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Ask HN: Starlink Signup failed, no recourse
160 points by childintime on Nov 20, 2022 | hide | past | favorite | 81 comments
On october 27th, when I first heard about Starlink for RV's, I immediately signed up at starlink.com and paid €480. I filled in my email and my phone number, but to date I have not received a confirmation of receipt from Starlink. The payment was a direct transfer.

I have gone through the (not great) starlink support pages, and one can apparently only contact starlink through an account that becomes available through the confirmation email. Naturally I have none. It also states that if that confirmation email wasn't confirmed, the order would be cancelled after 7 days (it hasn't). There was no email in my Spam folder.

Now it's been over 3 weeks. I am a customer but as far as starlink is concerned, I am not. They obviously did their utmost best to not need a helpdesk, having generous procedures in place for when things fail. There is no one to talk to, not even a silly bot. This is all great when it works, but when you fall on the side where things don't work as intended, as I do now, it doesn't exactly feel great. It feels like a scam, it's indistinguishable.

There is also a potential for a scam. If I somehow filled in a slightly wrong email address someone else could, in theory, have taken over my account, and could have redirected the shipment. The point is, I'll never know, and I was not made aware of such risk while signing up. Indeed the signup experience was strangely feed-forward, without an email-confirmation step. In the end it felt like I was supposed to dump €480 into a void, with nothing to show for, except a bank transfer. I was forced to rely on the reputation of the brand, only.

I think the above is a relevant data-point to many of you (non-scammers), because it represents an extreme case, even beyond Google, one where not only the non-fallability of software artifacts is presumed, but also the non-fallability of the organizational process that led to its 100% no-contact design.

That's sure to have some relevance to the community, but of course I just want someone to talk to and solve what could have been the smallest of issues. Any advice on how to proceed next is appreciated.

Edit:

- as commenters have mentioned, there is a reset option, by email or phone. AFAIK neither works.

- I'm pretty sure I filled in everything correctly, and at the correct site. Never had this kind of problem.




Forgive me if this doesn’t help - I have absolutely no experience with Starlink, but did some digging, found some Reddit threads and have an idea:

1.) To start, open up:

https://auth.starlink.com/

2.) Click “locked out”.

3.) There’s a chance you entered your email incorrectly, but this screen gives you the option to recover by either email or phone.


Forgiven, as you are correct to check this off, as I forgot to mention I had done this already. Nevertheless I've filled in both my phone and email again. Didn't detect a response.


Are you sure you were using the real site when doing the initial signup, and didn’t actually use a scam site?


In another thread, OP said they did not pay by credit card.

I just tried to sign up and in Canada, my only options are Apple Pay or a credit card.

Anyways OP, this is a good thing to start thinking through. I’m not sure where you’re from but I only have the option to pay via card.


I'm pretty sure I did. I do have a payment to "Starlink Internet Services Limited", but I don't know the IBAN.

Edit, the IBAN is: DE47 2022 0800 0092 9273 61


Sounds like you're in Europe (judging that you transfered to a German IBAN). I recommend you go to your nearest consumer advise office or equivalent. Alternative if you're in Germany, talk to the ct magazine from the Heise publisher. They have a section in every issue about some consumer issues.


That’s good news.


You weren't scammed - at least not by anyone but Starlink/SpaceX. They're just that poorly set up.

You may already know this, but the entity you made payment to is:

Starlink Internet Services Limited

5th Floor, Beaux Lane House, Mercer Street Lower, Dublin 2 D02 DH60

Registered with the Company Registration Office under No. 677409

Lauren Dreyer is listed as the Director: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauren-d-8077b594/

Her email address: edit - removed now that OP has seen it


Don’t bother with emails. The only way to deal with companies like this is to write a formal physical letter. Look up the process for filing a claim in the small claims court in Ireland. I would guess that the Irish system is probably pretty similar to the UK system. Try to google for the Irish equivalent of the Citizen’s Advice Bureau they will have free online advice for small claims. In the UK the CAB supplies a template letter you can use to notify that you have a problem and are considering a claim. See if you can find the equivalent from an Irish consumer rights organisation. Use thier advice to understand the implications of starting this process. If appropriate you then use this template to write a letter to the registered headquarters letting them know that you have a problem, what you want them to do and what your next steps will be if you get no response within a time limit (typically 28 days). If you still get no response and the Irish system works like the UK the small claims court process is all online and you don’t need to attend court it’s all done by filing out forms and paying a small fee. The difference being that because Ireland is in the EU you can enforce your consumer rights from any other EU country but UK citizens no longer have that right. If there’s someone from Ireland here who knows more about how the process works there, maybe they could help?


