What’s up everybody? It’s Justin Live from B2B Vault, the Payment Technology Podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems with your host Allen Kopelman! And we’ll be providing you with educational information about small businesses, FinTech, payment processing, and the technology businesses are using in the world today.
And in today’s podcast, we’re going to discuss. What to do when your account gets dropped from a payment processor. Meaning you were selling CBD, Kratom or you’re a high-risk merchant, or whatever you were doing, and all of a sudden you can’t make sales anymore. You can’t accept payments. You’re stuck-up Crap Creek without a Paddle!
Yeah, this happens a lot, believe it or not, and can be caused by many different things. Really simple things for you to fix. It could be something very complex. It can be something as simple as uploading a document to make sure that all your products are supposed to be where they’re supposed to be.
But yeah, there’s a bunch of different things that you can do and there are a lot of things that you shouldn’t. So, in this podcast, Allen is going to talk about steps that you can take to prevent it, and what to do after you get dropped from your payment processor. Hopefully, that doesn’t happen to any of our listeners.
Hopefully, you take all of our advice that we’ve been giving and you’re implementing this into your stores and your businesses so that it doesn’t happen, but yeah, man. Show us what you got. So, a lot of people want to take the easier route. So, they find themselves processing with Square, Stripe, PayPal, or Shopify!
Right. And then they go to find out like I’ve had at least in the last two weeks between people who made a Wix website, and a Shopify website contact me and they’re like, oh, I made this website. Then I, after I spent all my time making it right, or money, in some cases, let go to find out that
Shopify doesn’t support their product. Right! And then they find out that they have to pay extra. Or Wix doesn’t support their product, and now they have to rebuild the whole shopping cart, like a WooCommerce shopping cart, and plug it onto a Wix site. WordPress! WordPress, yeah.
They got to make WordPress separate shopping cart, you know, in order to do that. And that becomes complicated, and it can be a little bit onerous when it comes to hosting that, because now it’s not like one website or you got to switch your whole website, then there’s an extra cost. So, you have to make sure that when you’re using a service, like especially like PayPal, Strip, or Square that you’re going to their list of prohibited business types
Because people don’t understand like there’s prohibited, and then there’s restricted, but it basically, it just means they’re not going to process for you. Right! And they have basic stuff, illegal products, and services. So, it has to be a legal product.
Anything infringing on intellectual property rights, or products. Meaning fake clothes? Yeah, fake clothes, fake handbags. Celebrity’s picture is on it. Yeah! We’ve had people like try to get we have clients that sell watches and handbags online, and they have to send, they have to supply us with a supplier letter for each product, showing that they’re licensed to sell Kate Spade handbags or Swatch watches or whatever it is that they sell, right? Because we don’t want to have, you could go and there are tons of these websites like we have marketplaces that we have too, right? Uh-hum. And we have to tell the merchants that run those marketplaces.
Hey, you need to make sure that your client, right, you, you don’t have clients on their selling fake handbags and stuff like that because you’re going to get your merchanting, going to get your whole marketplace shut down. Shut down!
Other things are products deemed to be unfair, predatory, deceptive! So that can mean any, just the wording on your website can. My CBD cures headaches, you can’t say that on there. Right! Claims, especially when it comes to any, not just CBD but health-related products like creams and lotions.
You won’t feel pain anymore. Vitamins! Oh, this special cream cures arthritis, you can’t say that. No. You could say it may help with arthritis. And then, you have to research your product and go to the FTC and the FDA website if you’re selling a supplement, Vitamin supplements, or nutraceuticals sometimes they refer to and go see what they, you know what things you need to put on your website.
Lots of websites require that. We’re going to get into that like tobacco website. You have a thing on there. Tobacco can be harmful to your health kind of thing. And, a lot of products are age-restricted, like tobacco, selling alcohol online. Even a gift basket company.
