Skype is a regular tool in my journalist toolkit. It’s far and away the easiest method by which to record phone interviews (using the Call Recorder plug-in). I prefer it over Google Voice or Google Hangouts because it’s a much simpler tool to deal with, and damn near everyone already has a Skype account anyway. For about $60 a year, Skype gives me a phone number in my area code and the ability to make unlimited calls to and from it, and I’ve been paying that $60 a year and using Skype for six years without incident.

Until two weeks ago, when I went to make a Skype call to an interviewee’s cell phone. Instead of ringing, the Skype client immediately disconnected with an error that said "Account blocked."

The cause

I did the interview with my cell on speakerphone so that I could record it with a handheld recorder and then went digging. A quick bit of testing showed that while I could make "normal" Skype calls to other Skype users, I couldn’t call out to regular phone numbers from Skype, and I couldn’t call my Skype phone number from anywhere else.

After some investigating, I found what was likely the cause of the problem: way back at the end of May, my credit card had been compromised, and I’d had to cancel the card and get a new one (I’m not sure where the compromise occurred, but the credit card company caught what it called a "test" charge at an online retailer and blocked it immediately). By annoying coincidence, my Skype account’s auto-renewal charge happened to occur within a few minutes of the fraudulent test charge—and both charges were blocked. However, the fraud alert I got from the credit card company only showed the first charge. A notification about the second one showed up not by text or e-mail but by postal mail, of all things, and I managed to miss it.

Bad on me for not spotting this back in May when it happened, but as it turns out, it wouldn’t have mattered. Skype failed to notify me in any way that my payment had failed—it simply locked my account and waited for me to call the company. Which I eventually did.

Know thyself

Figuring that this would be resolved quickly, I went to Skype’s support page and filled out the extremely lengthy form for proving one’s identity and waited two days. Unfortunately, Skype’s first response was that my answers were insufficient and that they couldn’t verify I was who I said I was.

At Skype's suggestion, I tried again, this time filling out every single one of the questions in the form, trying to remember which fake birthday I gave to Skype when registering and digging through my Skype history to find the last two Skype-out calls I was able to make, and so on. Eventually, I had populated every field and dispatched the support request a second time.

Three days later, I had my reply. I'd passed the identification check and Skype support could now talk to me—but it didn't look like they were going to help me out.

"Thank you for contacting Skype!" the e-mail from Jefferson A. started off cheerily. "I understand that you are unable to make calls using your account as it is currently restricted. Our automatic systems detected activities which are contrary to Skype’s Terms and Conditions that have taken place via your Skype account. As a result, your account has been restricted and will remain restricted."

The e-mail supplied a completely non-helpful link to Skype’s Terms of Use and then told me that my only option was to create a new account and use a new payment method.

My Skype account is stuffed with media contacts. It’s friended to tons of other journalists, industry people, insiders—the kinds of folks I need to be able to reach to do my job. Starting over with a new account would involve a significant amount of pain in migrating over contacts and re-friending everyone—not to mention giving up the account name itself, which is my exact name.

Skype support was adamant, though: there was nothing I could do. Forget remedying the payment issue that had apparently caused the problem in the first place—support wouldn’t even tell me why my account was restricted, other than that "activities" had "taken place" that were "contrary to Skype’s Terms and Conditions." There were no options for remediation, no attempts at helping me unlock the account, and no appeal—my account was dead.

Some quick checking shows that this is a relatively common situation for Skype users to find themselves in. There are years and years’ worth of Skype posts from users complaining that Skype had blocked their accounts and then refused to discuss the reason for the block. Often, accounts’ prepaid Skype credits were frozen at the same time.

Most folks would have had to stop here—there’s just not much else to do. But I had another card to play.

Membership has its privileges

I never, as a matter of both personal and professional ethics, start off any kind of personal customer service encounter with my Ars badge on—work is work, and if I'm talking to a company as a representative of Ars then that's one thing, but I keep work separate from personal services. My Skype account is tied to a personal e-mail address (indeed, I’d registered it long before I came to work at Ars), and I’d done my Skype helpdesk correspondence from that e-mail address rather than from my Ars one. At no point in the initial two customer service inquiries did I identify as a journalist, because it wasn’t relevant—I was a Skype customer trying to resolve a problem with his account. I wasn't looking for special treatment—I was looking for the same kind of normal-person resolution that any other customer would get.

Reading the e-mail from Skype support made me absolutely livid. "I'm afraid the only solution moving forward," said Jefferson A., "is to create a new account and use a new payment method."

