This brief review is to share my recent experience with Remit2India and its allied sister remittance services runs by Times of Money group. I seriously doubt if Times of Money is really from the house of Bennett and Colemen considering the amount of serious discrepancies between the two. I would seriously pray that Bennett and Coleman disbands Times of Money group because it may prey upon the hard work and the good reputation earned by the group because of the unscrupulous business practices of TOML.
A brief history:
Remit2India is powered by Times Of Money Service. Times of Money has a bad reputation of launching botched projects and mis-management. Many would recall that Times of Money had a product called’Wallet 365’ a few years back(dubbed as India’s indigenous Paypal) which only met a closure order by the apex bank of India because of the mammoth risks and alarming amounts of hawala money and laundering risks involved therein. The latest avatar of Times of Money Wallet 365, in my view is a stream of products under the brand’Remit2India’, ’Axis Remit’, ’HDFC Remit’, ’Ind Remit’ etc.
The Current Setup:
The registration with the breed of Remit to India services is pretty simple like tasting a sugar. You would only realise that it is a poison but not sure sooner or later. Some of the hallmarks with this service are:
1) They take two days for verification of the account. At the end of second day you would receive an email stating that your account could not be verified because the social security number is not valid. They would need the soft copy of the social security card itself along with every other piece of confidential information like driver’s license.
2) To force you to part with these information they disable the account and/or surreptiously change the passwords and backup email address. For the account password unlocking they would again place a demand for the confidential information outlined in(1) above.
3) Even if you are registered in both India’s and Federal Do Not call registries they keep spamming with telemarketing calls now and then. When you share about the telemarketing call in a public forum some one would scribble that they are investigating the issue and the specified call that they made was never made by them. When you reply to the person who has scribbled that email would bounce as a non-existing user.
4) When you attract the customer care attention towards issue(3) you would just elicit a demand for confidential information outlined in(1).
Inferences from Remit2India Telemarketing(Eerily Scary Telemarketing Scams)
I have captured the telemarketing scam by Remit2India and the subsequent emails exchanged with them as an video. Whilst initially they refused to entertain the message that they ever called but then eventually in the final message from them they had accepted it. But again they missed(messed) up the months(June became July). I admit that there is a gap between Partha’s email and my response of six months because I don’t use system configured spam folders but my’Quarantine’ which I visit in my own pre-set frequency like 3 months, 6 months. My policy is that whichever email is more than 9 months in my quarantine are forgotten and trashed without mercy. Also in the final slide they want me to register in DNC. Why? Are they creating their own country administration? Aren’t they responsible to synchronize their calling lists and scrub them against Indian NDNC and Federal DNC lists?
Check out the slides as a video here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=ADeZhmigu6E
A few more peer reviews on Remit2India also reveal of the following:
1) Highly Unstable Exchange Rates
2) Undue Procrastination in Delivery of Money
(A couple of screenshots from complaints board is attached along with this note)
Simple Conclusion:(The Verdict)
Using Remit2India services is nothing short of entering your bank account password in another Phishing website or transferring funds to an account of a Nigerian scammer. I am only eagerly waiting for a day when the apex bank of India is going to place an embargo on Remit2India services similar to the plight of its elder sibling(Wallet 365).