Show us your ID!

This weekend I've had a very interesting gaming related experience.

My wife and I used to play Star Wars The Old Republic when it launched, but like with all games you can only play it for so long. So we quit. That's not the interesting thing by the way. Wait for it.

Recently we haven't been gaming all that much together, and we've missed it. Mostly it's been a combination of no MMO and pretty different tastes in other games.

Anyway, we decided to re-activate our SWTOR accounts, in order to game together. Now the easiest way to do this is to purchase some game time from Biowares online store. Except they have some kind of error going on with that, which meant that neither of us could complete the transaction. Lots of people have encountered this error, so it wasn't just us. Also, it was Sunday, so we couldn't nip down to the nearest Gamestop and pick up a couple of game time cards.

Back in our WoW days we often ordered our time cards from an online store on Åland – an island between Finland and Sweden that belongs to Finland. They have slightly different tax laws there, so some stuff is cheaper- but they were out of SWTOR time cards. The only remaining thing to do was to look around for another online store with cards in stock, and who delivered the time codes via email.

Eventually my wife found one. Fast2play.com. She ordered them, paid for them (payment guaranteed by Visa). And we started to wait. Here comes the interesting thing.

They sent her an email demanding to see a scan of her drivers license. Yeah, a copy of her ID card to complete strangers... Not!

She mailed them back demanding to know what for, and this is what they eventually said: Our security system has detected suspicious activity with your account!

Suspicious activity? Buying two time cards with a value of less than 50€? Using their own process? On an account a few hours old? Pardon my language, Ladies and Gentlemen, but that's utter BULLSHIT!

Finally the missus said, forget it, your service is unacceptable, refund our money asap!

What do they do? They – to our enormous surprise – actually send us the codes. Without seeing a copy of her drivers license. All this back and forth took several hours, one reply from them taking almost two hours to arrive, and it's content was pretty much: “please just send us your ID already”.

The codes came with a slightly snarky comment in the vein of “We already sent you your order, what are you whining about?”

Now I don't know if we were really unlucky, and Fast2play.com is an awesome business, but dammit, you don't give out that kind of info to strangers, that's the first thing we teach children about Internet Safety! We've ordered things like contact lenses and E-cigarette stuff that's been considerably more expensive than these measly game cards without any such hassle.

Imagine you want to buy the latest book from your favorite author. You enter the bookstore and pick one up. Then you think, “hang on, my friend is going to want one too, I'll get it for him now that I'm here”. You then go to the register to pay, but the clerk tells you that you queued suspiciously, and she's going to have to take a copy of you ID, and keep it. Would you still buy those books? Don't think so....

Use Fast2play at your own discretion, but in all honesty I can't recommend them. They were polite, but that's the only good thing I can say with a straight face.