Uphatter Reviews 2

this website is a scam

they stole money that people donated!! there is evidence
They cheat and steal the money you donate!!!

I have donated money to a campaign. Funds were immediately deducted from my account but haven't appeared on the campaign account within advertised 24-48 hour time window. After waiting a few more days I've created a support ticket and was told by support agent that they take security very seriously and my donation was flagged by their system so they required additional information from me in order to clear the donation (no reasons were given as to why I had to reach out to them instead of them contacting me with request for further information).

After providing all required information (screenshots and PayPal receipts), I got a confirmation email saying that all is good, my donation has been cleared and will appear on the campaign page soon. Imagine my surprise when the next day I got another email informing me of the contrary - my donation was still deemed suspicious and will not be passed to the campaign. I was also told that Uphatter is unable to issue a refund directly and that I must open dispute in PayPal and they will reimburse me that way.

10 days since opening PayPal dispute and PayPal notifying the merchant (Uphatter), PayPal has closed it claiming the dispute doesn't fit their customer protection rules (probably because it wasn't a purchase but a donation, fair enough PayPal). But I don't understand why Uphatter just stayed silent and didn't step in and offer a refund as promissed in the support ticket.

The whole thing smells like a big scam.

UPD: At the time of posting initial review I still had a small hope that I was wrong about this being a scam. After pinging support daily for 4 days and not receiving ANY response at all, today I received 2 in short succession.
First, written in poor English repeating the excuse of them being unable to issue the refund unless I open PayPal dispute and asking me to reopen the one I have opened previously (which, by the way is not possible - once PayPal closes the dispute for a transaction, there is no button to reopen it or create another dispute for the same transaction).
Second message, written in equally poor English was WARNING me for spamming and saying that if I continue that behaviour I will be banned. Guess what happened when I tried to go from my email inbox to the support portal to view those messages there and draft a response? I was already banned.

Bottom line: definitely a scam. Based on the fact that campaign that I donated to had some donations on their page makes me think that they selectively (or randomly) choose to skim some % of donation payments (hence no initial notification about failing their "very strict" security checks). And if that gets noticed by the donor and flagged, they resort to the PayPal + ban fallback scheme.