I’ve been a lurker here at LET for about a year and after hearing all the good reviews about BuyVM I decided to pick up a node a few months ago. I paid with Paypal and the node showed good performance. A few months went by and I needed another bigger node and so I went to BuyVM and bought another one using the same BuyVM account and PP account.
At this point, I experienced some of the most bizarre customer service I’ve ever seen from any company. This could be due to the owner, Francisco, is in the middle of moving the LA servers to LV and he might have had some temp workers answering emails at the time. The following happened on Jan 12th.
1: A few minutes after ordering one new node and one spare IP and paying my bill (for a year) I received an email from paypal saying that $112 of my $132 of my payment was refunded.
2: Clearly this was a mistake so went to log into my BuyVM account and found it deleted.
3: Having no other way to contact them I created another account so I could create a ticket. I can’t paste the resulting ticket here because BuyVM deleted this account too after the following discussion.
4: I explained what happened. I got a response in about 10 minutes from “Anthony” telling me to read a page on their site about how they delete accounts when there was fraud.
5: I replied (honestly and politely as I could) explaining how I was an existing customer and how I didn’t try to defraud them. I didn’t match any of the things listed on the page he sent. I used the exact same paypal account as the previous node a few months earlier. There was no change in my contact info.
6: He answered, “We don’t do business with people who commit fraud.”
7: I replied back asking what about my account was suspected of fraud and asked to have the remaining $20 refunded if they simply didn’t want my business.
8: A few hours later I got this in an email, signed by a “Aldryic C'boäs”:
“This issue was clearly explained in ticket 416463. As you have yet violated our Terms of Service AGAIN by opening yet another duplicate account, there will be no further negotiations. Any further attempts at opening multiple accounts will simply result in you being permanently banned from service with us.”
9: The second account was then deleted. At this point I have no way of contacting any representative at BuyVM. I still have a node there (3 months left on it) and they have made it clear that they would delete that if I made another account or tried to contact them.
I’m posting this here because LET led me to become a customer of BuyVM in the first place. I’ve since bought another node at another company (paying with the same PP account) and have had no problems. I understand that a good number of you won’t believe this story because only Francisco can confirm it and there’s little chance of that. I suppose this is a cautionary tale in that not everything about the company is great. The performance of the other node was good but this experience has been laughable.
Info about me:
- American, California. Not using a VPN.
- Over 21
- PP account is clean and verified and has been around for 10+ years
- Never contacted BuyVM support prior to this.
- Didn’t use a throwaway email account. This is my primary email and it’s the same as is on my PP account.
- The physical address tied to my PP account is the same as was on my BuyVM account.
- Existing node has not been hacked and nothing strange is going on with it.
What if I need tech support on this other node?
How do I get my remaining $20 back? PP chargebacks are pretty shady and this is only for a last resort.
Can I assume that this is not an isolated thing since two different admins reviewed the situation?