It was time to put on the journalist hat and escalate—the fact that Skype customer service responded in this way to a customer inquiry was newsworthy. I first fired off a tweet at Skype’s twitter account:

I followed that tweet up with a pointed e-mail to Gurdeep Pall, the vice president at Microsoft who oversees the Skype and Lync lines of business. I carbon-copied our Skype public relations contact at Waggener-Edstrom, Microsoft’s main PR agency:



The timing was fortuitous because Pall had just awakened on the West Coast, and he responded to my e-mail in four minutes:

This kicked off a flurry of e-mails with various folks in the Skype customer service structure and also long the PR side of things, and within about ninety minutes, my account was unblocked.

Good for me, sure—but why had it taken a journalist e-mail to a Microsoft vice president to handle what should have been a routine customer service inquiry stemming from a failed credit card transaction? What was going on over in Skype’s customer service group?

No clear answers

Before going to print with this story, I talked with a half-dozen people connected to Skype at Microsoft and Wagg-Ed. They were all helpful and extremely polite, but the messaging I got from them regarding this particular customer service situation was somewhat mixed.

Of prime concern was the total lack of information provided by Skype’s customer service about the reason behind the account blocking. Even after laboriously proving my identity, Skype’s customer service team refused to provide even a single detail; only after escalating was a Skype customer relations manager able to give any elaboration on the why behind the block:

We can confirm your account is now unblocked and you should have full access to use the account, which was blocked due to suspicion of fraudulent activity in relation to your account payment methods. Skype does this to protect our Customers and stop the account being taken over, especially if insufficient information to prove ownership of the account is available, to recover the account. Our Teams are working to make this a better process for our Customers, so we can resolve this faster and make it less painful. Our apologies, Mr. Hutchinson.

In light of the vastly different treatment I got after escalating, I had six specific follow-up questions for the Skype folks:

Why was I not informed that the reason for the restriction is "Fraudulent activity in relation to your account payment methods?" Customer service flatly refused to provide even this vague information in either of the two support requests I filed before escalating.

Why is there no method of redress provided other than to create a new account?

Why was the account restricted without any notification to me? If "fraudulent activity" was occurring—like, if someone stole my credit card number, for example—not informing the customer before you lock out the account makes the problem worse, not better.

Is this a typical customer service interaction where allegedly fraudulent activity occurs? How often does Skype restrict accounts like this with zero effort made to inform the affected customer?

Is it Skype’s official position that unless someone can play the journalist card and e-mail a Microsoft vice president, Skype will refuse to assist them in the event of fraudulent activity and will instead simply lock their account and ignore them? If so, why does this kind of anti-customer policy exist?

If that is not Skype’s official position, then what recourse does a Skype customer have when this kind of situation occurs?

A Skype representative explained that Skype uses industry-standard fraud detection and alerting procedures but that the company was looking into exactly what happened in this case:

Hi Lee, I have been talking to the CS team and there is definitely a process for flagging these situation, they are investigating what happened with the notifications to you, and what (did not) happen for you, with the triggered email notification. I am unable to comment on the transactions details you mention, I do have access to this sort of data, but I have forwarded your email onto the investigation team. I am sorry you had such a poor experience and I know that this has separately started a review of the email notification process, to make this a better experience.

My response to that response was that if the standard process was "lock account with no notification and refuse to unlock it no matter what," then the process is extremely customer-hostile. The Skype representative emphatically replied that such a response isn’t Skype’s goal:

That is certainly not our aim! We are trying to figure out what happened as this is not the right process and not our aim!

Final words

A couple of days later, Skype formally responded to each of the six questions I had above:

The summarized response is that Skype was notified by the credit card company that the transaction had been flagged as fraudulent and then washed its hands of the issue, relying on the credit card company’s (postal mail) notification instead of doing any notification of its own. Further, Skype’s stated position in this response is that the "permanent" block on the account was due to the credit card company’s fraud notification. The official response states that the paucity of information given to me about the block was because Skype was attempting to protect my personal information due to that alleged fraud—but even after following Skype’s identity verification procedure, no further information or options were made available.

Clearly Skype—as with any other online service provider—has to safeguard its users’ personal information. This isn’t at all in question; any online service has to have some level of identity protection because malicious actors are continually playing out attacks on just about every service out there.

The issue here isn’t that Skype was overzealous in reacting to an alleged fraudulent transaction or in locking my account—false fraud positives are a lot better than allowing fraud attempts to go through unflagged. The issue here is Skype’s liability-dodging response to this kind of activity. Rather than take even a small amount of potential liability for an incorrect identity validation when I tried to log a ticket, Skype shut me down. Going through the company's long identity validation process apparently was enough to convince them that I could be told that something had happened with my account, but that was the end of the road. And worst of all, Skype didn’t even bother to notify me of the problem in the first place.

There is some hope, though: it's quoted above, but one of the Skype reps mentioned in e-mail that the company is at least examining its procedures about e-mail alerting. "I am sorry you had such a poor experience," the representative said, "and I know that this has separately started a review of the email notification process, to make this a better experience."