Ripoff Report Needs Your Help!
X  |  CLOSE
Report: #1334709

Complaint Review: Sonetel - Internet

  • Submitted:
  • Updated:
  • Reported By: W. Burke — Beverly Hills California USA
  • Author Confirmed What's this?
  • Why?
  • Sonetel Internet USA

Sonetel Complete ripoff, totally unprofessional Internet

*REBUTTAL Owner of company: Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience

Show customers why they should trust your business over your competitors...

Is this
Report about YOU
listed on other sites?
Those sites steal
Ripoff Report's
content.
We can get those
removed for you!
Find out more here.
How to fix
Ripoff Report
If your business is
willing to make a
commitment to
customer satisfaction
Click here now..

 Signed up initially with this company because of the variety of phone numbers available. Purchased 20 lines from them all for business purposes and the launching of our company websites. The headache started from Day 1 with billing. For some disturbing reason, their merchant account is classified as a "high risk" account so any transactions with this company will red flag your personal account with your own credit card company. Once you go through that hassle, the appalling retardation continues. After I had to call in to release the hold on my account thanks to paying my due bill to Sonetel, I was out of town for 10 days.

Upon my return, while reviewing my emails, by happen chance, to retrieve an email possibly Spammed, I looked in my Spam folder. There, embedded between infomercial junk mail, was a notification email from Sonetel informing me my service lines with them had been suspended. Because my credit cards had declined their multiple attempts to charge. I immediately called, was put through with a smug, difficult to understand Indian guy who sounded like he was posted up in his own home.

Besides the audacity of being flagged as an untrustworthy merchant to begin with, they had actually frozen my lines since the 13th of October, with not a courtesy call, resolution attempt, or email contact. Just a generic notice well after the freeze. God only knows how many new clients and referrals I have lost in this time frame. Absolutely the most atrocious customer service if one can even coin that term with these folks. In addition, lets not forget the fact I paid in ADVANCE for these services, all of which I manually had cleared through my card company.

So surely they cannot cite unreliability of payment as their reason for cutting service. There are companies like mine that have heavy call traffic which is integral in maintaining open lines of contact. How this company became Public Enemy #1 with the major card companies, why they are still in business, and who ultimately is liable for this discrepancy in basic customer service, is all a mystery. One thing that is not: Not the company you want your personal information going to, nor the reliance of any type of longevity, professionalism, or efficiency. Save your fiscal means, there are plenty of comparable companies, who also offer basic professional support.

This report was posted on Ripoff Report on 10/23/2016 08:10 PM and is a permanent record located here: https://www.ripoffreport.com/reports/sonetel/internet/sonetel-complete-ripoff-totally-unprofessional-internet-1334709. The posting time indicated is Arizona local time. Arizona does not observe daylight savings so the post time may be Mountain or Pacific depending on the time of year. Ripoff Report has an exclusive license to this report. It may not be copied without the written permission of Ripoff Report. READ: Foreign websites steal our content

Search for additional reports

If you would like to see more Rip-off Reports on this company/individual, search here:

Report & Rebuttal
Respond to this report!
What's this?
Also a victim?
What's this?
Repair Your Reputation!
What's this?

Updates & Rebuttals

REBUTTALS & REPLIES:
0Author
0Consumer
1Employee/Owner

#1 REBUTTAL Owner of company

Sorry to hear that you had a bad experience

AUTHOR: Henrik Thome - (Sweden)

POSTED: Monday, October 24, 2016

Dear William Burke,

As a founder and CEO of Sonetel I am really sad to hear that you had a bad experience with our service.

We have paying customers in 160 customers, and most of them are very happy with the service we provide. In cases where a relation goes sour for any reason, it is key for me to understand what we did wrong, and how we can improve.

Your account was indeed blocked by our security team, as the pattern in your account unfortunately was very similar to patterns in fraudulent accounts where we have ended up with chargebacks for service delivered lately.

We are unfortunately the target for numerous fraud attampts, and block hundreds of attempts to use our service with stolen credit cards, phished PayPal accounts etc. each month. With have about 25 different security functions - mostly automated - that look for patterns. 

In your case, it was your porting out of phone numbers from our service shortly after signing up +  the large payments that contributed to the decision.

As a precaution, your account was temporarily blocked, and the last payment from you was refunded instantly to you credit card. We sent an email to you asking you to contact us in order to enable your account again.

You did not respond to the email (since it was in your spam folder) - but late yesterday evening you found the email and called our Customer service team. They informed you that someone from the Finance team would call you within 3-4 hours (which they did). Before that happened though, you contacted me via Linkedin (which I responded to) and you posted this complaint on this site.

The Finance team reopened your account, and whitelisted it to avoid it from being caught by future manual or automatic security functions. They also added a complimentary $50 in your account - which covers the monthly cost for having a US number with us for 2 years.

We will have additional internal reviews to see if the blocking of your account could have been avoided in the first place, and see if our procedures could be improved - as we naturally never want to block any legitimate customer.

We are sorry that you didn't see the email from us sooner (due to your email spam filters), and that this caused the service to be off-line for some time. In the future we are planning to implement SMS notifications in case of critical notifications. My guess is that you would find that to be a good idea.

Our customer service team consists of 27 people. They work out of our office in Hyderabad, India and handle over 5,000 customer inquiries per month. You can meet them in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AK20qR3A4vo

Your point about our merchant account being "high risk" with the credit card company is however very disturbing. This is news to me, and I suspect that this is caused by the following:

Our Payment Service Provider that handled all our credit card paymetns was acquired about a year ago. The acquirer had also acquired another Payment Service provider. At very short notice, we were informed early this year, that we had to move urgently to another temporary API. The new API lacked 3D secure, which has increased our chargebacks significantly - and it wasn't until in September (last month) that our provider finally was able to provide us with the specs for a totally different API that would allow us to restore 3Dsecure for credit card payments. We are now in the process of implementing this and should be ready by end November. Unfortunately - this loss of 3D secure - which was forced upon us - has increased our chargebacks significantly, which most probably is the reason why you see "high risk". This issue should go away in a month or two.

We have a Swedish government investment agency as one of our shareholders, we are PCI DSS certified and have 50 employees that work really hard to deliver a high quality service. I personally have a very strong commitment to high business ethics - and have also made that the corporate culture at Sonetel.

I understand that this hasn't helped you - and that you had an experience that wasn't a pleasant one.

I apologize for that.

Let me know if you have any remaining questions or concerns - or if there anything more we can help you with.

Best regards,

Henrik Thome
Founder and CEO of Sonetel

 

Respond to this report!
What's this?
Featured Reports

Advertisers above have met our
strict standards for business conduct.

X
What do hackers,
questionable attorneys and
fake court orders have in common?
...Dishonest Reputation Management Investigates Reputation Repair
Free speech rights compromised

WATCH News
Segment Now