Hi everyone,
I'm in a very confusing situation right now and trying to troubleshoot it. Almost a year ago now, April 2025, I bought some new Sims titles, Life and Death, and Business&Hobbies. And because we game on a budget here, I bought them with pay-in-4. The issue I ran into at the time was that I ended up double-charged. I paid the first pay-in-4 payment, and then got a charge for the full amount directly to my linked bankaccount from EA. I reached out to EA and paypal. EA didn't respond for days, paypal tried to reach them as well. Long story short, EA said they didn't see the 2nd charge and couldn't help, so paypal refunded that one. I got hit with a chargeback accusation and marked with a fraud warning. First time that's happened to me. I tried appealing it then to no avail, despite having been in contact with EA, over several attempts, before the refund. Eventually, they just took the games back. Which put me in a rather poor mood, and I didn't play The Sims for a while. And with all the news that came later, I wasn' t really in the mood.
But several titles, like the Fairy EP, that came later, were ones I had been quite literally waiting a decade for. So I decided to just get them now, and rebuy the ones I had lost before. Important context, since then I have upgraded my laptop storage and so the sims 4 was not even installed on my laptop. No games were. And so last week I attempted to redownload, and when I did I saw a notice saying that the games had been taken and that my account was on notice for fraud from April 2025. Still. I reached out to appeal and explain the situation again, no dice. I decided to move-on and buy the games today. But could not launch them properly.
I reached out to EAhelp, unsure if it was an issue from overzealous OneDrive folders refusing to fully delete interferring with the install, or something worse. What if it was related to this warning on my account? After explaining my concerns to the agent, I was told that he simply could not help me. That because there was a warning on my account there was nothing he could do, and he rushed off the chat after telling me to appeal again. The problem is, (though I think that there are several problems here) all that shows on my account is a warning. There is no verbiage of a suspension or a ban. So I don't understand why it would affect my ability to play. It definitely did not stop the sale of games to me earlier today. And if that is the case, I do not understand why it would stop an agent from helping me troubleshoot why my game cannot launch.
And if I was supsended, or even banned, there should be some notice of that. Especially given 10 months have passed since the incident. And it was not an issue of my own creation. I was not even given the benefit of the doubt, nor assistance in getting rid of the 2nd charge properly, so that the payment plan could move forward in its time.
I am not sure what to do at this point, as eahelp refuses to assist and simply refers me to the team for appeals. The appeal team has so far denied my appeals. And there is no back and forth there for explanations, or any detail on their decision-making. Which means, if this is a technical issue, I can get no assistance from eahelp simply because they see the warning and think I am out of their jurisdiction. I only have the warning because someone refused to help 10 months ago. And now I am left with deep regret for deciding to buy these new games, thinking that I could ignore the slight I felt at being accused of fraud. Foolishly thinking that it was just a warning and they would erase it soon enough, especially after seeing this purchase go through normally.
