Pro-Star Review and Security Concerns ( Anyone else experienced this?)

So we put in an order for a new laptop this morning. After talking with one of the officials they told my husband that they could ship in 1 business day. So we made the payment, and then a few hours later got an email asking for a photo of our Credit card and Photo ID and not to cover anything up else the transaction would be voided by the bank.

We called in to ask about it, and were met with one rep that exclaimed that the laptop in fact would NOT ship out until a few days later regardless that we had chosen 1 day, so we asked why and they gave us a separate time from when the previous tech had told us, which was 2pm and the same time we had initially fulfilled the order (literally 1:59), so we had the manager get on the phone, and the manager told us it was 1pm, and that the employee was wrong as well as the previous employee. We inquired on the reasoning for the credit card that such information shouldn't be required since it's being sent over unencrypted via email, and all he could say is "trust us, only 2 people will look at it".

We've both ordered from various resellers/vendors in the past, including XoticPC, power notebooks, and one Japanese reseller, and I get Pro-star is their own company w/ their own deal with Clevo but this just sounds VERY suspicious to us, and would like to hear if anyone else was told or required the same that purchased through here.

I'll update this tomorrow when we hear back as we may have to cancel if they keep changing things up.

 

That isn't all that worrying. I've bought maybe 6 laptops from resellers over the years and I've had two that asked for a copy of my ID. It's only been when my shipping address didn't match my billing address. I'm guessing it's mostly to protect them from scammers/fraud because they're on the hook if someone used a stolen card to order a laptop and then the card gets charged back.

I wouldn't worry about it. Did your shipping/billing addresses differ? Was it a debit card, paypal, etc? Your ID isn't really private information- they've already got your name and address, so it's not like your photo, hair color, eye color, and ID number are going to let them steal your identity. It seemed weird when it happened to me the first time, but after having worked for banks for a few years, I can understand why they do it.

FYI, you posted this on my review thread so I posted here in response.

 

No worries, I saw yours after and couldn't find any other reviewers, so wanted to confirm, billing matches shipping, and was on the phone a while they said it was for preventing fraud... which came off as weird..

 

Luna, I also ordered from Pro-Star and was asked to do the same thing. The issue was that I was having them send my laptop to my work address rather than my home billing address.

They gave me the same rationale and I send them a copy of my driver's license. Thankfully these days a license doesn't list your Social Security Number.

I haven't had an opportunity to test out my laptop enough (so I cannot rate them from a quality control perspective yet) but I bought from Pro-Star for the same reason. I ordered on a Friday, they confirmed my billing information on Monday and I had the unit by Wednesday. If not for the billing information hiccup, I would have had it sooner.

Computer came pretty well packaged and the Pro-Star folks did a good job with communication. I know one person on these forums had an issue with the heat sink in their Pro-Star unit, so hopefully that was just a bad unit rather than indicative of their batch of this model.

 

The request for a photo copy of an ID and credit is commonplace in instances where the shipping and billing info do not match on an order. We encounter several cases of fraud, so we ask this so that we can review things ─ and even then, some people attempt to touch up the pictures (there's no limit to some people's endeavors). We also hear of and experience people being a bit uneasy about us requesting that, and it's completely a legitimate concern; this is part of the reason behind why we inform people to obfuscate or black out all but the last four digits of their credit card number when they agree to sending the info to us. If there's anything we don't want, it's for someone to feel skeptical about such a big purchase.

After 20+ years in the business, we're here to build and maintain good repute with people.

 

Sorry for the late update, wanted to acknowledge this and state that everything was fine, and that this went through pretty quickly so overall satisfied + I do like the fact that they support next business day shipping vs waiting a week for a diff vendor to prep the model then ship. This saves about 4-5 days of waiting.

 

No worries! Thanks for the update, and I'm glad to hear things went along smoothly otherwise.