Error 401 (Payment Issues)

I've been having some trouble paying SE lately. I'm a norwegian living in america, so I believe this is some of the reason this happened in the first place. First I received an error 601 when trying to pay with my norwegian VISA card, and the same when I tried with my american VISA. Then I tried using a clean browser, used both cards again, but this time my american VISA was approved. However, when I try to reactivate my characters I receive the following error:

"An error has occurred.
Please confirm the status of any relevant options and then try again.
For details, please contact the Square Enix Support Center.
(Error code: 401)"

I have of course tried to contact SE support, but the e-mail service is so slow and when I contacted the american chat service, he complained about me being registered an EU customer and not NA, so there wasn't much help to get there except that I should buy Crysta. However, when I try to buy Crysta I get this error:

"ERROR (11000)
A technical issue has occurred.
Try accessing the site again. If the issue still has not been resolved, please contact the Square Enix Support Centre."

I would like to avoid CnB and UltimatePay or whatever.

Appreciate any help offered! :)

Regarding Crysta
Due to legal hiccups, the Add Crysta option will not be displayed on certain Square-Enix accounts(based on country of registration). If your account is registered in one of those countries, you cannot buy crysta. This cannot be changed in any way, unfortunately.

Regarding Credit Card Errors
UltimatePay has a strike-based fraud prevention system. If your credit card is from a region too far away from your current IP, you'll get a strike. Every time you try to enter it to get past the error, you'll get another strike. Each strike will block your card for a preset amount of time. I don't know how long these take to wear off, or what the cap is, but I do know it's at least 2 weeks. If you keep trying, you're just making it worse.

Regarding Click&Buy
Your Click&Buy region must match your SE region. IE: European C&B can only pay for European SE accounts. Likewise for NA. I understand they're a shady company, but unless you don't trust your bank to assist with any bad charges, it's probably the best bet. I haven't personally been ripped off by them, nor do I know anyone who has firsthand, but there are plenty of safeguards for credit card fraud these days anyway.


Just what I've learned in my time dealing with that problem. SE support is completely worthless in my experience.

Thanks for the reply! After reading a lot about this, it appears that my norwegian registered SE account can not add Crysta. Apparently I can create a new SE account and register it in UK or similar, which do support Crysta, though, but it seems like a lot of extra work. Also, I'm amazed that I can't even just use my american VISA. As previously mentioned, I would like to avoid UltimatePay and CnB, but I appreciate your information and will consider it if I find no other way.

Their billing all goes through ultimatepay, it's their payment processor. If you pay directly with a credit card, it goes through ultimatepay.

You also cannot make a new SE account unless you have no existing characters/etc, it's extremely difficult and not always possible to get them to remove a POL account from a SE account.

If you read what I said, you can use your American Visa, you just need to wait until your fraud points wear off and put it back in.

Oh, I understand now. I thought UltimatePay might've been some other method of paying. Sadly I did use my American VISA two times before it went through though, so I guess that means 4 weeks until I can reactivate my account... That's just lame. But yeah, thanks for the info. Made things a bit clearer.

It's not 2 weeks per attempt, I just know that it can accumulate to over 2 weeks. It's probably something reasonable like 12 hours, though it's still a horrible system.

Happy to hear it isn't that bad. Anyway, after having been in contact with SE support (EU, not NA), they actually appear to care about this. Told me a lot of the same as you did, and additionally that the block may last for up to 30 days. He told me to try again 24 hours after last attempt, and if it still fails he said he would take the matter to the Head Office (sounds serious, though it may be just a fancy name) so that they could maybe unblock the card. Hope this works. Already spent too much time trying to fix this.

I am still experiencing this same error, even after waiting for over two weeks between the attempts to pay for my characters. I have been in contact with both my norwegian and my american bank to assure me that they have not blocked any transactions. The matter was also taken to the Head Office in service support about two weeks ago, but they have yet to give me a reply. And every time I contact SE for info on the matter, they just tell me to be patient.

So I'll just try my luck on these forums again, in hopes that someone has resolved this issue at some point and will tell me how to do so.

I did make a Click and Buy account (as a last resort option), but they are taking forever to reply and activate my account. Also, I did read about it being possible to unlink and relink my POL ID to another SE account. Does anyone have any experience with this?

^ Did you have the issue solved?

Issue never gets solved