We had one come to us. They got, they’re like, oh, we had to remove all the wine from our website because the credit card processor said we’re not allowed to sell wine. So, I asked the guy, said do you have a license, an alcohol license? The answer is no. If you want to sell gift baskets with wine. One, you need an alcohol license, and two, you need to be getting a signature upon delivery whereas UPS or FedEx is getting a driver’s license from the person having them signed.
That’s one of the few things that they make people sign up for. Ah, even if you’re shipping cigars and stuff. They should be signed up with UPS and FedEx that they’re shipping a tobacco product and get a signature! Excuse me, I’m sorry. In some cases, I would say UPS and FedEx skipped the signature 99% of the time, but not for alcohol.
Not, they will not do it. Cause you have to tell them you’re shipping and alcohol. You know other prohibitive services like these like adult content. Not every processor accepts adult content or adult products. Most processors. Right. You got to be really careful even on WordPress. Right. We have banks that will accept adult products like lingerie, toys, videos, pictures, and even streaming videos.
As long as you’re following the rules, and like MasterCard as new rules for like adult websites! So, you have to be compliant with their rules. They’re very, very strict! Every single person has to be registered. That’s why there are so many problems. Only fans and porn hubs are constantly under fire from the card brands, and a lot of banks have shut them down because they weren’t following the rules of making sure that there were no underage people and that they identified each person that was appearing in a video, so!
How can they stop people from lying? They can’t stop people from lying, but at least they checked the ID. They did, you did your part! You used some kind of ID identification software or something. Man, I’ve seen some IDs. They’re real. Yeah, exactly. But I’m just saying you got to do the best you can do.
Yeah, I agree. I have six daughters, so like Yō. If I ever find one, anyway, carry on! So then, leagues and different businesses require certain types of registration with the card brands, like selling firearms! Or firearm products, you have to have special licenses.
If you are going to sell liquor, you got to have licenses, you got to have different exclusions. Some states don’t allow you to ship into their state unless you have a license in their state. Right! So, you have to follow all the rules. Like you can’t get set up for gambling through many companies.
There are companies that accept these kinds of merchants, but you need to do your research and find somebody and make sure that you talk to, just say I would like to speak to the underwriter. I would like to speak to somebody at the bank, right? Um-hum. When you’re going to get set up with one of these accounts. Cause the biggest mistake people make is the aggressive sales rep will say, oh yeah, I’m going to put this down as something else, right?
And then get you approved, then the next thing is all your money out. You don’t want to deal with that. And many times, people go and like some guy was trying to get in a camp. Wait! So, before you get into that. Okay! You passed right over something. So, when you said the sales guy, meaning the guy that’s setting you up for the merchant account, will set you up, under a different business?
Business, like he’ll put down your restaurant and it’s actually a strip club, and maybe the credit card processors, some of them are I always like to talk about, underwriting. I always put it in a funnel, right? So, some places have PayPal, Square, and Stripe, right? Um-hmm. These kinds of companies, and there are credit cards, right?
They have a big funnel, right? So, everything is, it’s all open, right? Everything comes in, right? And then it gets skinny later, right? As they see transactions come through, then they go, hey, this guy process 10,000 bucks at this Billy Bob’s restaurant. They go Google the address, hey, that’s not, and there was a $5,000 charge.
No, that’s not a restaurant, this is a strip club. We don’t do strip clubs! Right. So, we’re going to have to shut them off and they shut the account down. Maybe they have some money that’s coming into the processor. They’ll hold the money, and then! How long does it take for them to give you money?
They can hold your money up from 180 days to 280 days. Wow! Yes, so you could lose your money. We had a strip club come to us one time, and then we did an investigation. And what we did was we got the guy set up, he was on the match list. Because some rep wrote them up as a restaurant and it’s clearly a strip club.
Because they thought that the strip club thought, oh yeah, we’re going to get lower rates. No, it doesn’t matter. You’re not going to get it; you’re just playing a game. You need to deal with a company that says, okay, we know you’re a strip club. We don’t care if you’re a strip club, and we accept it! Right.
