Touch ‘n Go's enhanced NFC-enabled cards are out of stock — again

PETALING JAYA: All Touch ‘n Go's NFC-enabled cards have been snapped up a day after the company announced it had fresh new stock.

Its eWallet app struggled to handle the deluge when order-taking started at 10am today.

Like many others, a customer who only wanted to be known as Wong said he had tried placing an order on the app from 10am until noon but could not do so.

"After uncountable times clicking the button, I managed to order a card and get to the payment page but the transaction just could not go through as I think their servers were unable to handle the traffic," said Wong.

He said the situation was still the same in the two more attempts he made in getting to the payment page.

"I gave up after that. It was a complete waste of my morning."

Later in the day, the app announced that it had finished its stock of cards, leaving many who did not get it frustrated.

Some of them took to Touch ‘n Go's Facebook page to voice their displeasure.

One Facebook user, however, left a positive remark on the page, saying that she had finally managed to secure an order for the card after two hours and having "clicked 100 times". Her post was accompanied by a screengrab of the order and payment made.

At the time of this post, Touch ‘n Go has yet to issue a statement on when the cards would be available again.

While non-NFC cards can continue to be used, some users are holding cards that are expiring and need to change them. Since the NFC cards were introduced in April, Touch ‘n Go no longer sells the non-NFC cards.

Following frustration from consumers on being unable to secure one of these enhanced cards during the previous restock batches, Touch ‘n Go had put a limit of one card per user order in place, which is down from the previous maximum of two cards.

This comes after complaints from consumers that scalpers were somehow able to obtain an unspecified number of these NFC-enabled cards, and were reselling them online at several times the original price during the previous waves.

In a past post to their Facebook page, Touch ‘n Go had highlighted that buyers should be wary of non-genuine cards sold by unauthorised sellers or frauds, with the use of cloned, counterfeited, and/or hacked cards potentially putting the accounts of users at risk.