Thank you for responding so quickly now that an angry storm is building. It’s good to know that my email didn’t slip through the cracks.

As a reminder from my blog post, I deleted the individual contributions after not receiving any reply from Fundable.com because I hoped that it would trigger automated refunds for my friends and family. It did not.

I do look forward to your email.

Mr. Pratt’s next replied to another commenter at 2:50, but it bears directly on this so I’ll include it.

No one writes passionate blogs posts about how they received their money on time from Fundable. It is a non-event. The few cases that go wrong for a company are the ones that attract the most attention and provoke intense anger.

What makes blog readers worry is that they fear we are not held to the same level of accountability as a publicly traded company. But what they may not know is that we rely almost entirely on word-of-mouth to for our traffic. If our users can’t use our service, they won’t recommend it to other people.

Successful projects finish every day, without issue: http://www.fundable.com/recentlycompleted?SearchableText=&portal_type%3Alist=GroupAction&review_state=finished&review_state=finished-approved&sort_on=finished_time&sort_order=descending

While commenters are quick to ask, “what are you doing now for Mary?” we are in the process of investigating why Mary’s contributors did not get refunds (if in fact that is the case).

Again, anyone with questions can e-mail me at johnpratt [at] fundable.com

-John

The page Mr. Pratt directs us to does show successfully completed projects. My project also successfully completed, as you can see from this screenshot I took on January 23rd.

I had deleted one of the contributions, for $50, hoping to trigger an automated refund since the funds had not been disbursed to the group leader.  Only after I did that did I realize that the software keeps no online record of changes to the account.  A deleted record simply doesn’t show up anymore.

I’ve had emails from Mr. Pratt starting at 2:59pm letting me know that he is trying to discover what happened with my account.  I will let you know the outcome.

Continuation of Sunday, August 23rd, 12:50 am edit:

Mr. Pratt has given me permission to post our correspondence.

At 2:59 I got this email:

Hi Mary,

I’m looking into your collection and from our end it looks like all of your contributions were refunded.

But, you say that’s not the case so we plan to dig deeper.  To do this, I need to ask you about your collection.  I also want to get a better idea of what you experienced in January so that doesn’t happen again.

Would you be willing to discuss this over the phone?

You can call me or I can call you at your convenience.

My cell is [redacted]

best,

John

I replied at 3:06 pm

Dear John,

I’m on the phone with my father now and he wants to know when the refund went through so he can look for it.

This is the email I received about his contribution.

Dear maryrobinette,Your collection has a new contributon!
This e-mail confirms that handsaw@… has pledged support to:
Marys birthday computer (groupaction.2009-01-05.3541594791)
You have met your goal and now have $1910.00 in contributions!

Yours,
Mary

John Pratt at 4:02 pm

Hi Mary,

So far I uncovered one transaction by you for $500.00 that was refunded on January 5.  I will send details.

Can you give me your father’s name and I’ll look up his transaction?

Thanks,
John

Me at 4:20 pm

Dear John,

That is very interesting. I initiated a claim with paypal on January 22nd to recover my $500 seed money. By my records, and the ones on Paypal’s claim center, that refund went through on January 27th, not January 5th.

My father’s name is [redacted]. However, my father asked me to do use the credit card linked to his account but in my name rather than having to go online himself. The email address that it was tied to that transaction is [redacted]  The amount was $650

I’ve spoken with [Donor 1], who donated $50 and he said that he hasn’t received his refund.

When I last spoke to [Donor 2], he hadn’t received his refunds either. I have sent him an email today to see if this is still the case. He made three pledges, thinking they were anonymous, $10, $400, $300.

If it would help, I have screen shots of the transactions which I took on 1/23/09.  The only one missing is [Donor 1]‘s because I deleted it before realizing that no record would be kept in the online.  I have not posted the shots because I need to get permission from the donors first.

Yours,
Mary

Me again at 4:29pm

Dear John,

I’ve heard from [Donor 2] now and he also says that he’s received no refund that he knows of.  Perhaps if you could give us the time, date and mechanism by which these took place, it would help.

Yours,
Mary

John Pratt at 4:59pm

Ok.  Once we account for all of the non-refunded contributions, would you like us to send you the total at [my email address]?  No fee, of course.

-John

Me at 5:10pm

Dear John,

How are you going to account for them?  Will I see records of the contributions that are refunded?

And no, thank you, I would like you to refund the money to my friends and my father.

Yours,
Mary

I’m going to pause here to explain why I made that choice.  I’m not normally comfortable with sponging of my friends or family but I justified it in my fuzzy little brain by the rationale that my 40th birthday was coming up.  Everyone I asked to chip in was someone who was likely to give me a present.  Though we could not afford the new computer at the time, I had to have one so we bought it using the credit card, believing that the proverbial check was in the mail.  Since then, I sold my first novel and the signing check went in part to pay off the computer.

Back to our story.  John Pratt, 5:28 pm:

There is a 60-day window for refunds for our payment service provider, PayPal.  So, what that means is that we will have to issue checks in the mail to your contributors or send them payments by PayPal.

I am sorry that it is this way.

I am looking up the names that you mentioned and accounting for how much they contributed.

