[ADBjester]

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I used the epass virtual visa to buy my girlfriend a necklace from zales.com. After I submitted the billing info, the money was immediately deducted from my epass account. Later, I got an email from zales saying they were unable to process my order because of invalid payment info. The money is still out of my epass account. Anyone else ever have this problem using the virtual visa?

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Two things:

1) The money didn't come out of your ePass account. Log into ePass and view your statement. The charge says "Outstanding". It isn't anything more than a pre-authorization until that changes to "Matched". A "pre-auth" is much like going to a restaurant and paying with your physical card. They "pre-auth" the bill plus 30% since they don't know how much you'll tip. Only when they run it through as a matching sale later does the money get transferred... but while the pre-auth is in place, those funds are blocked off for the exclusive use of the merchant obtaining the pre-auth. The merchant has a fixed amount of time to claim those funds with a matching sale, varying based upon the issuing bank. The length of time funds are held by ePassport before assuming "no sale will take place" is 30 days.

2) The Virtual Visa is issued on a non-US-based Carribean bank in Nevis. Many US merchants (especially online websites) don't take "international credit cards" due to the high incidence of fraud from such cards (especially when shipping to a US-based address), as I discovered while using an ePass account to buy parts for a new computer. FrozenCPU and Antares took it easily. NewEgg and iSquared would not. TigerDirect took it, but I had to send documentation proving my residence.

It is likely that Zales rejected the purchase *after* gaining the pre-authorization, because it was not a US card. Therefore, the pre-auth will sit on your account for 30 days, tying up your funds, and will then drop on its own.

When NewEgg did this to me, I had them fax ePassport a statement that they don't take foreign cards and had no intent to charge my account the pre-auth, referencing my ePass user ID, the amount, the card number and my name and address. ePass dropped the pre-auth in 48 hours rather than 30 days.

You may want to do have Zales do the same. It has to be on their letterhead.

I have since discarded the ePass fax number to which such letters should be faxed, but (if you can get through) it is easily obtainable from ePass customer service.

Jester