This is an unfortunate situation for all involved. Yesterday, a company went belly up and we all hurt a little bit in our wallets for it.
Envaulted.com (http://www.linkedin.com/company/1327029) was a 3 man operation: CEO, Sales & Marketing rep, and COO (Alex). Looking at the CEO's LinkedIn profile, he has a background in Marketing, Finance, and Engineering: all the makings of an efficient operation that had potential. The CEO and his buddy (Sales & Marketing) probably invested the majority of the stake, and I'm sure they went the first 2-3 months with little-to-no paycheck in hopes of finding the next Groupon. This business model needed to change one thing: no CashBack for everyday purchases, meaning income was earned by deal CashBack only. It would have also helped if they had automated more of the processes, specifically Venmo/PayPal/check distribution.
As ss315 noted, Alex was probably told nothing about finance, other than when the checks were being cut. I feel bad for Alex, cuz he probably spent an extra year coding the technology behind the scenes that we never even knew about. Good luck to you - Alex - in your future endeavors!
Having been in a failed tech startup, I concur with the above about Alex. Chances are that the co-founders are both interviewing with F100 companies for their next place to land and regroup. Alex has no idea of this and still thinks if he works harder he can single handedly save the company. What he also doesn't know is that the outstanding legal bills already are more than the company is worth after liquidation.
On the flip side, this could be a hack or technical breakdown. After going through mtgox last June, 3 days of incommunicado downtime doesn't seem so bad. Who knows 6 months from now, this could all just be a faint memory and Envaulted firing on all cylinders.
ZZZZ Best Inc., 1986 Centennial Technologies Inc., 1996 Enron, 2001 WorldCom, 2002 Bernie is sitting in jail until he is planted in the ground Tyco International (NYSE: TYC), 2002 Bernard Madoff, 2008 HealthSouth (NYSE: HLS), 2003
The courtrooms are filled with these idiots and pensions. marriages, lives have been lost.
AlexEnvaulted said: Sheesh. You'll have a copy of my birth certificate up here soon...
Guys, I'm really sorry I can't give you any real information right now, besides the following: we haven't been hacked and you needn't worry about your passwords / accounts.
I will eventually explain everything as best I can, but it may be a little while before that happens. I've relayed information to you based on what I've been told in the past (Venmo on Jan 1, checks next week, etc) only to look the fool when the assurances didn't hold up. That gets old for me as well as you guys, so just bare with me until I've got everything sorted please...
milkandcookies said: ZZZZ Best Inc., 1986 Centennial Technologies Inc., 1996 Enron, 2001 WorldCom, 2002 Bernie is sitting in jail until he is planted in the ground Tyco International (NYSE: TYC), 2002 Bernard Madoff, 2008 HealthSouth (NYSE: HLS), 2003
The courtrooms are filled with these idiots and pensions. marriages, lives have been lost.
Move on, you been had.
If by you've been had you mean I made $500 for making minimal changes to my spending habits, then I'd really like to be had more often!
I am really surprised that some of you don't know that a startup + delayed checks = NO MONEY. Every time... Only way they make it through more checks is using the money from new investments to string it along a littler farther.
In the end, wasn't it really like banging Scarlett johansson for a couple months and then she dumps you after promising to bring Katie Perry over for your birthday? Sure, your birthday became a what could have been, but you WERE banging her for a couple months. All your friends were saying there was no way she's stick with you, but you were in denial. Now she's gone, but in the back of your head you're still thinking "Maybe...". Still, it would probaby be wiser to get yourself checked out for STDs at this point.
amitgu said: somdave2005 said: Day 2 now...definitely not looking good.
Am surprised you still have hope.
Yes, you may now think of this discussion more as a wake than an emergency room waiting area. Feel free to share your favorite Alex memories and help yourself to the coffee and hors d'oeuvres.
mattun said: In the end, wasn't it really like banging Scarlett johansson for a couple months and then she dumps you after promising to bring Katie Perry over for your birthday? Sure, your birthday became a what could have been, but you WERE banging her for a couple months. All your friends were saying there was no way she's stick with you, but you were in denial. Now she's gone, but in the back of your head you're still thinking "Maybe...". Still, it would probaby be wiser to get yourself checked out for STDs at this point.
