Online shop operators check the payment behavior of their customers to protect against fraudsters: tedious for those affected.
With so-called credit checks, online shops and other companies want to protect themselves from fraudsters. They have specialized companies check whether the information provided by the customers is correct and whether they are solvent. Customers who do not pass this check will be excluded from the ordering process or will have to pay in advance.
A listener of the SRF consumer magazine “Espresso” was recently informed several times by the financial service provider Powerpay that the “purchase on account” option does not apply to them. Instead, you are more than welcome to pay in advance by credit card. The customer felt wrongly defamed and did not want to let this exposure sit on her.
«Discredited and delivered»
The professional assistant says in an interview with “Espresso” that she felt like an inferior customer. “And even when I repeatedly asked why, I didn’t get a satisfactory answer.” She suspected the rejection was related to her son’s past crimes. Years ago, he enriched himself with foreign identities on the Internet.
It can’t be that I’m going to be held in clan custody for the rest of my life.
At the time, she herself had reported her own son. The crimes have been legally settled, the son does not live in the same household as the mother. “It can’t be that I’ll be taken into custody for the rest of my life,” she says.
Victim became perpetrator
The Eastern Swiss company Powerpay now belongs to the German Riverty Group, which collects customer data for Internet companies and carries out credit checks. A request for information in Baden-Baden finally confirmed the mother’s suspicions. Her file not only contained her unsuccessful attempts to order, but also the crimes her son had committed in her name.
“That’s how we found the reason for the blocking,” explains Riverty media spokesman Dario Artico. No one would have reported to them that the corresponding processes had not been carried out by the customer herself and had meanwhile also been legally completed.
Anyone who feels unjustly excluded from an online shop can defend themselves in accordance with the Data Protection Act with a so-called self-disclosure and thus query what data is stored about them. However, for security reasons, there is no right to all the details.