Send the physical letter with a registered post so that you can prove they received it.


Didn't have this info. An email is a great help, and an address also, thank you. I copied the email, probably best to remove it now?


*5th Floor, Beaux Lane House, Mercer Street Lower, Dublin 2 D02 DH60, Ireland


Starlink's customer service is terrible, your experience is common based on what I read on /r/starlink. Folks there pass around the email address starlinkresolutions@spacex.com as a possible way to get help but I'm not so sure that really works.

You should definitely pursue a refund from your bank. I hope you don't have to initiate a legal proceeding.


Indeed, anything legal would be a wild escalation.

Finally having an email is great!


"Indeed, anything legal would be a wild escalation."

I think a lot of the tech companies deserve a wild escalation for ignoring customer service. It can be infuriating if you have a problem with Paypal or Google and they either blatantly ignore you or have focused all their UX skills on making it as hard as possible to find a way to contact them.


Eh, the company took their money and ghosted them. This is what Small Claims Tribunals are for. No lawyers needed. OP should easily be able to claw back their money (plus the cost to hire an Irish bailiff to serve papers on the director).


This kind of sounds normal for starlink. Do you know any neighbors, etc with an account? They might be able to file a ticket.

Alternatively, call the bank, claw the money back, and use a different email/phone to establish a new account.

Their might be an address you could contact (they have to have one on file for lawsuits, etc).


Unfortunately I don't know someone with an account.

I think a second try could work. But I'm not in a position to do so yet.

2 good suggestions.


Sorry for your situation, I hope perseverance gets you through to someone.

I’m not hugely surprised that they lack customer support. SpaceX won’t have had any of that in their DNA, won’t be practiced at it, and will have had to scale that function rapidly. Unless they hired amazing leadership for it at the outset, it’s going to take a while I’m sure.

Given customer support experiences at, ahem, related, companies, it may not be a priority for senior leadership. It needs to be something the top care deeply about and treat as an advantage, otherwise it’ll be perpetually underdeveloped and scraping by to provide the bare minimum as it will be treated as a cost centre rather than a differentiator.


For now my hopes are up, as it's been heartening to see this post upvoted to the front page almost immediately. That feels kinda incredible.

Yes, this was a very deliberate design, and I understand the desire/necessity. But it's also a dream. I guess I'll have to write a letter or something, though I have no idea yet to whom. I though of sending out a tweet (though not a user), but I'm afraid the recipient is too busy right now.


Not sure if Starlink was set up this way, but teaching moment:

Before taking a payment on a SPA, everyone please make a separate database transaction that records the user - come back to display the UI for CC collection AFTER. If you try to add the user, run the CC and return in one shot, while attractive from a transactional perspective, it's NOT good if your DB rolls back but the third party CC processing did not.

Then you end up with users that pay, but no record of payment in your DB. Get it right people.

Yes you can at least confirm your own transaction is committed in one shot THEN perform the CC, but separating these two out is still the best bet.


This is an intentional dark pattern.

Starlink goes out of its way to avoid allowing non customers interact with them. For example, dishy doesn’t ship with an ethernet jack for its router or enough hardware to actually mount it in most situations. They don’t let you even view the accessories store (or prices for the mandatory extra equipment) until after they ship the dish + router.


How you treat your customers reflects company values, and company values reflect leadership's values.


On the other hand, one off anecdotes does not a company standard make. You can find plentiful anecdotes on the starlink subreddit of people talking about how they got responses within only a couple hours of submitting a request as well.

Also it's possible this person didn't even buy the service, as they say they got it without a credit card, but the service requires you to use a credit card to buy it.

Edit: It may be the norm in Europe to pay by bank details but the Starlink site does not allow you to pay by bank details, unless you can show that you can somehow there with a screenshot.


> the service requires you to use a credit card to buy it.

Incorrect. This is Europe and direct payment is the norm.

Edit: the downvoters never heard of Sofort, Bancontact and iDeal. Here's Starlink accepting Sofort: https://hackmd.io/So0zZS9DS9OCKOzWA7RALw


German here, can confirm, basically nobody has a credit card, and all the big online services take non-credit payment now.


German CC ownership is something like 33%. It's low compared to similar economies but it's hardly "nobody" and nobody is surprised when an online store only supports CC payments. (Also, German companies that want to offer CC-less payments on items this large and with a subscription cost probably most commonly also support actual bank transfers.)


I can't find a good primary source for that stat. Got a link?


https://www.bundesbank.de/en/publications/reports/studies/pa... says it's actually up to 54% (including prepaid, 7%) in 2021.