Ahh, but some of us only got to wine and dine her, running around from this store to that restaurant, spending money that would have otherwise stayed in our pocket, without ever actually getting laid.
HouseofG said: mattun said: In the end, wasn't it really like banging Scarlett johansson for a couple months and then she dumps you after promising to bring Katie Perry over for your birthday? Sure, your birthday became a what could have been, but you WERE banging her for a couple months. All your friends were saying there was no way she's stick with you, but you were in denial. Now she's gone, but in the back of your head you're still thinking "Maybe...". Still, it would probaby be wiser to get yourself checked out for STDs at this point.
Ahh, but some of us only got to wine and dine her, running around from this store to that restaurant, spending money that would have otherwise stayed in our pocket, without ever actually getting laid.
Ha Yes I am in that category as wel, never got my check! LOL
My history with Envaluted has been a series of bad decisions on my part.
-This thread popped up in December of 2010. I saw that sign-ups were open to anyone and was intrigued by the whole concept of 1% CashBack on everything. Though in the end I got scared off by the thought of giving my credit card login info to some random website on the internet that no one had ever heard of, and decided to pass. Bad decision #1
-Soon after I went overseas for a month and stopped checking FWF regularly. Great decision #1
-When I got back I kept seeing this thread get bumped to the front page, so I finally clicked on it again and saw that the site was indeed legitimate and some people had even gotten their first checks for 1% back on their purchases, no strings attached. What a great deal!
-Seeing the great ride everyone was having, I tried signing up, but invites were closed and I was put on a wait list. Bummer.
-Initially I was pissed at myself for passing on the open sign-ups back in 12/2010, but months upon months passed by and I completely forget Envaulted even existed. Apparently those months were the golden age of Envaulted that some of the "old-timers" (i.e. anyone who got a single check) talk about
-Low and behold in September I get an email from Envaulted with an invite! Woohoo! I'm in!
-So it's now September 2011 and I'm finally part of the Envaulted family, enjoying the ride, accruing gobs of CashBack, shopping at places that cost a little more (especially for gas stations) just to get more deal CashBack. Bad decision #2
-I hit $10 Cash Back pretty fast and definitely passed up on at least 2 or 3 opportunities to be part of a batch check mailing because of.......(drum-roll)......Venmo (or more so the "promise" of Venmo). I had seen some of the trouble people had with lost checks, duplicate check problems, etc. and figured why bother with checks when I was already a member of Venmo and knew how easy to use and awesome that service was. And I mean come on, Venmo was just around the corner! Alex said so! Bad decision #3
-Finally got fed up with the Venmo promises falling through so I sucked it up and requested a check at the end of November. Wait, wait, wait. No checks, no nothing. I didn't really stop ignoring the weekly Envaulted deals until late December. Bad decision #4
-I was thinking of changing my passwords when others started talking about it a couple weeks ago, but thought that was a bit extreme, and now the website is totally FUBAR, and no one except Alex et al. knows what really happened with all our information. Bad decision #5
So in the end, I made a series of bad decisions, never got a single penny, in fact lost money (because I shopped at places that cost a little more thinking I would actually make it up in deal CashBack), and now have no idea where, or with who, my personal credit card information currently resides.
And really, I have no one else to blame but myself. Because no one forced me to sign-up for Envaluted. No one forced me to shop at places with deals. No one forced me to believe the Venmo promises. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I did that all on my own accord.
Arctann's message reminds me: why did Envaulted let in a whole bunch more people in September if they were having financial problems? Were they just trying to pump up their stats in a last-ditch effort to impress potential investors/acquirers?
