THIS IS A SCAM - REPORT IT TO FEDERAL TRADE COMMISSION
Intuit's TurboTax has an expedited loan program when filing your taxes online with them in partnership with First Century Bank (the lender), BorrowWorks (the lender service company), and Green Dot Bank (the card issuer) in which you enter an afreement for an interest free loan advance of a portion of your income tax return from the IRS. The claim is that you pay the fee associated with the loan and then have access to your loan funds "Within 1 Hour of the IRS Accepting the Return". In order to have access to the funds, the customer is issued a temporary card number that can be registered and accessed via an email from TurboTax after the IRS has accepted the return. In reality, the link requires that you input the last 4 of your SSN and DOB, then create a username and password. If and when this works, you are able to access the online account that has a link to "Access temporary card information". The link is dead however, users can no longer login back into the site. It appears that TurboTax and named partners above have successfully collected stated fees for the loan advance, but do not actually have to provide access to the loan itself until the "physical card arrives in the mail in 7-10 business days". This is their clever fall back excuse, as it is not possible to even reset your username or password without the "16-digit card number". Hundreds of customers are complaining of the same exact issue on the Intuit forum site and forum moderators all use the same generic response, which is that they cannot assist and to call Green Dot at (888) 285-4169. This too seems to be a dead end, from my experience and many others on the customer service forum. I spent a full hour on the phone with "Jake" who claimed that although he could access my balance, transactions, etc, he had no access to account specifics such as the temporary card number. 45 mins of that call was spent on hold waiting for the supervisor "Carl" whom also reported the same resolution option of waiting 7-10 days for the physical card to arrive and then the ability to reset user/passwords and gain access to the loan that we have been charged for, under the promise of access to funds within an hour. Some customers have reported that the Green Dot card has yet to arrive at all, even beyond the 10 days. "Carl" stated that they could expedite the card for an additional $15 fee, but said that he could have a corporate manager waive that fee for me during a follow up call that will take place in "2-3 business days". I like many others feel as though we've been misled by a well known company by a very clever scam that can be simply credited to technical problems with the website. However, if anyone has spent any time studying cyber security and topics related to social engineering malware schemes, you can clearly see the design of this scam's cycle and you can clearly see how it is designed perfectly for the companies involved to be able to deny any purposeful wrongdoing or malintent. However many of us are not fooled and the scam here is obvious. BEWARE of this before signing up for TurboTax's refund loan.
