Monday, February 19, 2007

SkypeOut Frustration

4d10 In my moment of weakness, I could spend hours and hours trying to fix something that is advertised to work but doesn't. In the last few days I must have spent countless of hours banging my head against the wall trying to buy SkypeOut credit using anything except physically going to a bank to make a funds transfer.

It all started when Mina moved to Singapore and I found myself spending a lot of money making international calls. That's when I looked to Skype to remedy this situation. At first I tried to purchase SkypeOut credit using my credit card. However, due to Indonesia's notoriety in online transactions, even my platinum Citibank Visa got rejected. Of course Skype won't admit that this was the reason behind the rejected transaction, but it's publicly known that credit cards issued in Indonesia have very low credibility in the e-commerce world.

Then I discovered that PayPal is now offered for Indonesian residents. Of course this is old news (shame on me), as apparently PayPal entered the Indonesian market since October of 2006. I thought this was awesome as it would surely allow me to get those pesky SkypeOut credits now. But I was wrong for the second time.

Skype evidently has some reservations about Indonesian PayPal users as the PayPal payment option does not even show up from the purchase screen. This was after I registerd my PayPal account on Skype. I even tried to trick Skype by signing up for PayPal auto-recharge which would automatically make PayPal purchase if my SkypeOut credit falls below 2 Euros. None of this efforts worked.

Not willing to give up, I tried other ways to purchase SkypeOut credits. Next, I tried my Bank BII Master Card debit card. I thought a debit card would give more credibility in this type of transaction. I was proven wrong again as this card was rejected like a nerd on prom night.

My last desperate effort was to go Moneybookers.com. Apparently Moneybookers is the second biggest online payment behind PayPal. Except for having to go through the ugly brown web site, the sign up process was similar to PayPal's. Unfortunately, the conclusion was the same as well. I fared even worse than PayPal as Moneybookers even failed my credit card verification. No reason was given. Just plain rejection.

At this point I'm ready to throw in the towel. And by that I mean dragging my ass to a local HSBC bank where Skype has an Indonesian bank account via Global Collect. At the last minute, I opened my KlikBCA account to see if they offer any service that could help. Unbeknownst to me, KlikBCA now offers a way to transfer to other banks. I don't even know when they started to offer this service! DohI typed in the purchase amount and now it's a waiting game . I should know in 4-5 days and will put an update if this method works.

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