And it’s getting fewer and fewer because, in our business, so many companies are getting acquired by venture capitalists. PE firms, which are some other kind of investment companies, right? Acquiring companies, then once they buy the company, they go, whoa, look what?
What the heck is going on? These guys are processing for all types of crazy businesses. We’re a public entity, and they either, they say, Okay, we have to stop accepting those. Right. Then any of them that get out of line, they get rid of them right away. So, you want to be, you have to make sure, this company, oh, I’m going to sell firearms online.
Okay, is this company listed with the NRA or whoever recommends different companies? Oh, they have, you can get references. Oh, do you Firearms companies, oh, you do other adult websites whose websites do you have, understand! Um-hum. Don’t just believe them and say, Oh yes! Or their person’s going to send you to 50 companies to see who’s going to take it.
You want to make sure that like their experience, they know what to deal with. They know about the complex compliance things that you have to go through with your site. The same thing with CBD, we get CBD merchants all the time. And we go to their website, and they are supposed to have this COA, Certificate of Analysis.
And then they’re over a year, not acceptable by the bank. There you go! They might be processing somewhere that’s not monitoring the site, but that processor could get fined by Visa and MasterCard for having a merchant selling expired products or not having the right thing. So, you got to make sure, but simple things go on in this business that people don’t understand like you could get shut down.
One, your business is not what you said it was. So that could get shut down. You get approved for one website, and then you get three or four more websites that you didn’t tell the bank about! Um-Hum. And then they find them, and they say, hey, we didn’t approve these websites. We just went through that with a merchant.
No, they called us up! They go, oh, we’re making like two more websites. I’m like, oh, you got to contact underwriting, and get the information over to them, let them look at the site. There was some back-and-forth email with some language they wanted to be added to the guy’s website, blah, blah, blah. It was all done and happy!
Like I said, make sure the applications are filled out correctly, they’re not lying about what you do. You’re selling, you have a marijuana shop, and the guy puts it down, it’s a CBD store. That’s not, they’re going to find it. You’re going to.0 get shut off, you’re going to get, you might get fined.
You could get your money held, you can end up on the match list, and then you’re on there for five, six years. Yes, you’re screwed! Then you’re not going to get that or let’s say you have to register. Like I had a guy with an adult site, I’m like you have to register, it’s a thousand dollars.
Okay, we could do it in a couple of payments or whatever, but you must register. It’s a thousand every year. Tobacco, you have to register. Some people don’t want to register. I can tell, later on, you’re going to get caught, and then you’re going to have a big problem! Because they’re going to say, oh, you’re selling a product without registering. Right.
That’s why a lot of times I’ll see places like selling tobacco through PayPal, Stripe, or Square eventually, they get shut off! They just shut him down, they go, no can’t, no can do. Because they don’t, they’re not set up to register people. Then you have to follow requirements for certain businesses like CBD.
We talked about certificates and firearms. You need an FFL license, a Federal Firearms License, and like when they ship firearms, right? You have to, your federal legal, let’s say Justin has a gun store. Um-hum. And then he wants to sell me a gun and I live in Texas. He can’t just send it to my house.
He has to send it to another gun shop in Texas. That person is going to check and make sure Oh, I’m licensed, I have my driver’s license. I still think that’s messed up, but whatever. Yeah, I don’t agree with how a lot of that is handled. I don’t think you should be able to purchase a firearm on any website.
I don’t care what site, where it is in the United States or the world. They need to put, need to have. No. It’s open, it should be. That’s your opinion, my opinion is, I don’t think you should be able to buy a weapon or a gun online period. Plank. There are no exceptions at all. It definitely should be closed up or eliminated, I agree with that!
There’s, what you live in Florida, there’s a gun, and there are gun stores and pawn shops all over the place with guns. Yes. There’s no need to go to a gun shop. But also, guns show they need to have a way at the gun. Gun shows shouldn’t exist either. Either that or they should have a table there.
