[Update: Fuzzie’s team has been in touch and unlocked my account. If you used my referral code to sign up and find your account blocked, please reach out to me and I’ll send your details over as well]
Back at the start of April I wrote about Fuzzie, an app which awards cashback on the purchase of gift cards. Fuzzie supports a whole range of merchants like Grab, Deliveroo, the Book Depository, Lazada, Honest Bee and a lot more.
What’s great about the app is that you earn both cashback and miles, in the sense that when you buy, say, a Grab gift card you get 8% cashback on the Fuzzie app, plus you also earn 4 mpd when paying with a card like the DBS Woman’s World. This is much better than going to the merchant directly, when you’d earn the 4 mpd but no cashback. Cashback can be applied towards future gift card purchases.
Fuzzie has a referral program that lets you gift $5 credit instantly to a new user, while earning $5 when said new user spends a total of $25. I like the idea of earning both miles and cashback, so I posted my referral code and for a couple of months saw quite a few successful referrals. I didn’t count how many, but my ballpark guess would be perhaps 70 or so.
I used my referral credits to redeem Grab and Deliveroo vouchers, and everything worked without a hitch. Which is why I was surprised to get this email from the team on Saturday:
I only ever created one account to use with Fuzzie, so I have no idea how they came to the conclusion that there were fake accounts involved. In any case, Fuzzie requires you to validate your registration with an OTP sent to your mobile so it’s not that easy to create multiple accounts. Right now I’m locked out of my account and can’t access it on the app.
My guess is they saw my account had a disproportionate number of referrals, flagged it as a fraudulent account and shut it down. That’s…kind of puzzling. Isn’t the whole purpose of a referral program to encourage referrals? I have referral codes for Shopback and Mileslife too, but you don’t see them shutting down accounts for having too many referrals.
Then there’s the tone of the email, which is threatening and over the top to say the least. When I saw the title I already thought it’d be one of those extortion scam spam mails people get, but when I saw it was actually from support@fuzzie.com.sg? Woah boy. Someone’s customer service team needs a bit of de-escalation training.
I also understand some people who used my referral code now find themselves locked out of their accounts. Again, to the extent that you weren’t creating multiple accounts, there’s no reason why this should have happened to you and you should be chasing this up with their customer service team. If you were creating multiple accounts, then serves you right.
I’ve reached out to the Fuzzie team to ask what’s going on, and will be very interested to see what they have to say. It’s a shame, because as far as cashback + miles combinations go, this is/was one of the better ones for us in Singapore.
The referral concept is still a little Fuzzy to them. No prizes for guessing how the morons arrived at their trade name.
With a bit of Fuzzy Logic 😉
Actually the details on the referrals are placed on the invite friend page of the app and also in the FAQ. And you can track all your friends who have activated your referral code within your account. We indicate whether their status is “successful” or “pending the min. spend” for full transparency.
If you need more help or clarifications, just drop us an email and our support team will help you in a jiffy.
Farhan
Having been following Milelion for a while quietly. This was certainly a funny email as I think the platform may be surprised to see so many new sign-ups from the same referral. Typical start-up issue to face scale up. It’s supposed to be a happy situation to them. They said they will take legal action which has no issue. Curious to see what they mean to take “CRIMINAL action” towards Aaron?
Smooth criminal
Too smooth bro 😉
Maybe they want to offer the milelion a greater selection of lionesses for his harem. Thus criminal, sort of.
There can be no doubt about this
criminal means something that the law would frown on.. e.g. hiring gangsters to beat aaron up, splash paint on his door etc
I’m kinna perplexed on this. Assuming you have been getting 5 bucks per referral, it also means that the users have been spending at least 25 bucks for you to earn the referral. I wonder how do you define it as exploiting when you are the one who is pulling in all the customers for them? :/
You’ll be surprised how some users are doing it. These syndicates have dedicated teams to find loopholes. This was a first major red alert we had in quite a long while. It gave our bots some extra work to do- they have been slacking off and getting paid for sitting on their pants.
But looks like they got a little carried away without having the background knowledge of the referral code promotion by Aaron.
They been sent to the naughty corner for being too Fuzzy!
Farhan
Fuzzie Logic is so… surreal.
Dear Aaron,
Hope you are well. We just saw your email today, it’s a Sunday, and I was instructing the team to review the details and respond to you. I believe the email you are referring to was sent to you yesterday afternoon.