BarryAndLevon said: Arctann's message reminds me: why did Envaulted let in a whole bunch more people in September if they were having financial problems? Were they just trying to pump up their stats in a last-ditch effort to impress potential investors/acquirers?
Having worked for start-ups while in college, I would say it's likely a combination of hope and desperation. It's usually hope in VC money coming in, and desperation in trying to attract the money.
AlexEnvaulted said: Sheesh. You'll have a copy of my birth certificate up here soon...
Guys, I'm really sorry I can't give you any real information right now, besides the following: we haven't been hacked and you needn't worry about your passwords / accounts.
I will eventually explain everything as best I can, but it may be a little while before that happens. I've relayed information to you based on what I've been told in the past (Venmo on Jan 1, checks next week, etc) only to look the fool when the assurances didn't hold up. That gets old for me as well as you guys, so just bare with me until I've got everything sorted please...
Thx for posting. Hoping you guys're successful either way!
BarryAndLevon said: Arctann's message reminds me: why did Envaulted let in a whole bunch more people in September if they were having financial problems? Were they just trying to pump up their stats in a last-ditch effort to impress potential investors/acquirers?
I think that's a pretty good guess. Did any of the September people even receive a check? Probably didn't cost Envaulted a dime and gave them access to a bunch of new data.
I signed up in September/Early October, requested a check as soon as I was able to, received about $40 from the one month. Had another $80 waiting to be sent when they finally went down.
It was possible to get paid in that last round of open invites, just had to request ASAP. I personally wanted that cash asap, and could never understand why people held hundreds in their account and said they were waiting for paypal or venmo or whatever. Check arrived and was cashed the next day. Done.
I made a little money, as the only wasteful spending I did was some redboxing in Dec/early Jan. Sadly my story starts very similarly to Arctann, with my dismissing them early on based on the early comments in this thread that it seemed too good to be true, and the website seemed like a fake. Could have made hundreds more I'm sure.
Ironically, the only sure fire way to make sure you came out at least even or slightly ahead in the later rounds was to purchase gift cards which -- while officially prohibited -- currently are essentially impossible for sites like EV and ML to police based solely off of the cc txn stream.
Unless a site like EV or ML can convince the merchant to take on the responsibility for filtering off its gc sale txn, any downstream cc-txn-based attempts to do so just seem like so much wasted and unscalable effort.
Okay...I just waded through 20+ pages, found nothing except 2 posts but it doesn't really state what the problem is ... is envaulted down? Gone? I keep getting Service Unavailable
This server is temporarily unable to service requests.(Internal-Reason: 132) or it just don't load at all (This webpage is not available Error 118 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.).
Thanks,
-d
edit, nevermind: I guess I should read more carefully (and not go so far back...) ... saw the post about envaulted being dead about 20 posts up.
arctann said: My history with Envaluted has been a series of bad decisions on my part. +1, minus the thing about going overseas. My outcome: about 7-10 hours spent on envaulted, reading this thread, and $0 of CashBack.
dlong said: Okay...I just waded through 20+ pages, found nothing except 2 posts but it doesn't really state what the problem is ... is envaulted down? Gone? I keep getting Service Unavailable
This server is temporarily unable to service requests.(Internal-Reason: 132) or it just don't load at all (This webpage is not available Error 118 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.).
Thanks,
-d
The other 2 people aren't telling the third person that works there what is going on.
It *looks* like Envaulted may still be trying to access my Chase accounts. I changed my password recently (because of this whole Envaulted turn of events), and Chase locked me out today due to failed login attempts. I had three Chase cards in Envaulted, which might have translated into the three failed logins needed to lock me out (apparently Chase locks you out after 3 failed attempts). The error message specifically mentioned excessive failed login attempts, though I did get back in by resetting my password again.
Has anyone else experienced this? It may just be a weird coincidence of some kind that I was locked out due to excessive failed login attempts following my Chase password change, so I figured I would ask.