Gun shows, if they exist, should exist for business only. Private people should not collectors, people who can come off the street and purchase firearms inside of it shouldn’t be able to do that. Well, no they should just have a required to have registration there. Sorry. So, you can’t buy anything unless you’re registered!
Yeah, if you can buy. If you can go and look at them, that’s one thing. But you shouldn’t be able to purchase anything. No, But I’m saying, they could easily set up, away. They fix it. Where people have to show like, I am registered.
Oh, I’m very anti-firearms, like I don’t care about all you people about taking my guns away, you can kiss my ass! I’m not sorry, I mean you’re not in the military, what do you own an AR 15 for anyway? This is not a political podcast. You know if you’re doing a medical type of business, let’s say massage therapy or it’s a doctor’s office, or like medical marijuana doctor where they’re giving people the card or they’re performing like Botox and things like that.
Mm-hmm. Yes, we’re required to collect licenses. For sure! Or look it up and make sure the place is licensed properly, you have a liquor store or convenience store. We get liquor licenses, tobacco licenses, and EBT licenses. Same thing with pharmacies. You can’t just put a pharmacy online and let people buy whatever they want.
Although I get probably 50 text messages now. I like it. T-Mobile has finally been added to my phone. When someone sends you a spam message, you could hit spam or junk, and then it’s gone. Then that person can’t send you stuff anymore. Well, that’s because you had AT&T or something. No, I had a Sprint before. Okay.
They didn’t have that. But now I was going to say T-Mobile, we’ve had that option forever. Yeah. Now T-Mobile. Click that little button, add the block list, and you’re done! You could, I could block them before, but you couldn’t stop these SMS messages. But now they came up with the wording, if you start flagging those, then you stop, I get them less and less now, but that’s a huge problem.
We’re going to do another podcast about cyber security because it’s out of control. Cybersecurity month! Yeah, so the other thing is you know, you can get shut down because you have excessive chargebacks. You’re not responding to chargebacks; you’re not responding to phone calls. It’s important if you’re getting a bunch of chargebacks, contact your rep, contact the company you do business with.
Hey, what can we do to lessen this? Like we just have a guy now, they have a cigar shop and then they decided they’re going to put up a website. And the guy’s been a big cigar influencer. The guy just bought the cigar shop, but he was a cigar influencer before. Oh, okay. y. So, he has a huge following on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok smoking cigars, right?
So now the place went from the when they first put the company before that he bought was doing like maybe a hundred orders a month. That’s two or three a day. They’re going fifties plus a day now. Yeah. So, they started getting a lot of scam orders. So, I was telling him, I go, you guys got to figure out like how to do it.
You have to have like your whitelist of people who bought from you before and you know those are good customers. And then the people who haven’t bought from you before. You need to hire somebody that’s sitting behind the computer and that is going to manage your shop. Right! At your, for your web website, and strictly, that’s the only thing he’s going to do is manage your e-commerce store because some guy that’s sitting in your office is not going to have any idea what they’re doing.
So, in my humble opinion, hire someone like myself to manage your website, so then that way you can keep making money. But you also must manage the payment part and make sure. That’s what they should be doing. Who, the website person? The person managing the website. Yeah. If they’re accepting payments for a product and they’re getting emails and managing the website, they’re going to be the first ones to know when someone makes a payment, when someone makes a purchase.
Literally, the very first per, even before the owner. If it’s set up, how I would set it up? Okay! I would know. Well, they need help. It would be the same for the owner and myself. We would get the same notification at the very same time. Yeah! So, the problem they’re having is people are going in with a real credit card, real data.
So, they have the correct billing address. It’s somebody that bought it off the dark web, and then the shipping address is a different shipping address. So, then they flagged, they started flagging those and checking the addresses, which I told them, I said, there’s probably software you can buy.
You’re doing 50 orders a day, that’s a lot of manual work to do. And then they check those addresses. I mean. They typically, on an e-commerce website, there’s really nothing you can do about shipping to a different. They’re checking them because they got ripped off, like crazy. You could check Yeah, but what I’m saying is, do people ship to a different address every day?
