“It is a normal practice to have maintenance or inactivity fees for accounts deemed no longer in use” - G2A

There’s been a recent furore on Reddit over key reseller G2A charging inactive accounts a monthly fee.

The post that sparked this off originally appeared on the ‘assholedesign’ subreddit and has over 35k upvotes. It shows an email from G2A which states that the poster’s account has been inactive for 180 days, therefore a 1 Euro fee will be taken each month until the account is next used.

Here’s how it works, according to G2A:

“G2A PAY charges an inactivity fee after someone has not logged into their G2A.COM account for 180 days. An email is sent 3 days before the charge to remind the user and allow them to log in and easily avoid the fee. This fee is €1 and is taken from the user’s G2A Wallet (if there are no funds on the Wallet, PAY does not charge anything). Another €1 will be taken each month that the user stays inactive.

“If they log in, the timer resets itself and they have another 180 days before they are charged. If there are no funds left (or no funds to begin with) on their G2A Wallet, then the account is set to inactive. All a user needs to do to reactivate it is log back into G2A.COM. We never force the user to make a transaction or do anything with the funds. It’s just to let the system know the user is active, and the account has not been abandoned.”

The key reseller also gave us a list of reasons as to why it needs to charge this fee, as outlined below:

- It costs money to upkeep accounts. This includes server maintenance, IT infrastructure, etc. Sometimes all this is done for an account that has seen no activity for years and only has a few cents on its G2A Wallet. We want to know which accounts are still in use and keep these accounts active, and we want to catch inactive ones before they have been that way for years. We don’t need these users to buy anything, just log in at least once every 6 months, just so that we know they are still with us.

- As a supervised financial institution, we must meet many requirements related to the monitoring and servicing of each account. We get regularly audited by auditors from the Big Four accounting firms and we have to back up and explain all our accounts and the funds stored on these accounts.

- We work in over 170 countries around the world, all with different and varying jurisdictions. After a certain amount of time has passed, accounts that have not seen activity for a long time may be deemed as abandoned, and the funds stored on there may become a liability. The law may require us to hand over those funds to an appropriate government institution, and we have to prepare for that possibility.

- It is a normal practice to have maintenance or inactivity fees for accounts that are deemed no longer in use. Many companies that in some part have to manage finances have a similar type of fee, however, in most cases it’s significantly higher. Many of them also require their users to make a purchase within a certain period of time, which is not the case for G2A PAY.