Marjorie Nickel G.
Our experience with WePay included poor record keeping, delays in resolving the problem, and a broken promise re: the withdrawal; and does not inspire confidence to set up another GoFundMe campaign in
On July 2, 2016, I set up a GoFundMe campaign for friends whose baby was born at 32 weeks, necessitating a lengthy stay at hospitals far from home. I tried unsuccessfully to arrange for the beneficiaries to access the money directly. The funds ended up being sent to our bank account, from which I was to send the money to the beneficiaries by e-transfer. The first six donations were transferred to our bank account fairly promptly. From there on, WePay’s record-keeping began to cause us concern. On July 6, I received notice that WePay was sending a sum to our bank account that exceeded the total of the remaining donations. Evidently WePay had failed to deduct the initial amount that the beneficiaries had tried unsuccessfully to withdraw but but which had been transferred to our bank account and sent to them by e-transfer. Even after that large withdrawal had been cancelled, we still had a problem, because the amount that GoPay indicated was available for the next withdrawal still didn’t take into consideration the initial amount that had already gone to the beneficiaries. In other words, WePay wanted to give us more than was due us. The representative from WePay Support was courteous and prompt in replying to our concerns as we exchanged several emails, which included my records, screenshots of pages on GoFundMe and WePay, and even a screenshot of our bank statement. The engineering team took considerable time to sort it all out, but finally on July 13 the representative wrote saying that the corrected available balance is scheduled to go out the next day. In the mid-morning July 15 I still had not received notice from WePay of the withdrawal. The representative then went ahead and manually forced the withdrawal to our bank account. While it was very kind of him to do that, WePay’s oversight in sending out the corrected balance on the day promised was disappointing to us. While the representative did what he could to communicate with me and to seek to rectify the situation, we wonder what happened in WePay’s record-keeping to allow such errors and delays. This apparent negligence does not inspire confidence in WePay nor GoFundMe, and on that basis, we would be unlikely to set up another GoFundMe campaign in the future.