They’re getting a lot of orders where it’s 2, 3, 400, 500 bucks. We got to be smart. So, they’re called. So now on those orders, they’re calling people up on the phone. If they don’t answer the phone within 24 hours and return the callback, then they’re just refunding the transaction. If the person calls back, they’ll say, hey, order again.
But they’re just taking precautions because they got a lot of chargebacks. Not their fault because they’re growing, and the employees need to learn how to do that. There’s got to be some way of verification for that. Well, no, when you have real credit card data, it’s very hard to dispute that.
Their credit receipt, the credit card information, so we looked at the transactions and they got AVS positive response, CVV two positive, zip code, address match, and everything was perfect. But it was a scam. Somebody stole the person’s ID. That’s what I’m saying, like you got to have someone managing your site. Right!
So, they’re now putting a guy in charge. Do you think these big, huge companies that run these shops have a whole team of people running it? Oh yes, they got a team or they’re using, like there’s something else, there’s software you can put on your website, but it really won’t prevent that.
No. Because I call that like friendly fraud where it’s like you have. It is that people are being jerks and knowing how to get away with stuff. Scammers! Yeah, I mean people have been getting away with scams since the beginning of time. Yes. And then, like some places have software that tells them like, oh, when the person puts in the info like when they get that data out of the shopping cart, it goes into a CRM system.
We also talked about this too and there are a lot of ways to prevent that. What is your average sale ticket? Right, that’s what they’re doing. They’re monitoring the sales based on, Okay, most people only spent 50 to a hundred bucks. Anything over that is automatically flagged.
So, they’re making phone calls. Yeah, it should automatically put a red flag in. Hey, that’s what they’re doing. Let’s verify this. But then again, business owners who are trying to do this all on their own, are more concerned about making a buck and they’re not really paying attention to all that.
And now they’re dealing with chargebacks, and they can’t access their funds. Right! They’re getting kicked off payment processors left and right. At some point, you just got to cough up a buck and pay what it weighs for you to operate your business. Yes, you’re going to have to start with an employee. If you’re doing a ton of volume. There’s other stuff you can do.
If you’re selling like a SAS product right, where it’s a membership? There are things you can do, you can install, you can put RDR, which that basically, let’s say Justin goes and signs up for xyz.com and it’s 20 bucks a month, right? And then I, and then somebody steals Justin’s credit card information, let’s just say off the dark web.
They always caught the dark web, right? Mm-hum. They steal it as in, I laugh because I get these notices from Credit Karma and stuff. It says, Oh, your information’s on the dark web. Everybody’s information is on the dark web. They don’t have my credit card data, but at the same time. So, the thing is, so then somebody, let’s say someone gets Justin’s information and they go on another website, and they buy something, then Justin sees it because he checks his bank account or his credit card and he contacts his bank, hey, that’s not me.
Boom boom, boom! They cut Justin’s card, they send him a new card maybe, and then they do a chargeback. So, the merchants that are the merchant that is getting the chargeback, can protect themself with RDR because it’s not a product, right? It’s just a service. And the RDR basically would send the minute they would see Justin wants to do a chargeback.
If his bank is a member of that RDR thing! Right. It’s not all the banks, it’s probably 70 or 80%. I didn’t even know this there, there’s like over 30,000 banks in the US including FinTech. I was like, wow, it’s a big number! But then so let’s say 70, 80% of them are on that system, it would automatically like the merchant would, it would generate a refund from the merchant. Mm-hum.
And you can only really do that with service-type businesses. Right. You can’t really do it with a physical product. But there are other things that you can set up, there’s Ethic, and Verify which I also identify things as a chargeback, but that’s also not going to catch like these ones
What I’m talking about? Yeah. This is just manual like we have a merchant that sells almost a million dollars a month of hand cream, right? And they sell tons of it, they have hand cream and eye cream. And they basically have the whitelist, right these are people who ordered before!
