Hello,

On Monday, some of you may be aware of the issues we faced with our payment provider, GoCardless. At 9am in the morning, they had emailed the companies inbox to say they had performed a review of our account, and found it in breach of their terms. After researching into this at later time, we found out that we fell under this breach of terms:

Any type of gaming:

• Gambling, betting, betting tips, prize draws or any form of lottery, or other related services.

Something which we should have checked beforehand, from the list of their prohibited services, found here.

Unfortunately, they immediately banned our account, meaning we could not access our dashboard, not even to consolidate or reconcile our monies. This also meant we could not manage refunds to customers. GoCardless ensured us that they would be refunding customers within 5-7 days, from around Thursday the 2nd April. Meaning we had lost money on all the draws both paid and those with shipping, since then.

I decided that I would still honour those draws, because I didn't feel it was fair to punish our users (some of who had paid) for a mistake that we had made.

All said and done, those people will receive their money back, and will also receive their wins too.

At the time, we quickly scrambled to integrate with Stripe, luckily we had already coded in most of the infrastructure at an earlier date, as we were planning to use Stripe before we integrated with GoCardless, but found GoCardless to be less intrusive to the payment flow. However, Stripe allows you to pay with Apple Pay, gPay and various other options (including bank pay), so may prove better. GoCardless offered us 120 days fee free. Stripe is charging us 20p per transaction, plus 1.5% of every payment, so we lose money instantly when you pay via card.

That being said, everything should be working OK now. This is likely a temporary solution, as we want to move to a payment provider that allows our type of industry no questions asked.

For the time being, please enjoy playing, and if you have any queries or questions in the meantime, please let us know via support.

Best,

Ben