Well hate may be too strong of a word but they’re definitely suspicious of them…
I just had a nice long chat with them about why my visa check card no longer worked. Apparently pre-ordering Unity 3 at 6AM tripped some sort of fraud alert so they turned it off. They didn’t bother to CALL me or anything, I just had to find out when I tried to buy a set of headphones.
Glad I paid cash for my lunch with clients. That’d have been rather embarrassing.
Man that sucks, i hate it when companies does things like this, without asking you first.
I had problems with PayPal before cause i made my account back in Germany and when i moved to canada and paid with it, they just blocked it, without even telling me. I once logged in and saw a message that they blocked my account cause it’s too weird that someone from canada would use it.
It took like 3 weeks to enable my account again, had to send many emails, do transactions, etc.
(Un)fortunately, a lot of banks are overly guarded about online sales at unusual hours or made from different geographical locations.
Sometimes they are suspicious of very large transactions, like over $4000. In cases like that, it’s best to try to break your purchases into smaller multiple transactions – for example two separate purchases of 2x Unity Pro instead of 4x in a single go.
As an alternate route, we accept Paypal. It’s possible to feed your credit card data into Paypal and make an indirect credit card purchase that way. Some banks are less guarded about crediting PayPal than webshops. For very large orders of $5000+ we accept cashiers checks (USA only) and bank transfers from vetted institutions.
If you’ve made a payment and are stuck waiting for your bank or Paypal and need to get working ASAP, feel free to write sales@unity3d.com. Just explain the situation and we can probably issue you a 30 day eval license to get you going. We usually only do this once, however.
This happened to me not once, but twice, while trying to get a Unity 3 license. You’d have thought, after I authorized it the first time, that things would be good, but no.
Then again, you’d have also thought Unity sales would have responded to my emails about the problem, when I questioned them about how I could actually get them $$$. No dice on that, either. :x
I had a similar issue when I tried to order the Android Pro license - the bank rejected the transaction because it was over a certain limit. After I had a call with them they told me they tightened the security guidelines recently. Suspicious is an amount of foreign country currency you want to pay, up from a certain amount, how much that day went over the credit card and and and. What I learned is, that I can simply call them and say: I’m making now a payment which is correct and not fraud and they unlock the card for any amount for a certain time. Still lets you have the safety of not having unlimited cash fraud on the card.
It’s not like it was out of pattern for me. I routinely shop online, though I do tend to use Paypal a lot. (The only reason I didn’t this time was I was hoping if UT got their money quicker and without the paypal cut I might get a beta download email sooner)
This is nowhere near as bad as when they shut off my card while I was in Cancun. Thankfully I was at an all-inclusive and had time to get it cleared up. The icing on the cake that time was the answering machine message when I got home: “Mr Stanley we’ve detected from potentiality fraudulent charges on your card from Mexico please call us at…”. A lot of good THAT did me.
Almost every time I drive to Texas (twice a year), the credit card company calls or freezes the card. No large purchases, just gas/food. You would think the software would pick up on the fact that my gas purchases start in Cali and slowly heads east.
In the US, when you are traveling between states, you typically want to call your bank to let them know you will be using the card in unusual locations for the next few days or weeks or whatever.
Same goes for moving.
So I can imagine that changing countries is also a relatively big deal and you should warn the bank.
Unity on the other hand doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense to block. If you’re making an online transaction, it shouldn’t seem unreasonable to the bank that it’s in another, far-away location.
I actually had a similar problem pre-ordering Unity 3 Pro on a credit card. It just wouldn’t let me make the transaction at all. So I ended up using my debit/check card instead.
I had a similar problem except it was booking my trip to Vegas. No call, no nothing and in my case there was NO ONE for me to get a hold of until the following Monday, it was a Friday evening I placed the order. No cash in my hand, no way to get a hold of the bank or their fraud department until Monday and suppose to be taking the kids to a festival the following morning.
Thankfully I have good parents who lent me the money until Monday but that’s ridiculous way to operate without even a phone call to verify. Happened twice more then I changed banks and have been fine ever since.
Slightly different problem for me, I live in Bangkok but have a UK based bank account and credit cards, tried to buy Unity 3 the other day but I can only do it if I pay VAT even though I dont live in Europe, so gave up didnt fancy paying an extra $600. Asked Unity if I could do a transfer but seems only on purchases over $5000. No trying to sort out a bank account here but not easy for non Thai peeps.
I have this kind of problem with Paypal all the time.
I have paypal, linked with bank and credit card, everything confirmed what’s possible etc., but when I purchase something higher in value or e.g. 3 different items not costing much but in short time span like 10 mins, they limit my account saying that they need additional information to confirm that it’s really me.
Happened like 10 times, then I stopped using them for a while and when I came back to check how’s my account doing, it was limited and surprisingly there was no way to remove the limitation…
There’s nothing in the resolution centre, and the “case id” of this limitation seems to be invalid. Haven’t had the time to email or call Paypal, but it’s annoying how they do things like that :x