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Warning about trying to use Vpreca prepaid credit cards

HanSolo

Sempai
6 May 2015
206
93
39
Just another report of getting Japanese-stonewalled. I can only assume certain members of the Japanese culture have extreme, almost psychotic levels of paranoia. The amount of stringency in the most trivial of things boggles the mind.
I bought one of these 5000yen Vpreca cards a while ago, and after battling to even register an account for it, I gave up. Its just issued as a printed A4 page with a code on it. The code gives you access to the money you spent in VISA card form, provided you're an acrobat who can jump through all their hoops.
I finally tried again today and at least managed to register an account, with some BS kanji that can sort of be pronounced like my name, an email address that they actually liked (randomly rejects certain domains), and using google chrome autotranslate.
So next stage was putting the code in. It asks you 'what name' to put to the card, and explained 'you can only use hiragana, katakana, letters uppercase or lowercase, Chinese characters, or spaces'. But trying multiple combinations of all of those for like half an hour just produced red error messages. Eventually I just hit submit with the default 'V p r e c a' (which is just a place holder text), which it accepted.
Then you have to validate your number. SMS validation was blanked out, and wouldn't work with my skype-based number anyway (Skype is garbage). So you had to validate by calling. Tried multiple times, each time the number said 'not available'. Then in the fine print they block VOIP numbers. Why??? Just for the sake of getting in people's way is why, because they seem to get off on that. I swear some of these bureaucrat types go home with a list of people they successfully obstructed that day, and take it to the bathroom with them when the wife isn't looking.
Also international numbers are blocked, so I can't use my other SIM on roaming to SMS validate anyway.
So after boiling my blood for an hour trying to break through these bastards stonewall to get my money back, I'm considering just throwing this thing in the bin and writing off as stonewall costs of living in Japan.

Also I know exactly what some usual suspects are going to type, but I'm not interested, I'm posting this on here because it ranks in google and it will warn others.
 
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