Taking Curve to Financial Ombudsman

[Ash]

I’m due almost £200 curve cashback. Held as pending, several months past Curve’s on due dates. Tried app chat and email over the months to seek the cashback, but just get given the run around and fobbed off.

Is non payment of cashback something i can refer to the financial ombudsman?

[JDB]

Ash wrote:

I’m due almost £200 curve cashback. Held as pending, several months past Curve’s on due dates. Tried app chat and email over the months to seek the cashback, but just get given the run around and fobbed off.

Is non payment of cashback something i can refer to the financial ombudsman?

Before you can take a case to the FOS, you need to make a formal complaint to Curve and await their final decision letter or until eight weeks have elapsed without a response. The FOS will not entertain a complaint without you going through that process. In principle, the cashback could fall under FOS jurisdiction, but I would read the T&Cs very carefully indeed, as they may blame the retailer or you using a clashing affinity product.

[points_worrier]

The FOS can help you submit a formal complaint if you struggle to do it via chat. I needed this when I had a complaint about PayPal – they tried every trick in the book to avoid accepting a complaint from me, and only accepted it once the FOS submitted it on my behalf.

[Ash]

Thank you both.

Forgive me, what does FOS stand for?

[BA Flyer IHG Stayer]

financial ombudsman service

[supergraeme]

They’re sitting on nearly £3k of refunds that they took into Curve Cash for no reason. A month ago they asked for a bank statement so they could return the money that way but they’ve been ignoring me since (e-mail/chat/Twitter). This can’t be legal?

[SamG]

Use the curve card to pay things to get it out? I use it to Pay amex usually so I can do the exact amount

[Nath4n]

Curve cash is an absolute joke.
I expected to be sitting on a small-ish (£20-30) balance from the 1% cashback over the past couple of months. Went in to find less than £1. It looks like Curve cash had been being used up automatically on a variety of pending/authorisation charges, i.e. TFL initial tap in, Google Pay authorisations, £1 card holds – dating over several months – and then never being refunded back to Curve cash once the authorisation naturally dropped off.
Curve tried to make me dispute each one individually, and the time investment just wasn’t worth it – so I downgraded from Metal.

[Ash]

supergraeme wrote:

They’re sitting on nearly £3k of refunds that they took into Curve Cash for no reason. A month ago they asked for a bank statement so they could return the money that way but they’ve been ignoring me since (e-mail/chat/Twitter). This can’t be legal?

Crikey! Sorry to heat that. They are very slow (bordering on ignoring) chat and web messages. Not ideal, but as the other poster says, use Curve to pay off credit cards. Works if you have Curve Metal. Need to check if they’ll be charges if non-metal curve.

[Rui N.]

Nath4n wrote:

Curve cash is an absolute joke.
I expected to be sitting on a small-ish (£20-30) balance from the 1% cashback over the past couple of months. Went in to find less than £1. It looks like Curve cash had been being used up automatically on a variety of pending/authorisation charges, i.e. TFL initial tap in, Google Pay authorisations, £1 card holds – dating over several months – and then never being refunded back to Curve cash once the authorisation naturally dropped off.
Curve tried to make me dispute each one individually, and the time investment just wasn’t worth it – so I downgraded from Metal.

Surely you’ve seen those transactions as notifications no? Seems a bit weird that it happened apparently so many times and you never noticed.
You can also turn off automatic use of Curve Cash.

[Nath4n]

Rui N. wrote:

Nath4n wrote:

Curve cash is an absolute joke.
I expected to be sitting on a small-ish (£20-30) balance from the 1% cashback over the past couple of months. Went in to find less than £1. It looks like Curve cash had been being used up automatically on a variety of pending/authorisation charges, i.e. TFL initial tap in, Google Pay authorisations, £1 card holds – dating over several months – and then never being refunded back to Curve cash once the authorisation naturally dropped off.
Curve tried to make me dispute each one individually, and the time investment just wasn’t worth it – so I downgraded from Metal.

Surely you’ve seen those transactions as notifications no? Seems a bit weird that it happened apparently so many times and you never noticed.
You can also turn off automatic use of Curve Cash.

Hindsight is great, if I’d realised what was happening I would have turned off automatic usage and then just used it all on a large transaction. It’s the fact that CS wasn’t interested in me raising that there clearly is an issue with Curve Cash being used up on authorisation charges and then never released, when ‘auto’ usage is turned on.

[supergraeme]

How strange – just four hours after including the CEO (@ShacharBialick) in a Tweet (and e-mailing complaints@imaginecurve.com), they’ve issued my refund. What a coincidence!

[Ash]

I just tweeted him – will keep you posted.

FYI for others – twitter handles are

@ShacharBialick
.
@AskCurve

@imaginecurve