They know they’re good, and then they have the people who have never ordered before. And then they have two, three guys sitting in the office that they’re working on those transactions all day. They pick up the phone and actually like to call the person, google the address. I mean that’s the only way, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, ladies and gentlemen, and I’m telling you right.
There’s literally no other way for you to stop it. Like you have to do your due diligence. There’s no other, you can rely on technology all you want, but humans are smarter than technology. We created the tech man. Exactly! So, we’re going to find a way to manipulate it to make it do what we want it to do.
And there are ways. Just be smart, man, that’s all I could tell you! There are some very expensive products out there that are a few thousand dollars a month. But yes, if you’re doing millions, then it’s time to step up to get one of those products. But here are some posts that I saw on the internet.
So, I looked on Google and I saw some on Facebook, stuff that gets posted around, why did Square close my account? Whatever. I guess this person contacted Square and they said, oh, there are three reasons why your account would get deactivated. The norm is higher than a normal chargeback.
So, the chargeback ratio, when I first started in this business, this is, it’s kind of crazy when I think about. The chargeback ratio was 3%, then it went down to 2%, then it went down to 1%, and now it’s 0.08% or 0.07. Seems pretty. What? No, I’m saying that what they allowed merchants to have been 3%.
Oh, back in. I thought you meant that’s how much it went down. Chargebacks went down. No, in 2001, you could. So that’s how 3% you could have up to three percent, your transactions were chargebacks. Percent chargeback. Now it’s 0.07. That’s kind of low. Yeah! That’s what I mean, they tightened it up on the businesses and with EMV, it forced all like the card-present fraud, all to the internet.
Oh, right. That’s why I think they got to have multifactor authentication on non-card present transactions. That’s just my deal. It’s really easy to make some, you can send money and get money online in 30. 2.3 seconds. So right high-risk activity, or a breach in the terms of service, which is broad, but basically that means you’re selling something. You didn’t read your contract and now you put that product up there and you weren’t supposed to have an eight-inch bong on your website!
Right, you’re not supposed to be. Yes, you have to really read. A lot of people don’t understand. They have to really read the terms of service of these, when you’re signing up for an online merchant account from a company where you’re not talking to a sales rep and you got to under, you got to go look at what’s prohibited.
Yeah, Shopify style they weren’t even letting you sell CBD on their website. No, you can’t! exactly. So, I know you can’t process payments with PayPal for CBD. Nope! So, you can’t, you’re going to you can build a website like on WordPress and you can sell CBD, but you’re going to have to find a payment process attached to the website.
Exactly, and then another one. Same thing PayPal shut down the account. Why? Oh, it’s suspected fraud. There were excessive chargebacks. You should check like I said, the terms and conditions sometimes, like they weren’t able to debit your bank account was another reason. And selling some prohibited products, other things processors, not just PayPal but a spike in sales. Which is super whacked to me, because I’ve someone that I know that just happened to somebody I know. Right.
They have a product, and it was a skin product and, it was actually a real tragic event that drove a bunch, and someone got killed. Right. to support that. And to support the business, they went and bought this skin product. Right. Well, when doing that, there are sales. They went through the roof. Okay.
And what happened? They’re sitting there and that’s why I asked how long. Does it take for that money to come back? Cause I mean there’s. Well, that’s the time where listen, if you’re dealing with PayPal, Stripe, or Square, there’s literally no one to call. This circumstance is going to be a little bit different, right?
Because it’s like the kid was a part of a very popular sorority. So, the people that are like, going to be some powerful people that are contacting these banks on their behalf. But who is the processor? A normal person isn’t going to get that. Who’s the process? Oh, probably like Stripe or PayPal. Yeah. So, it’s very difficult to deal with them when that happens.
Yes. Because they’re just, you just got people in cubicles everywhere. You send them an email, the customer, the guys that’s looking at it, we don’t really care, like we’re holding your money, blah, blah, blah. Right. Now I just got an email from a client, right? So, they called me, they are, it’s an insurance company.
