Payment Issues

Recently there have been some problems with our payment processor.

One of these is that sometimes there is a significant delay in completing a transaction, so the funds are “reserved” but the transaction isn’t actually completed until a few weeks later.

The other problem was that a number of charges were made to some of our customers’ credit cards, in our name. The majority of these are USD 1.00 test charges that are used to verify that a card is valid. Normally we cancel these charges immediately and the charge doesn’t appear on the card statement. However the problem at our payment processor has resulted in some of these supposedly “cancelled” charges recently being applied to customer cards. A number of other charges which were supposed to be “cancelled” have also been processed. This was done in error and without any instructions from FastMail.

We are currently working with our payment processor to refund these erroneous payments. In some cases, the refunds are unable to be processed directly because the card has expired or been cancelled.

We may need to refund these charges via an alternative method, or, at the user’s option, instead credit the amount towards future FastMail renewals. We will be in touch with the affected customers once we have more information on the scope of the problem.

We would like to assure our users that we will make certain that all erroneous charges are corrected. This may take some time, so thanks for your patience.

Our apologies for any inconvenience or confusion. We will post more information as it becomes available.

• the FastMail team