(N.B.: CSR stands for “customer service representative”, if you’re one of the half-dozen Westerners who’ve never come across the abbreviation before.)
I understand that any time a site is dealing with (at least potentially) money changing hands that there are regulations for good and imperative reasons. However, how those regulations are reflected in policy varies, considerably.
This is a rant against a large, well-known online brand that sells everything from deadbolts to data services; let’s call them Nile, to maintain plausible deniability.
I lived in the US for several years until 2003; the last three or so of those in central/southern California. I then left, apparently permanently, and now call Singapore home. While last in California, I opened an account on Nile which I apparently haven’t used since. That account was tied to an email account which I still own and have access to on a global Web-mail service, and a phone number which I (obviously) no longer have access to and have long forgotten. In the years since, I’d forgotten that I’d even opened that account with Nile.
I later (mid-2000s) opened an account with Nile using my personal-Web-site-affiliated email address, and located the Nile account in Singapore. (I foolishly/hurriedly failed to associate a phone number with that account, apparently thinking it would not be needed.) I’ve bought numerous items from Nile over the last 15 years or so using that account, and all seemed good.
Today, however, was not so good. I bought an e-book on Nile, paid for it successfully using their click-once process, and then used the Nile book-reader app for the Mac to start reading. So far, so good. I then decided I really ought to get something that had been on my buy-later list on Nile for some time, selected it from the list, clicked the “Add to cart” button, and then tried to check out. Nile asked me to re-enter my password. (Bear in mind that I’d just purchased an e-book less than 10 minutes earlier and had left the tab open, so Nile should have known I was still me.) After making sure that I truly was still on Nile’s site (good URL; secure SSL connection with a valid certificate — click the ‘lock’ icon next to the URL in your browser), I entered my password (or rather copied it from my 1Password vault, as always), I was met with an “invalid password” screen. I tried the copy-paste again, followed by manually typing the password as stored in 1Password. No joy.
The real dragonfly in the ointment is that my “main” personal email address is down for a week or so from now; the hosting/email provider recently screwed up and then reinstalled everything, which of course meant that email has been effectively offline since…non-FAAMG recommendations very welcome).
I then called Nile’s customer-service number in the US (remember, I’m on the other side of the planet) and talked to a very nice and patient Filipino CSR chap (much closer; very possibly also Singapore-based) who walked through trying to help me reset my password. When I told him that I wouldn’t have my main email back up for some time, he quite reasonably asked if there was another email address I could use. I had him try the account I mentioned at the beginning of this post with the well-known global email provider, and he said that I couldn’t use that one, as it was already tied to a (separate) Nile account. I then said “fine; I still own that email, so I’ll just try to log in to Nile and go through the password-reset using that.” We then rang off, with a plan apparently formed.
I then went to the Nile Website, logged out of the Singapore account, and tried to log in to the old, long-forgotten one. The password-reset sequence sent me an email with a link that I clicked on; this brought up a page prompting for the phone number associated with the (old, US-based) account, “helpfully” reminding me what the last two digits were.
What the actual…
I haven’t used that phone number in well over 15 years; I’d long since forgotten it (and purged it from the contact info on my computers).
Then I remembered why I’d had to open a new Nile account in the first place.
Policy Failure One: Nile wouldn’t let me change the country used for my billing address. People move around the US all the time, but nobody had apparently ever considered the possibility that someone could move out of the US and still keep the same email address. (Ask people from most countries, and they’ll tell you that sort of thing happens all the time, even in long-ago pre-internet days.)
Policy Failure Two: Nile has no way to combine accounts. That is, even if they could satisfy themselves that I am the legitimate owner of both the antique US-based account and the current Singapore-based one, or if I opened a new (Singapore-based) account using an address from a different email provider, there would be no way for my antique or newly-created Nile accounts to have access to the purchase history or other information of the existing Singapore-based account. It’s simply Not Allowed (which any Singaporean will be well-acquainted with, but that’s a different catalogue of rants).
So I’m back to finding a new hosting+email provider for my personal domain and accounts, and getting the domains and so on switched over (which usually takes a couple of days to fully percolate across the internet).
Oh, yeah; what makes this all even more tragicomically FUBAR than it already obviously is, is that later this year I expect to be transferred out of Singapore for the long term. Making that change on Nile or any of the other FAAMGs is not something I’m looking forward to.
