Hi EF,

I recently encounter a TWINT promotion scam, which I think is quite nasty given the typical Swiss standard.

In May, TWINT promotes SBB (or SBB promotes TWINT?) with a campaign to encourage users to make 3 payments in SBB app using TWINT, in return for a voucher of 10.-. The 3 payments must be made by 31.05.2019.

Once I finished 3 payments by the deadline, I got a message saying that the next SBB payment with TWINT would give me the voucher (weird, there was no mention whatsoever of the 4th payment in the beginning), but ok. I did the 4th payment, and still received nothing.

I reached out to SBB, which told me to contact TWINT instead. I contacted TWINT, which first denied any responsibilities, and asked me to contact SBB instead (!). When I insisted, they looked into the issue, and replied me that my 4th payment must also be made by 31.05.2019, which granted me a voucher to also be used only by 31.05.2019

These information about the 4th payment and voucher deadline was not mentioned whatsoever at all in the first promotion message. Now, I cannot care less about a 10.- voucher. What bother me is the "nasty" scheme to mislead customers. TWINT is a startup, and this is probably one of their "growth hack" techniques, but damn I did not expect it from a Swiss company

Thank you for reading this far. My question is, is there anywhere I can turn my issue to, such as consumer right protection, or misleading advertising practice, etc?

This is why I always take screenshots when participating in such actions.

Ouch


But twint is not a startup, as far as I know. It is a group of major banks who got together with SIX and decided to have their own share of the pie instead of working with apple pay.

Twint was from PostFinance and later merged with competitor Paymit which by then was owned by UZB, SIX and UBS. Later on a few banks joined the team.

Being owned by a big company does in no way mean one can't be a start-up

Here are the "conditions of participation" I was able to discover:

On Postfinance:
https://www.postfinance.ch/en/privat...icipation.html

On Twint:
https://www.twint.ch/winSBB/

Note the slight differences in wording.