Our system has anti-fraud capabilities built that automatically detects suspicious activities and blocks them. You will be surprised how certain users can fraudulently obtain multiple sim cards- there is a black market. And with our latest features on lucky packets and new major brands, this has created heightened interest among fraudsters to try find loopholes to exploit.
Fraudulent activity is a serious issue affecting all major e-commerce sites and there are even syndicates created with the sole purpose of finding ways to cheat the e-commerce players.
So far our system has been pretty robust and spot on in the blocks, but in this case, without knowledge of your previous article on us and the fact that you were promoting your referral code on a large scale, the system was not able to separate this out.
We do in fact encourage a lot of referrals and have awesome fans who have managed to generate hundreds of referrals and earned thousands in referral fees. And there are bloggers as well who write to us about promoting their referral codes and they too have secured several hundred referrals. Some ask for a custom referral code that we provide.
In this particular case, it was tricky as for some reason, your code was linked to too many fraudulent accounts detected by our system and this triggered the security alarm.
Actually I’m glad you wrote to us. So now we know your background and what actually happened. I had just hoped that you had given us a bit more time to review and respond.
I know this must have been quite a shock- I would have spitted out whatever I was drinking if I had seen that email. Happy to share that your account has now been unblocked and is in the safe list away from our robo-guards. And as with the Fuzzie tradition for customers, we’ve thrown in a little something for you as well- will share privately in email. We try our best to be rock solid in our customer support- sorry that we slipped up here.
You mentioned some readers were also blocked. Do direct them over to us and we’ll help them out.
Having said all that, your skills in launching an article so quickly in just hours is impressive and maybe we can find opportunity to work together for marketing 😉
Cheers,
Farhan
I like the clarification provided by Farhan, although I agree with Aaron, the tone of the email is a little mean..
Even as I agreed with Aaron, the title is misleading. Nowhere in the mean email stated you were banned for having too many referrals. That was merely your speculation even fraud was suggested in their email.
As your site grows sometimes you realise what you say have a lot of influence.. Your title could destroy a startup..
this is a fair point. It didn’t strike me that it could come off that way. What is accurate is that my account was banned and a police report was threatened, so I’ll remove the last part.
“Your title could destroy a startup..”
Or the startup could end up doing the honours itself with the quality of its employees given how such a joke of an email even made it past the management. Farhan’s own post leaves a lot more unanswered. Are you from Fuzzie?
Hi Farhan, I signed up with your company, downloading the app through Aaron’s introduction only, from his article.
I feel that it was your company that over reacted with such a threatening email.
I find it interesting that you did not apologise clearly and put the blame in Aaron taking it public early.
Anyways I will be deleting your app and to be frank I don’t like the powering up element and the “gambling to win” concept. It looks too much like loot boxes in other games.
There should be a 18+ warning or 21+ warning depending on what’s the age of gambling in sg.
Cheers
Don
Let’s de escalate by saying the app itself is sound and a good tool for people who want miles and cash back. The anti fraud guards however are oversensitive and emails could use a bit of rephrasing.
Fuzzie should step way up and engage more competent staff to write such emails. It is telling how there is no apology nor explanation in Farhan’s response (which in itself seems more obfuscating than anything) of how this email even got drafted and sent out. Even terse emails can be worded tactfully such that they sound almost completely different. And, of course, ensure such (template, I believe) emails are properly vetted by a capable in-house legal.
a) Criminal action? Who are you kidding here? Only the AGC can initiate prosecutions (with the exception of limited private prosecutions under the various statutes which don’t apply here)
b) “We have details about you from our brand partners”. Sirens will be going off for any TMT lawyer worth his salt – how did Fuzzie get these details? Can we be sure that all such details were passed to Fuzzie in accordance with the Use and Disclosure provisions under the PDPA? PDPC – watch this space!
c) Hopefully Fuzzie did not bcc or show any other third parties this email (or at least, ensure that evidence of the same never sees the light of day). The contents are so poorly thought-out that an Order 14 summons for defamation will probably be a piece of cake. Otherwise, I reckon it would be Aaron’s turn to tell Fuzzie to “stop all your activities” before he takes “civil action” against Fuzzie. And oh, by the way, defamation does have a “criminal” element to it under the Defamation Act too.
In short, Fuzzie is completely out of it. Step up or ship out.
