Just a warning to all my loyal readers:

.

Obopay is a new company who claims you can use any mobile phone to get, send or spend money. They want to be the cellphone version of eBay owned Paypal.

WARNING: Read The Small Print…
…weekly because it changes!

When I signed up with Obopay they issued me a MasterCard debit card and I funded it with $15 as a test. This is supposed to be the easiest way to get your money out of Obopay… just use the debit card anywhere they take MasterCard.

Honestly I never found a reason to use Obopay. I do a lot of shopping online, and I never came across something online that even accepted Obopay. So I just kept the card in my wallet for months.

A couple of days ago I got a letter from Obopay telling me that they were canceling the MasterCard debit card program on March 24, 2008. So I decided I better go spend that $15 that I have had sitting in my account for six months or so.

When I went to spend it, it didn’t work. After logging into my account, I found that instead of $15 on my card, I only had 15 cents left on it, even though I had never used it.

It turns out that they changed the terms of their service secretly on Nov 27, 2007. On that day, they began charging $4.95 per month for… well…. to be honest I have no idea what the fee is for. They simply call it a Monthly Maintenance Fee. So over the next three months they quietly removed $14.85 from my account.

I contacted the customer support and I was told this:

“…we have had the changes to the fees posted on our website since October available for your perusal..”

I guess they expect everyone to check their terms and conditions page every week in anticipation of any changes they decide to make. They now offer to pay you $5 just for signing up with Obopay… of course at the end of the month they will take $4.95 of that money away.

My advice is to stay away from Obopay completely. Any company that wants to charge hidden fees on their customers, just for the right to be their customer, is not a company that I want to do business with.

I can keep as much money as I like in my Paypal account without worrying about any hidden fees removing my money in the middle of the night.