Lois & Clark Forums Forums General Discussion Off Topic Revolution Money Exchange

Hey FoLCs!

I just found out about this site , and I think it's pretty cool. Basically it's Paypal, but there are no fees. A lot of people in the financial blogosphere have started using it, and I thought some people here might find it useful.

Also, they're currently running a promotion where if you sign up through a referral they give you $25. The money isn't tied in the account or anything, so you could even sign up for the account, transfer the money to your bank and then just close the account and be $25 richer.

The button below is a referral link, if you want to take advantage of the offer, but it ends today so do it now if you want to do it. (FYI for full disclosure - as the referrer, I get $10 if you sign up for an account through the link, but they don't give me any of your info or anything. I won't even know who signed up.)

Revolution Money Exchange Referral

~Anna

ETA: I just saw on their site that they've extended the deadline to May 15th, so you've got a month to sign up if you want to.

I use PayPal for Ebay purchases, so this looked interesting, Anna. I went to take a look. However... I soon discovered that unless you're a US resident you can't sign up. There's no provision for people from other countries - not even Canada!

I also did some checking, because I was interested, and found this review on geeknews. From that, I learned that you have to give your social security number to sign up (I don't know how normal that is in the US, but I don't like giving out my SIN without being absolutely sure it's necessary) and that Ebay won't accept it as a payment method and isn't likely to in the future unless they change their policies.

So, nice idea - it'd definitely be good for PayPal to have some competition - but unfortunately it's of no use to me. Thanks for passing on the tip, though!


Wendy

All the things you read about ID theft say you should never, ever give your Social Security number. With that they can cause all sorts of problems for you. I hope this is a legit site.

SSN is used to identify you for credit checks and credit reporting. (These days, it's not really very secure information, anyway.)

Any credit card company requires your SSN as part of the application. And that's what the site is really about. They can't make money offering PayPal-like services for free. They have a credit card offer that comes with every account. It's a new kind of credit card they created which doesn't have any personally identifiable information on the card itself (embossed or magnetically encoded). So if it gets stolen, it's harder to abuse and there's no info for the thieves to use to steal anything more from you.

They're hoping that people who sign up for the free money transfer accounts will sign up for and use the credit card, and they'll make their money off those transaction fees (like any other credit card company). Assuming you can find merchants who will accept a blank credit card...

So, it is a legit site, as far as I can tell. It's just a question of how viable a business it is. And that depends on how many people sign up for it...