The tone of the email is so mean, threaten criminal report without investigation?! They should apologize!
Agreed. They should investigate first then determine if true before using automation to send out emails. This is so criminal until proven innocent which is the worst kind of customer service. They say surprise at how fast u posted the article. How about how fast they accused you. This is just lame blaming the technology
Is Fuzzie a scam? They banned my account AFTER I had spent money on it, but didn’t send any email to inform nor have rectified the issue. Be careful.
ShopBack tried the same stunt with me by forfeiting my referral bonus and threatened to shut down my account, when a kind family member I referred decided to cash out to my bank account.
“Hi there,
Our system has detected that there are incidents of self-referrals on your account and therefore these referral bonuses have been invalidated. Your cashback however will not be affected.
Do note that any further infringement of the Refer a Friend terms and conditions will result in the loss of all bonuses and repeated offences would result in the termination of the account.
Our commitment to responsible ShopBack users has always been one of our ideals as a company, and the Refer-a-Friend Program is no different. We’re taking this seriously, and we hope that you are, too.”
What a joke.
Lol. That’s obviously wrong against their TnCs and wrong.
I’m not sure if this is the place to post, but I have really ran out of ways to get Fuzzie’s attention on this issue. Hence I would like the community to be aware.
Fuzzie runs a jackpot using tickets that you gain when making purchases. We have been using the app for a while, mainly on Grab and Deliveroo vouchers. This meant we accumulated a fair amount of jackpot tickets.
We entered the draw every week and was pleasantly surprised that we won draw twice, once winning the jackpot.
Until today, more than one month after receiving notification from Fuzzie of our win and providing them with our bank details, we have yet to receive any payment. Whilst this is a “free” draw, it is an enticement to purchase and use the app.
Many emails to their support address, post to Facebook has not drawn any response from Fuzzie.
So I just want to make people aware that somethings at not right at Fuzzie.
I will be more than glad to provide screenshoots of the draw and email notification from Fuzzie as evidence if anyone wishes to verify.
I having the same issue too. Won the jackpot and got notified by fuzzie thru email, replied then with my bank details. Until today which is more than a month, yet to receive the winning nor any reponse by them when I emailed them.
Hi! Have they gotten back to you? I won the jackpot recently too and Im worried that it just a scam 🙁
I also won and never got paid.
I’m sorry to hear all this, but the right place to send this is probably their Cust svc team
Since 1 Aug i been notified of the winning and till now nope still no winning been transferred to my account.
It’s very disturbing to see that 6 months after we have won the jackpot, the reward is still unpaid and several promises have been broken by Fuzzie. They state that they have not received clearance from the regulator and yet they still advertise the jackpot as an enticement. Very unethical practice.
Yes, it is ridiculous. If they are indeed obtaining regulatory approval, they should obtain it first before running such a program and advertising it as a selling point.
Okay, this is the last straw.
Soon after Aaron wrote this article, I found myself “shadow banned” from the app. No warning, no notice, no explanation whatsoever. The app just refused to let me login and sends me directly back to the login page. I emailed support@fuzzie.com.sg, but received no response.
For awhile, I thought it was because I was running a custom rom on my phone. But some days ago I happened to re-flash my phone to stock, and decided to give Fuzzie a try again. Still, no luck; I still coudln’t log in. Since I couldn’t get any response from the support email, I decided to leave a negative review on google app store detailing my problem.
Lo and behold, here is the reply I received: “Dear ___, we have checked your account. There was a security block triggered due to strong evidence linking fake accounts to yours to exploit credits. Do write to us at support@fuzzie.com.sg if you would like to appeal. We half genuine customers as fast as we can. It’s not cool to try to take advantage like this.”
Wow, without even trying to verify the facts, I am accused of being a scammer? To be clear, the ONLY action I took on the app was to sign up with Aaron’s referral link. I did not even share my own referral link with anyone.
I can see what happened. I was likely transitively labelled as a scammer after Aaron’s account got suspended. But after resolving the issue with Aaron, it appears that they did not bother to fully rectify the issue for others.
This is pure incompetence. That alone might have been tolerable. The rudeness, however, is something I will not accept.
Fuzzie: can anyone confirm if 4 mpd still works with Citi rewards (Master) and/ or UOB Visa Signature? Overall looks very interesting (I somehow missed that one last year). Thanks!