Holders claim prepaid cards 'useless'

Holders of prepaid cards issued by a Shanghai-based third-party payment company claim that they are finding the cards to be almost useless in a widespread area of the Yangtze River Delta. The cards involved are carrying more than 500 million yuan ($80.45 million).

The cards, issued by Chang Go Corporate Services Co Ltd, have been rejected since December because of a "system breakdown", said cardholders.

Chang Go holds a third-party payment license issued by the People's Bank of China, and it had approval to issue the cards in Shanghai and the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Anhui and Shandong, according to the official website of the company.

The cards are valid in more than 20,000 stores and supermarkets in the Yangtze River Delta, the website said.

Xu Yumei, a customer from Shanghai, said: "I have many such cards that were given by my employer as incentives, and some from friends as gifts. Now they are useless. I can't pay with them in the department stores, supermarkets and beauty salons that used to accept the cards,"

In Shanghai, some convenience stores were still accepting the cards on Tuesday.

A post on the company's website said that it is fixing the system, but cardholders said that many merchants that used to accept the cards are turning them down because the transactions cannot be completed via the company's system.

China Daily called the hotlines shown on the company's official website, but the phone was not answered on Tuesday.

"It has been more than a month since we found out that the cards did not work on the system. We have put up a large notice reminding our customers about the temporary failure of the payment tool, and we will keep our customers updated," said He Yinfang, an employee at an outlet of RT-Mart, a supermarket chain in Shanghai.

In Ningbo, Zhejiang province, cardholders found that only two stores were still accepting the cards this month.

Chang Go's branch office in Ningbo has been "temporarily closed", a notice on the gate of the office said on Monday.

In response to cardholders' concerns that the issuer may go bankrupt and the paid-in amounts on cards would be lost, a circular from the central bank's Ningbo branch said on Tuesday that the agency will protect cardholders and secure consumers' rights and interests.

It added that Chang Go has been working to restore functionality for the cards.