When my customer service representative gets back on Monday, I will try to find out why there were no responses to your initial emails.  I searched my own email archive on my computer and I can’t find your name.

-John

Me at 6:14pm

Dear John,
On Sat, Aug 22, 2009 at 5:28 PM, John Pratt wrote:

There is a 60-day window for refunds for our payment service provider, PayPal.  So, what that means is that we will have to issue checks in the mail to your contributors or send them payments by PayPal.

I am sorry that it is this way.

I am too.  It would have been so much easier to deal with back in January.

Please paypal [Donor 2]
[email address]
Please mail checks to:
[My dad + address]

[Donor 1] plus address

I will update the post on my website when you tell me the payments have gone out and also when they are received.

I am looking up the names that you mentioned and accounting for how much they contributed.

Since you said that everyone had received refunds, I’m not clear why you are having such trouble finding the names and what they contributed. To help, I have attached a screenshot of the payment screen. I had already deleted [Donor 1]‘s contribution before taking the shot. The first donation listed “Mary Kowal” was the seed money your tips recommended adding to a fundraiser. That was refunded on January 27th, five days after I placed a claim with Paypal.  The second donation listed “Mary Kowal” is my father’s credit card, [Dad's full name]

I also have attached a .doc with the emails I received from Fundable in response to each contribution.  I can forward the actual emails to you if that would help.

When my customer service representative gets back on Monday, I will try to find out why there were no responses to your initial emails.  I searched my own email archive on my computer and I can’t find your name.

At the beginning of the year, the only email address that I could find on fundable.com was contact@fundable.com.  It and the 800 number were the only visible means to contact the company although briefly you had a chatroom up. You, or someone claiming to be you, and I chatted. This is the one piece of documentation I didn’t record and I regret that I have to paraphrase from memory.  I gave you my account info and you looked up the fundraiser.  At the time you said that there were irregularities because two of the donors had my name and three donations came from the same person. You said that you would email customer service to find out what was happening with my account.

Since my name isn’t in your email archive, I take it you never contacted your customer service department.

John Pratt at 10:00 pm

OK.  I have the following:
$500 – Refunded to Mary on January 27
$10 + $400 + $300 – Requires PayPal payment to [Donor 2 + email]
$50 – Requires check sent to [Donor 1]
$650 – Requires check sent to [My dad's full name]

I have strong suspicion as to why your collection was not paid out on time.  During end of 2008 and beginning of 2009 we were suddenly plagued by fraudulent fundraisers.

What would happen is that a criminal would enter stolen credit card numbers into Fundable as contributions.  As a shortcut, they would use the same credit card in large amounts multiple times to finish their collection.  After we paid out their collection, the credit card companies would reverse all of the payments they made on behalf of the real credit card holders, costing us thousands of dollars.

To add to the confusion, the criminals would act angry and threatening like a normal customer would when we definitively identified their collection as fraudulent and refused to pay it out.

Until we finally found a service that could detect fraudulent payments, we had to take strong measures and I suspect that your collection got caught up in the process.

-John

Me at 10:15 pm

Those are the correct numbers for the refunds. Will you let me know when they go out?

The explanation of the fraudsters is very much what you said to me in the chat room. What I don’t understand is why your policy is apparently to keep the money if you thought it was part of a fraud.  Wouldn’t it make sense to refund the card holders?

If you want me to post your explanation as to what you think happened as an addendum to my blog post I would like to do that.  Unless you’d rather post it yourself in comments. Otherwise, I’ll paraphrase, since I dislike posting private email without permission.

Yours,
Mary

John Pratt at 12:45am

Yes, please post anything I have e-mailed you as soon as possible, preferably at the top.

Since I was not answering calls or general e-mails in January, I can’t yet say what lead to this.

Outside observers don’t know that we would have quit a long time ago if we weren’t motivated by helping people realize their projects using our system.  Financially, the site breaks even.  This is NOT the most efficient way to make money on the internet.

-John

My last reply written at 1:04, which I sent right after I finished inputting the rest of this into the blog.

The one thing I want you to understand is that none of this is okay.  If you are serious about helping people, you need to put a system in place so that people can get in touch with your company without having to make the internet fall on your head.  Whoever your customer service person is, isn’t doing his or her job right.  It should never have been necessary for me to escalate like this.

Despite your explanation about what happened with my fundraiser, if you had doubts about the legitimacy of the charges I can think of no good reason for fundable.com to have kept the money. If you thought I was a crook stealing other people’s funds, why didn’t you return it [to them] in January?

Now, I’ll ask again, will you let me know when the refunds go out?

Yours,
Mary

In an additional email, he has reiterated that my collection had looked like a fraud and that is why they didn’t disburse the funds to me at the end of it.  I’m sympathetic to that, but I still lack any adequate understanding of why fundable.com held onto the donors’ funds for months.

I’m not going to wrap up with a commentary, because if you’ve made it this far, you can draw your own conclusions about what happened.  But I will promise to let you know as soon as those refund checks arrive.

Edited to add Sunday, August 23rd 8:24 am

As promised, the paypal refund to Donor 2 has been received.  Mr. Pratt sent screenshots of the checks to Donor 1 and my dad.  Those are scheduled to go out on Monday and arrive by the 31st.