Neteller is pure evil | Rickard Andersson

A couple of years ago, I created an account on Neteller. For those of you who haven’t heard about Neteller before, they basically do what Paypal does. I can’t remember why I created an account, but I believe I needed it to play online poker or something like that.

So, anyway, the other day, I received an e-mail from them and the e-mail contained an unsubscribe link. I don’t want more crap from these people so I clicked the link. Here’s what I got:

The server at x1.neteller.com is taking too long to respond.

The day after I tried again and this time the web page did load properly (it’s down again by the way). I was greeted by a form in which I was asked to enter my e-mail address. It should be noted that the unsubscribe link that I clicked to get to the form contained a massive query string containing various IDs and other crap that would appear to identify me. Still, I entered the e-mail address I used for the account (myusername+neteller@gmail.com) in the form and submitted. Here’s what I got:

Not a valid email address

This, of course, is wrong. The address I entered was 100% valid. My guess is that there’s some kind of validation code on the server that incorrectly flags the e-mail address as invalid due to the plus sign (see instant disposable Gmail address).

On the same page as the non-working unsubscribe form, there was some text telling me that I could e-mail support@neteller.com if I ran into any problems. So I did. I contacted them telling them what the problem is and that I would appreciate if they could fix their unsubscribe feature. In reply, I got this:

Dear Member,

NETELLER is pleased to announce a new web-based service to submit your questions! Please click on the link below to send a question to NETELLER Customer Service:

http://help.neteller.com/cgi-bin/neteller.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php

NETELLER will no longer reply to questions sent by email; we will not be answering the email you have sent. To submit your question, please click on the link above.

Sigh. So I clicked the link in the e-mail and tried to use the “new web-based service” instead. After inputting my e-mail address and a subject and message body, I submitted the form. Did it work? But of course not. Instead of submitting the form, I was redirected to a new form in which I was asked to create a new account.

Neteller is evil.