Sonja N.
Draft2Digital Undercommunicates KYC Deadline & There Is No Recourse
Your welcome email from Draft2Digital will not include extremely vital information that you have 30 days to adhere to Know Your Customer (KYC) policies else your account will be permanently suspended. The email providing this vital information is sent separately from the welcome email at the time of account creation (I am wondering if my email service provider saw two emails arrive simultaneously and assumed one was spam). You have 30 days with a 15 day extension to get your account in compliance, and the timer starts on the day you create your account. Since I created my account late January, my account should have been suspended early March. You do not receive any reminder emails about the 30 day deadline. When I was finally able to speak to a real person instead of an agent or bot sending canned responses, Draft2Digital confirmed they don’t send an email about the 15 day extension. If for whatever reason you do not see the one and only email about KYC and its corresponding deadline (whether that’s your own user error, it going to spam, your email service provider blocking it from your inbox, etc) you do not get any other kind of notification. No second chances. Logging into your account will not show a KYC notification or that your account is at risk of being suspended. Or even that your account is suspended if you’re beyond the deadline. You are able to access your account after the 30/45 day deadline. If you make an edit to anything associated with KYC and their third party system isn’t able to validate it, you will be told to contact customer service, but again, there's no warning that you already missed an important deadline and that your account is going to suspended. I updated my KYC info in May (when my account should have been suspended in March), but it failed third party validation, notifying me to contact their CS for assistance. Would my account still have been suspended if their third party system had been able to validate it? Unknown. Your account will be suspended, and you will no longer be able to access it. Note, an email is not sent to you informing you of your account suspension. I had to find out on my own when I tried to look at the CS error again. The reason for my account suspension was sent to me in a reply to the original email I sent regarding the validation failure--I am unsure if I would have ever received an alert my account was closed if I didn't already have an outstanding ticket trying to become compliant. Essentially, I was not given any opportunity to be in compliance since I missed the 30/45 day timeframe. Any appeal will be denied because you’re not compliant with KYC. They will say they cannot risk paying out people who are not in compliance. I did not have any books for sale and was trying to get my business accounts/numbers in order prior to selling so everything was above board and in order. Overall, the customer service was extremely unhelpful. I was unsure if I was speaking to a bot or an agent using canned/macro responses. I was finally sent over to someone (that had a name in their signature), who finally told me what I did wrong, but again, that my appeal was denied because I didn't meet the timeframe--which, from what I can tell, I was only told about once in an email I never saw or received. There were no nurture or drip campaigns to help people stay on track. People are saying I dodged a bullet but I can't help but feel that it didn't have to be this way and that people are set up to fail.