MasterCard
Date:	10/11/08 (86 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Ease of use, keep track of spending, no interest applied

Disadvantages: Atrocious customer service, high fees compared to others

My decision to get a prepaid credit card was simple; I loathe actual credit cards with a fiery passion, as they encourage excessive spending and the interest is ridiculous. However, when setting up in business I found a lot of services won't access a Visa Debit card, it's MasterCard or Visa only. I was told it is possible to have a credit card but without the actual "credit" facility, instead just putting on the amount you need the using it like a debit card. I did a websearch and up popped Cash Plus.

SIGN UP

Sign up was easy and took all of five minutes, filling out basic details like name, address and contact telephone numbers at the website. The card costs £9.95 as a one-off set up fee and then an extra £4.95 as a monthly fee. I paid this with my debit card and received a confirmation email within seconds, telling me my card would take five to seven working days to reach me.

It actually took 16 days. Not exactly a good start!

HOW IT WORKS

With this particular card, you pay the flat monthly fee of £4.95 no matter how often you use your card. You can use your card exactly like a normal MasterCard, so anywhere you see the MasterCard symbol, as well as online.

To use the card, you need to have 'loaded' the money on to it beforehand. You can do this in a variety of ways.

It's free to top up to £500 at a Post Office or up to £5,000 at a retail outlet (there's a postcode search to find your nearest) and the funds can take up to two business days to load (I often found it went on almost immediately though). You can also have your wages paid directly into the account, or pay £2 per top up at an ePay outlet, but this does guarantee your funds are available within 30 minutes. When the balance is loaded on your card, just use it like a normal credit card until the balance is gone.

I loaded money on mainly by paying a standing order from our business account directly into the card account. This does take up to five working days but we usually had plenty of time before our purchases to get things ready.

The actual process of loading the money onto the card and then shopping with the card was relatively hassle free. The online account facility means you can check when the money has become available.

GOOD POINTS

This is excellent for people like me who loathe credit cards or who have a low credit rating, as no credit check is involved in obtaining a card. You keep a tab on what you're spending and the online account system is quite good at updating each transaction in good time.

BAD POINTS

Of which there are many, I'm afraid.

The £4.95 monthly fee is very high and I resented paying it for the months when we didn't use the card. Obviously, if this is your main card that wouldn't be a problem, but for an occasional user such as myself, it got annoying very quickly.

After reading a lot of small print, I discovered you can just pay the usage fee per transaction. It equates to around £1.50 per use and there is no monthly fee. However, Cash Plus REALLY don't want people to do this and hide the information as best they can. I assume they're hoping people will forget about the card and they can still collect the monthly fee, which is debited from your card's balance (more on that in a moment).

Secondly, Cash Plus are near enough impossible to get hold of. When I wanted to switch over to a pay-by-transaction usage, I spent literally hours on hold, only to be cut off when I finally spoke to someone. I did eventually get through and was told I needed a different department, which was another hour on hold. From what I've read on the internet this is not an uncommon problem for Cash Plus. However, I did eventually get through and requested a switch over to the pay-by-transaction method. I was told this was done.

Oh, and their customer services is an 0871 number. Total bill for trying to switch plans? £11.75. Lovely.

Several months passed when we had no need to use the card. Then I went online to make a transfer onto the card and discovered the card's balance was minus £64. Horrified, I called Customer Services, having no idea how it could have happened. When I eventually got through, I was told my monthly fee was still being applied and I was also being charged for going into debit funds. They claimed to have "no record" of my call requesting a transfer.

A rather long battle ensued in which I point blank refusing to pay them a penny. I provided a copy of our phone bill so they could see I had made a call, but they argued that could have been for anything, not just for switching to a different pricing option. All of this arguing took a ferociously long time because I refused to call them (pricey!) and communicated only by letter, and it would sometimes take them weeks to respond.

In the end, they sent us a default notice and threatened court action, but there was no way I was paying and we had to go through the financial ombudsmen to get the matter settled. When the ombudsmen found in my favour, I never heard from Cash Plus again - not even an apology.

CONCLUSION

Prepaid credit cards most definitely have their place in the world and are extremely useful. I opened a new one with PayZone after this dispute and haven't had a problem in over a year of using it.

Cash Plus, however, are not who you should get a prepaid card from. The customer services' is terrible, the rates are very high (not just in the monthly fee. For my PayZone card the setup cost was £5 rather than £9.95, for the exact same service) and they don't give a jot about their customers. All of the benefits of Cash Plus are available from many different companies, so I would strongly recommend you go with one of their competitors instead.

Summary: Prepaid cards are a great invention, but avoid Cash Plus.