Update: They are now charging fees.
Cirtru (which stands for Circles or Trust) is a website which attempts to build connections between tenants and landlords, as well as to help people find roommates to share an apartment.
They are running a limited-time offer to pay rent with a credit card with no added processing cost. Cool way of racking up some free spend.
Note that this is not the same thing as Plastiq, Radpad, or RoomiPay which offers a simple rent payment service: with Cirtru you can only pay rent for a listing found on their site. Also, be aware that you’ll get a 1099K from Cirtru if they process more than $20k of your payments.
I have no experience with Cirtru, hopefully others will chime in below if they try it out.
Hat tip to reader Lisa and Ben
Update: I sent a e-mail to Cirtru and Stripe last night telling them if I didn’t have a refund to original form of payment or a release of funds to my checking account by the close of business today I would file a chargeback with Amex and file CFPB complaints against both of them.
Got a notification of a refund about five minutes ago.
do you see the actual balance refunded yet? Cirtru said they cancelled the payment and refunded, but I haven’t had any refund hit my card yet.
Nope. I’m doing a chargeback today if it doesn’t show up. Warned them last night it was coming.
So now Stripe is saying they can’t send me the money nor can they initiate a refund to original form of payment–that has to come from CirTru.
I was told the same thing. IM not sure if we should dispute with cc or keep waiting ? It’s been two weeks.
Has your’s been listed as pending or in transit? I will be initiating chargeback later this week
it has been listed as ‘in transit’ for about two weeks now…
Neither for me–just showing as a balance on my Stripe account.
Waiting since March 7th – 9.6k – still nothing. Stripe said it’s Cirtru that’s holding the money. Did chase cc to boa debit card… Not happy with this obviously. Chase cleared cc within 1 business day! Did 2 other payments for 4K and 4.5K cleared within 3-4 days… Maybe they are holding larger amounts?
Is yours showing as “in transit” or pending on the stripe website? Mine has been listed as “in transit” since March 7.. very frustrating
Just a heads up i tried doing the payout as a debit card and it was in transit for like 5 days which was abnormal so i contacted them again and they said that it had to be a bank account and that it would just eventually error out (whether that is true or not i just did what they told me and washed my hands of them) so i switched it to a bank account and then they reprocessed it and got my pay out in 2 days.
Yikes, mine is a debit card as well. Did you just go to the dashboard and update with your bank account? If you don’t mind me asking, how did you get in touch with guys?? Their customer service is seriously lacking :[ Thanks for the info!
yes after they told me to use a bank account i did change it on the dashboard. and got in touch with stripe via facebook because their customer service is terrible and wasn’t responding to my messages (it might be different now they seemed to respond now w/o FB help), however, i would try to contact them by their support page on the dashboard at bottom where it says contact us. do that first and see how it goes. i said something along the lines of “i noticed my payment is still in transit can you let me know what is going on” and then they manually canceled the in transit when i switched it to bank account and then it worked out.
So you contact Stripe or Cirtru?
Try both – but Cirtru is the one holding the $$ – though it looks like it’s stripe on their website.
I used a debit card – they held it for 12 days! emailed cirtru saying that I will do a chargeback – was processed in 3 hours.. money in bank account is pending.
It was showing up in transit – but emailed Cirtru today and also Friday (Friday was a nice email). Today I said that I’d do a charge back with cc if it’s not processed. Was processed right away.. $$ is pending. Used a debit card linked to boa checking…
Same here. Got money instantly paid to the debit card. No more bis with ’em ever.
Finally the 9k payment to my debit card is now pending in my checking account. ~10 biz days.
did u get the text msg in advance?
Text msg arrived a few hours after CC payment.
how long r we supposed to wait ? they are just playing with us and there is nothing we can do about it ???
The money finally shows up in my wellsfargo bank account, as pending deposit though. I expect it to fully clear in one or two days. Made the payment on 3/4 using Amex, took them exactly 10 days to clear. Probably won’t use them any more, the fee went up any way.
Got response from Cirtru after threaten to initiate chargeback. Not sure what’s the issue they meant but it just doesn’t sounds right.
“we are working with Stripe to identify and resolve the issue at the earliest.”
DP: got the same email than Jay, in the meantime one of my pmt was received over the night.
So I think we will end up getting our money (and rack up a goooooood amount of points). I would not shake the boat too much now, i guess they just got overwhelmed.
Totally not convinced on the “issue”. I am seeing automatic payout being disabled and pending amount is not paid to Stripe yet. May be it is just cover up.
Account object: confirming express type of connect account. Platform account (Cirtru) can specify payout timing. Read more here: https://stripe.com/docs/connect/accounts#choosing-an-approach
“type”: “express”,
Balance object: pending showing 0 means money has not been paid to Stripe. Read more here: https://stripe.com/docs/api#balance
{
“object”: “balance”,
“available”: [
{
“currency”: “usd”,
“amount”: 0,
“source_types”: {
“card”: 0
}
}
],
“livemode”: true,
“pending”: [
{
“currency”: “usd”,
“amount”: 0,
“source_types”: {
“card”: 0
}
}
]
}
Payout object: confirming automatic payout has been disabled and it is an instant payout. Read more here: https://stripe.com/docs/api#payouts
“auto”: false,
“automatic”: false,
“method”: “instant”,
the only “issue” i can see here is that they need time and money to pay off the transaction fee to the cc company. so that’s why we got “delay” here. what a joke
Got the same reply to an email I sent last night. Let’s wait for a couple more days.
Still waiting on payment; linked to Schwab bank account.
Linked to debit card. Received multiple payments within 24 hours
Still waiting on my payout as well. $3000 to Northpointe (via debit) initially processed via PayPal debit card. No response from Cirtru, currently in communication with Stripe.