Well the good news is that they've now reopened my account and have told me that it is fully verified, but they really are all over the place. To their credit they've apologised and give me an extra 10 GBP free bet, but they're not going to survive if they carry on like this.
Despite my earlier doubts I think they are genuine and well intentioned, but clueless and chaotic is an understatement (I thought Fansbet were incompetent, but this is in a totally different league).
I actually ended up feeling a bit sorry for them (they are brand new after all), so when they asked me if I could give them some feedback as to how they might avoid problems like this in the future, I was happy to oblige.
The problem was that they wanted to verify my payment method (they had already verified my age/ID and my address). This wouldn't normally be an issue, but I had deposited using a prepaid card and they didn't seem to understand what this was or accept that it was entirely unconnected to my bank account. They kept insisting that my account would remain locked until I sent them a bank statement showing the deposit I had made to them. I told them that there was no bank statement showing that deposit, but they wouldn't have it. To make matters worse when I tried to escalate the issue, the email address for complaints given in their terms and conditions turned out not to exist. Given that the stalemate looked set to continue, I even considered contacting IBAS, only to find that IBAS doesn't have them in its list of registered operators even though their website gives IBAS as one of their ADR providers.
I decided to have one last go at them on live chat and finally managed to get through to someone more senior who had some understanding of the situation. After the best part of an hour and after I had sent them a photograph of both sides of the prepaid card, the account was eventually reopened. Apart from the non-existent email address and the ADR shambles, I pointed out to them that an account with funds in it should never be locked simply because they are waiting to verify a payment method, as that would leave them open to accusations of fraud and theft. All that they needed to do was to prevent any withdrawals being made from the account until the payment method had been checked. An account should only be locked when a player's age and/or ID cannot be verified.
Hopefully lessons will have been learned from all this. In spite of everything, basically I think they're ok and are safe to use.