What I would say is most unusual in Germany is the number of stores that don't take CCs, or even don't take any cards. People don't use them, but they have them.


Thanks a bunch! I definitely underestimated the amount.

Important to note that 80% of those are what the study calls "charge cards", which is 'credit cards' that resolve against an associated debit account. Not sure if those even allow overdrawing it. And 82% prefer paying with a debit card rather than credit if given the option, which indicates to me that this is a mere reaction to the online prevalence of credit cards which will go down as stores offer more non-credit card options. (As we can see by the slight reduction in '21.)

In other words, I believe this prevalence represents a desire to be able to interface with websites, rather than a desire for credit. People largely don't own a "credit card" so much as a "debit-VISA adapter."


> This is Europe and direct payment is the norm.

I've been born and lived in EU all my life and the most common way to pay online is with credit card. Most websites do not accept much else.

Some more traditional companies do accept direct transfers.


For buying stuff online? In which EU country is this supposed to be the norm?


In Baltic states and Finland it has been norm for many years. https://makecommerce.net/service/bank-link/


Sofort is common, as the name might suggest, in DE (and I hear also AT). Weirdly a lot of people don't know it's a private company, assuming it's a service offered by their bank. I guess because the name is so generic.

I would never pay for anything with it.


DE


I live in DE, and I haven't come across any merchant where there wasn't at least a PayPal option to pay. I know that many people in DE still "distrust" credit cards, but I wouldn't say IBAN payment in e-commerce is the norm.


I suppose you won't have anything but the payment to prove this? Might still be worth taking this to a consumer protection association in your country - Starlink is the kind of service they might be willing to take on if stuff like this happens. It would still be some hassle for you, but you'd have a very good chance of either getting your money back or getting what you ordered.


That might be a very good idea actually. For me, it would be enough to get my money back. If I had paid by credit card, this would likely have been no issue.


If you are in the UK, as someone else said, your best recourse is to file a claim with the small claims court.


Contact your bank immediately to start the process to get your funds back

Sometimes these claims are limited in time by a number of days (like 30) so get it on it straight away!


I'll try.


Do you allow your browser to save inputs such as email addresses you put into forms? If yes, maybe you could find where the browser stores this info and check the email address.

As just one data point, I can confirm that they do send a confirmation message when they receive an order. But you probably already have heard this from others. One way to get their attention would be to get your bank to reverse the transfer, if they can possibly do that, which they might, given the circumstances. Of course that risks resetting your timeline.

Also check your deleted emails folder (since you didn't mention this). BTW three weeks is not a long time when it comes to waiting for Starlink. I waited a year.


I don't have access to the (work) PC now, but it does remember the email. So I could verify this.

A datapoint really helps, as I am basically in the dark.

Nothing found in my deleted emails.

Thank you.


Paid by creditcard? Compile your efforts to get in touch with them (needed to proof you did everything to get them to live up to their promise) and file charge back.


Paying with a credit card is so massively convenient for this reason. Keep your debit cards far far away from the internet.


Still it does not always work. On faux webshops you can be tricked into making a fund transfer, while you think you are paying for goods. This is a common scam as chargebacks do not work on fund transfers!

Actually following the papertrail and disconnecting the fund transfer shops for helping the scammers is not done, so they can go on with impunity.


That's good to know, I wasn't aware of the difference! They told us we'd have flying cars but the future is just grifters hiding in every corner of the fucking world.


How do you do a fund transfer without a bank account number?


The scammers put that in already. They just show you the auth form for the transfer in the page you expect to be a payment-for-goods authorization.

There is a papertrail, as i mentioned, but the CC ecosystem seems to be not too interested to kill it. They derive legitimacy off and make money off scams.


Not by creditcard, no. Yes, I now recommend doing this.


====================================================

UPDATE: the good news is here, this is going to get solved!

I had posted a copy on Reddit r/Starlink. Just now I found a response from Starlink Operations in my Reddit inbox.

The responses here have all been very well considered and helpful, that has been kinda magic. Thank you so much!

=====================================================


Have you tried Starlink’s Whatapp:

https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=14253313125&text=Olá%21...


I wonder where you got that. Did I miss something??

Edit: note this identified itself, at least on my PC (which has PT-BR as its idiom), as Starlink Brasil. Edit: I see portuguese text was part of the link.

Edit: "phone number shared through url is invalid", is the phone number correct? It seems it's missing a country code?

Edit: I tried adding +55 (Brazil) and +351 (PT) to the link, didn't work. Maybe I didn't format it correctly.


