USCIS - ELIS issues

[rysa 3]

Hi everyone, just posting this in case our experience is helpful with others and lets you avoid waiting in the phone queue. We had our interview recently without issues and was trying to pay the 165USD fee using USCIS's new ELIS. But as other threads back in summer might indicate, the site is really buggy. It's still buggy a couple months later. We first signed up with a secure pin number option since that'd have let us skip having to answer eight security questions. However, upon receiving a confirmation email and trying to log in for the very first time with the correct pin number, we got locked out with a system error message that claimed, "ERROR: Online access to your account has been revoked. Your account is now locked.The maximum number of unsuccessful attempts (3x) has been reached. Due to security reasons, your account has been locked." After going through the phone customer service song and dance, they recommended trying to reset the password before forwarding us to the technical team. So we just did that while being put on hold, and chose a different security option (the eight security questions). That actually worked in the sense that we could now use the security questions to log on. So we were finally able to pay the fee (gmail users: the receipt will probably go to your spam folder).

Of course, now we can't log in again because the website says our username/password is wrong (again), but we kind of don't want to bother trying to reset the password again until we have to since we have the email/cc receipt of the payment... We'll deal with it again when we do AOS.

Horrible system. So, if you get locked out, try to reset your password using a different security system option... and hope for the best.

[NikLR 13,227]

Do you mean ROC not AOS?

[Ryan H 3,812]

Moved from Process & Procedures to Progress Reports.

[rysa 3]

Do you mean ROC not AOS?

Yes! Sorry, got muddled.