wise.com (was: transferwise) is very difficult to get started with, and impossible to contact, and spammers

I recently opened a new account with wise.com, formerly known as the spammers transferwise.  This is part of my futile effort to have a basic payments capability.

wise.com seem to be following the trend of thinking that the more convoluted they make all their processes, the more "verified" things are.  Processes should involve as many SMSs, smartphone cameras, selfies, time-wasting, assumptions, and glitchy crap that doesn't work, as possible, to reduce the probability of successful account setup.

This journey started when I decided to look at the Transferwise card as a possible payments card.  I had previously abandoned Transferwise in favor of Currencyfair (also spammers, as it turned out), because Transferwise kept spamming me.  But I still had the account details.

Login with my old account details didn't work.  The only option was something like "I've forgotten my password" to do an account rescue.  But I hadn't forgotten my password.  wise.com, formerly known as the spammers Transferwise, had changed something.  I emailed them in a reply to some other support message, but got no response.  So I decided to just create a new account.

From the outset, login requires realtime SMS reception.  Registration requires mobile number, and login requires realtime SMS reception.  This is a basic service design flaw.  Many people do not have good mobile reception at home, or may choose not to have a mobile coupled to a service in this way.  I live in the mountains and SMS reception is intermittent, often taking an hour or more to receive an SMS.  This doesn't work for login.  It's okay to have realtime SMS reception as an option, but not as a requirement.  So I already know this account is going to be inconvenient to manage.

Once the account was created, l had to upload a scan of my passport page.  Fine.

EUR was already an account, because I live in the Eurozone.  Adding (wise.com) accounts for CHF, GBP and USD was about one click each, which seemed nice. The individual bank-account-style accounts, with their own account numbers, comes later.

I ordered a card for 7 EUR, and sent 1000 EUR as an initial topup.  Because I don't yet have a EUR IBAN at this stage in the process, this topup is to a general wise.com EUR account, with a particular payment reference.

I receive an email saying "Complete these steps to get your account details ... Verify your identity".  It's at this point everything started going badly wrong.

The email has a QR code, and says to scan it with smartphone camera.  I have an iphone SE, so I scan it with the iphone's camera.  This launches a browser, firefox, on the iphone, and goes to a wise.com login page.  Now I have to use the iphone screen to re-enter my wise.com email and password.  This already indicates a basic flaw in wise.com's process: I am entering my username and password twice, but I am also entering them on a device I don't have control over.  Previously, the credentials were just entered into a browser on a device I have control over, the desktop workstation.  Maybe if we were allowed to keep the password secret, there wouldn't be a need for all the convoluted "two factor" crap?  Having revealed my password in this way, it... sends another SMS, to the mobile I registered with the wise.com account.  We are now involving three devices, with two SMSs, and have probably revealed the account password.  And some dipshit at wise.com is going around telling people they work in "fintech" "security".

I now get a web page, where their "verification" plan is revealed.  I am to take a series of photos of an id, interspersed with "selfies", meaning, photos of myself.  The choice of id is passport, id card, or driving license -- fine.

But when I go to take a picture of the id, their web page says "Couldn't detect your camera. Please enable cameara permissions, try a different browser, or use a different device".  So the task of trying to get a working payments card has now turned into an iOS IT debugging project.

 

At this point, I want to ask for help.  The first thing to note is that all wise.com emails come from a "noreply" address. This is offensive.

From my logged-in wise.com account, the only option that looks like it could lead to getting in contact is "Help centre".  Maybe they have that thing where you have to search for your problem first, and can then get in touch.

Searching "Help centre" for "couldn't detect your camera" brings up results like "What countries can I send to?" and other irrelevant crap:

 

So searching didn't help, so now I can raise a support case, right?  No, not from that screen.  And not from any other screen I can find.  It looks like, as a matter of policy, it is not possible for a wise.com customer to contact wise.com. 

Uncontactable business, that should be a major red flag for a payments service provider?  But I need a payment card, and the bar is low.  No service in this sector is any good.  So I guess I'm proceeding with my iOS IT project, and somehow getting the id-card-selfie-web-page rigmarole to work.