Found that by going to Starlink’s order form, using select on map feature for address field, zooming into an Brazil until a street was visible, clicking order, and Starlink Whatapp number is linked to in the intro text.

425 area code is a US area code in Washington state near a Seattle. Literally copied URL, so if there is an error it’s from Starlink’s link. Phone number in link is 14253313125, which appears to be a valid US number, but agree I got number from what is likely Starlink Brazil; picked that because you appear to be in Brazil.

Which country did you order it for?


Still trying to duplicate what you did.


WhatsApp number only appears to show up on Starlink for Brazil, so no idea if that’s even useful.

Also, might be wrong, but you mentioned iDEAL which as a payment option I have only been able to find that as a payment method for Netherlands. For Sofort and iDEAL payments on Starlink Netherlands both state:

“You will be redirected to your bank's website to complete payment. By submitting this form, you authorise (A) Starlink and Stripe to send instructions to your bank to debit your account and (B) your bank to debit your account in accordance with the instructions from Starlink and Stripe. As part of your rights, you are entitled to a refund from your bank under the terms and conditions of your agreement with your bank. A refund must be claimed within 8 weeks starting from the date on which your account was debited.”

Which means you still have sometime to try to resolve this or get a refund. Possible since Stripe is mentioned that they might also be a way to get this resolved.

As for the IBAN number you have, if you Google IBAN lookups, you will get the bank information, but my suggestion would be to contact your bank as soon as possible to find out what the process is from their perspective to get a refund in case it takes time so you’re not trying to be within 8 week limit; per Starlink, which might not actually be the legal limit per law where jurisdiction is for the transaction.


I had a similar experience here in the states, but fortunately know people who work at spacex. I believe the official process is to trawl LinkedIn to find a contact with the company who can forward your request to someone who can handle it.


You might have made a typo in your email adres. Open https://auth.starlink.com/forgot-password and click on "phone" to reset by phone number.


True. AFAIK that would have been the first time, but it's possible, given it didn't ask for confirmation.

Strangely I don't get a response through both the password or phone resets. Neither was the payment returned.


r/Starlink on reddit may be able to help, at least with more information.


I guess I'll have to make an account.


Posted as: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/z07m2v/paid_for_s...


Did you delete the post or did mods delete it?


I deleted the original post. I'd used an account the browser had remembered, but then I discovered the email behind it was no longer valid and I could not update it. Hence I reposted in the above link.


It seems to be visible now. Traffic/trolling-heavy subreddits usually enable automoderation which removes posts submitted by users who are new to the site or have low karma.


>€

Contact your regional consumer protection agency.

>did their utmost best to not need a helpdesk

EU is pretty serious about ability to contact real live person on the other end of any business operating in EU.

> I am a customer

no you arent


Tweet Elon... I'm sure he's very focused on these Starlink customer problems at this time and will be right with you. He's a man of his word.

* stifled laughter *


I have an account and could try filing a ticket for you.


That would be great. In response to your previous comment I'd updated my profile with an email. Please contact me, then I'll give you the proper one.


Email'd


Made contact, support ticket has been filed.


If anyone stumbles upon this looking for the resolution, OP was given a refund via this ticket.


Dear Europeans. This is where Credit Cards come in handy.


Perhaps start hunting the executives and employees on LinkedIn?


Maybe try twitter


Stop giving money to Elon Musk and his projects.


Worse, it seems I'll have to pay him twice, at least initially, to get this solved.

I'll be living and working in Africa soon, from a van. Starlink is operational in only a few countries but in 2023 it'll be about half. To me it's a life-saver, and I suppose it is for Africa.

Yeah, regarding Musk, we are witnessing the birth of something the world hasn't seen before. Literally out of this world. Something people could righteously get nervous about.


A lot of east Africa has surprisingly good LTE coverage. I assume you know this. Of course, starlink will have higher speeds.

Anyway, here's an idea: livestreamed self drive safaris!


I heard about cheap LTE, in a few countries. But I thought it was mostly the city (no safari ;-). So I looked at the coverage maps in a few countries and coverage seems to be quite sparse.

I'll be working remotely, so I thought starlink would be a very worthwhile investment. Even though it's still booting up.

Btw, keep the tips coming, I'll need them :)

Africa is our future.


[flagged]


It was meant as a factual description. I'm open for suggestions to word this differently.

Regardless, this is not meant as Starlink bashing, this is a process somehow failing.

Edit: you are right, the word "scam" is used too often. As a start I changed the title.


They are in the UK, and per their post used direct bank transfer. No CC involved.




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