Oh, we have open enrollment coming up. We need to make sure all of ours. We need more volume of credit card processing. Can you contact us? They have a lot of merchant accounts because of the way they’re set up, they process for multiple insurance companies. So, they’re like, hey, we need this one to increase from 1 million to 2 million. For the one that’s at 2 million, we need to go to 3 million. Like they want more, way more volume for open enrollment. Open enrollment is coming up for insurance. Literally, I hate health insurance! Like the worst thing. Yeah. My phone number, my phone’s been going crazy all day.
It’s crazy. I did already this morning. So, you got to really be careful, you know what’s going on with when you’re getting a merchant account, so you want to make sure that you understand, like especially if you’re in a higher risk type of business and you know that you’re not. We had another guy, and he was doing over-the-phone, like tech services. Mm-hum!
Which is slightly scammy of a business. What was it? Tech support like. Oh. That’s, so I like, go into your computer. You have a problem with your computer. Computer? Yes. You, yeah. And they’re coming to your computer, screen share? Oh, yeah no! Yeah, I don’t do any of that! I don’t even like them as clients because. I don’t trust it. Yeah, I don’t trust that they’re doing business on the up and up, because a lot of times, like once my mom called me and she’s like, oh, Yahoo called me on the phone.
I’m like, Mom, Yahoo is not calling you on the phone. No, you did not. What happened? So, my mom tells me the person got, she did a screen share. Oh. Oh no, she paid with her credit card money. Yeah. No. I’m like no, no. So, my mom called her bank, and she did a chargeback right away. I said, whatever that person installed on the computer, go in there and remove it.
Yes, like right now! Because they were scraping her computer as sitting there. You don’t know what it was doing. Oh, it was, Yeah, but it was running a script! That’s for sure. It was found that’s how people got into, was trying to find the keystrokes. Anything. Yeah. That’s what that, So I told my mom, Shut your computer off.
Unplug it from the internet right now. So, she unplugged her computer from the internet, and she went in there. Actually, I had one of my friends who’s a computer guy go over to my mom’s house. Cause I don’t know how to do all that. I could, but I’m not, I don’t have time. No, right! So, I happened to call my friend.
I go, hey, are you in the area? He’s Yeah, I’m down that way. I said, can you go by my mom’s house? She messed something up, but he went there, and it was they just, they installed some program. It was like a virus, software. They told my mom; she had a virus. And they were going to charge her to remove it?
Yeah. And they’re going to, and she gave them the credit card and they charged her. She thought it was Yahoo, and I was like, no, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Google. Google, IRS. The IRS, they don’t, and none of them call you on the phone. Social Security Administration. No, no. My favorite is, we had a, I had a guy on the phone.
Samantha recorded me one day when some scammer was calling me. It’s really funny. We should repost that for Cyber Security Month. It was a pretty funny video, but you know they don’t call you on the phone. Google’s not calling you, Apple’s not calling. I had some guy yesterday call me on the phone. Oh.
Are you the business owner? Yes. Do you have Apple computers in your office and Apple devices? Oh, we want to help you with your devices. I was like listening. Done. No, thank you. What was another one? Another phone call I got. Oh, yes, I get these emails all the time, right? Oh, your Microsoft account has expired.
Please log in. No, do not click that. No, no, no! But let’s get back to the high-risk merchant. So, you got to really make sure you know what business you’re in. We’re, we deal with a lot of difficult businesses. I’ll give you an example. Like we have a guy now, he’s got a credit product, right?
So, we took it too, three or four different banks, nobody wanted it. Then we showed it to another bank, and they said they wanted it, but then now they’re messing around. So, we’re done with that, we’re done with them. And now we found another bank that we finally went to them, explained the business model, what the guy’s doing.
