Complaint Review: US Direct Express

I was awarded S.S.I. after a very brief Disability Determination period. Filed in Summer, 2003. Approved in January, 2004 after getting diagnostic and prognostic records from my home-state and seeing an orthopedic specialist.

I decided in 2008 to stop getting my check physically mailed and instead enroll with US Direct Express.

From the beginning, calling Customer Service was a hassle. The automation is too layered. That is, after being prompted to enter your 16-digit card number and PIN, it gives you your card balance, but then you have to sit through entirely too many options, within those options there's even more sub-options. Hitting "0" is supposedly "invalid".

Then when a C.S.R. does finally come on the line, they hold up your transaction inquiry asking entirely too many different "identifier" questions. SSN is fine. DOB is fine, but when you prompt the C.S.R. by saying, "I made a purchase which proved to be unsatisfactory; and the merchant agreed to refund the purchase price...." they presume to interrupt you and say, "I still need your address and phone number". I instructed them "a thousand" times to narrow down the "identifiers" to one or two solid means of unique questions, such as "mother's maiden name", given that I've already provided the system with my PIN, but they still prattle on and on with "identifiers" even when specifically advised that the customer is anxious about missing money.

Then when I moved from my second to my third address since enrolling, their system kept purging my new address and when I'd quote it, they'd say, "That's not the address we have on file". I told them not to get hung up on my old address because I don't even remember the house number anymore", they'd continually prattle and prattle about "verification". They told me that if I didn't have the old address I'd have to answer another series of questions generated by Equifax. I told them I didn't have time for that and was very ready to discuss the missing refund. They said they couldn't discuss my account without the irrelevant address, so I hung up and called them back the next day after finding an old FedEx envelope with my previous address. When I called back, they said it was "too late" to supply the address and that I still had to go through the questions.  I again said I didn't have time to play their little games, and called them at another time. Then they said it was "too late" for the series of questions and that I'd have to FAX two forms of I.D. When I called them from the place the I.D.s were FAXed, only then did they say that the it would take 24-48 hours.

I fired them then and set up Direct Deposit with Wells Fargo Bank.