I'm surprised no one has realized the real reason they have shut down. With the AARP card dying/dead + all the AA from Chase, envaulted no longer needs our data to keep their churning schemes going. Am I the only one that caught onto this?
cmatthes1 said: dlong said: Okay...I just waded through 20+ pages, found nothing except 2 posts but it doesn't really state what the problem is ... is envaulted down? Gone? I keep getting Service Unavailable
This server is temporarily unable to service requests.(Internal-Reason: 132) or it just don't load at all (This webpage is not available Error 118 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.).
Thanks,
-d
The other 2 people aren't telling the third person that thinks he still works there what is going on.
I already went ahead and changed my password on my Citi accounts. But out of curiosity...what sort of credentials did Envaulted store that they used to get access to CC accts, and what could someone do with these? Of course we had to give them our passwords for each of these accounts, but do they use the actual passwords in some form (whether it be encrypted or not)? For all we know, they could have our passwords stored in plaintext...but I seriously doubt that even a company like Envaulted would do something so stupid.
If I understand right, there's some sort of standardized protocol used for access to financial accounts that sites like Envaulted use. Does this depend on them having our login/password, or was that just necessary to "connect" the account then discard the password? Is there anything really nefarious that could be done (beyond knowing what we've been buying) with such a login? (assuming that most banks require confirmation (challenge questions, send code to phone, etc) if you're making changes to your account, or even if you're logging in from an unknown location)
I don't know the technical details, but Envaulted used the OFX protocol (which was why it supported so few banks, unlike Yodlee/Mint which use a screen-scraping approach).
scottxmso said: If I understand right, there's some sort of standardized protocol used for access to financial accounts that sites like Envaulted use. Does this depend on them having our login/password, or was that just necessary to "connect" the account then discard the password? Is there anything really nefarious that could be done (beyond knowing what we've been buying) with such a login? (assuming that most banks require confirmation (challenge questions, send code to phone, etc) if you're making changes to your account, or even if you're logging in from an unknown location) My understanding of Envaulted's business model - without working for Envaulted or having access to the technical code - was that they would login to the onling banking entity using the User ID/Password. Once authenticated, they would use regular expressions or an algorithm to match the last four digits of the linked credit card. Depending on the online banking portal, the algorithm would then obtain the transaction history and synchronize back to their internal transaction tables.
We never provided Envaulted with the full 15/16-digit credit card number, and I am not aware of any online banking entity that publishes the full credit card number (I use AMEX and 5/3). Additionally, the CVV2 code and billing zip code were not provided to Envaulted at the time you would link a card, although the latter might be inferred from the address linked to the bank/credit accounts. With this said, I don't foresee a scenario where Envaulted - if malicious intent was intended - would be able to make unauthorized purchases to linked credit cards. As someone had previously suggested, it might have been feasible for someone to perform a series of cash advance transfers, and pay a "utility" bill that was in fact a PayPal or offshore entity.
But all-in-all, I think Envaulted was a legitimate organization that couldn't balance the original concept with a development plan. I think things were looking up when companies got on board and there was the initial inflow of cash, but eventually the spiraling amounts of Everyday CashBack just saturated the company's liabilities. If I were in the CEO's shoes, I would have offered 1% Everyday CashBack to everyone in the "Beta" phase and once a decision was made to change the earning structure in November, I would have removed Everyday CashBack, or set it equal to smaller percentages (e.g. .05, .1, .25%). Just my $0.02...
mikeg1 said: It *looks* like Envaulted may still be trying to access my Chase accounts. I changed my password recently (because of this whole Envaulted turn of events), and Chase locked me out today due to failed login attempts. I had three Chase cards in Envaulted, which might have translated into the three failed logins needed to lock me out (apparently Chase locks you out after 3 failed attempts). The error message specifically mentioned excessive failed login attempts, though I did get back in by resetting my password again.
Has anyone else experienced this? It may just be a weird coincidence of some kind that I was locked out due to excessive failed login attempts following my Chase password change, so I figured I would ask.
-mike
I just checked, mine don't show any evidence of failed login attempts...so probably something else caused that.
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