It’s a legitimate business and that. So, it’s like credit restoration? No, it’s basically they’re selling a class to teach. Okay. So, there’s like a lot of services online. You could pay 15, 20, 30, or 40 bucks a month. Sometimes there are more, and they explain to you how to get your credit score boosted and boost your credit score. I would have very really good advice for you.
Dispute all the charges that you have, you could do it yourself for free. Period. No, no, that’s not what they do! So, they tell you how to boost your score. So, one of. What’s going to boost your score? Right! So, one of the oh. What, when do a bunch of chargebacks No. When you dispute! Oh. What’s on your credit report?
Yes. And they remove it, your credit score. Yeah. Dispute them, they. That’s what they teach you. Like how to go on your credit card. It’s super easy. Go on your Credit Karma and you see something that doesn’t belong there. You wrong spelling, name, different address, all those little things. You can dispute that, and they take it off it.
And then they were talking about like with young people that are maybe living at home or maybe they’re living in an apartment, and they really haven’t established credit yet. Because it’s really unusual, like a lot of young people move into an area now where they don’t really need a car. So, they’ll take Uber and then they’ll walk because there’s everything in their neighborhood. Right!
They don’t, go live out in the country where you got to drive, 10 minutes to go to the store too, or maybe you must drive 30 minutes to the store. People are living, there’s like a lot of setups now.
Like you, let’s say you live in downtown Fort Lauderdale. You could walk to the grocery store. They’re building like grocery stores at the bottom of all these buildings. Food deserts are getting smaller and smaller. Thank God. So, you know that that’s really good. They’re putting like a smaller version of Whole Foods, a smaller version of Publix, or they’re putting it in a very close area where you can Uber over just, a few minutes.
So, a lot of people, working at home and all that, don’t have a car. So, they don’t have a car payment. They don’t really and a lot of your debit card doesn’t report to the credit bureau, so they teach you to like, oh, you need to go out and get a credit card. You need to get a report, you can physically report that you pay rent.
Yeah. There are ways to do it. Yes. So, they teach you in different ways. True Bill, I think. Yes, there’s some way to do it where you can. But they got bought by somebody, Rocket Pay or something. They explained to you how to report your rent, and you can report it by connecting your checking account.
That works, since I started doing it, my credit score went up a little bit for sure. So, they teach you that and it’s a one-time fee only, No monthly fee and all that, so it’s a great product! Just having a hard time. Why don’t they like it? They don’t like it because they think that the person is going to take the data and maybe sell it to a credit, another company for credit repair, and stuff like that.
That’s why some of the banks don’t like it. I just think that whatever. So, can the bank just say, hey, you sign this document? Yeah, they can. That’s what I mean. We just got to find more, that’s what I was telling you, in the business, now you have gotten all these companies getting acquired. No, right I get it. So as all these companies get acquired, all of a sudden you can’t get. Some guys got a problem with CBD or whatever, or an adult site.
The new owner doesn’t want to deal with that. Well, they’ll just stop taking niche. No, I get it. Yeah. They’ll stop talking like that niche type of business. Yes. And anytime somebody’s got a business, that nobody’s ever heard of before. You got some kind of new product. Right! Or a new thing, then business, they don’t want it. You’re disruptive.
They don’t want to deal with you. Yeah. They don’t understand it. I’ll give you an example. We do a bunch of like car shipping places, right? Mm-hum. They ship cars, they ship freight, they do all this stuff. They’re like a broker, right? So, some banks are like, no, we don’t want that business.
I’m like, It’s great. It’s a great business, as long as the person runs it correctly. Right! It’s a good business. So that’s what you have to understand. Cause they don’t, they’re what are they afraid of that they’re selling stolen cars? No, they just don’t. Shipping stolen goods? They don’t understand them, they don’t understand the business model, so they don’t want to deal with it.
So that’s why I’m saying you must go when you go to somebody, people come to me, they go, oh, do you know how to. Can you get car shippers approved? Yes! We work with a bunch of car shippers, if you want a reference, I’ll give you a reference, I’ll give you a couple of references. Oh, can you do moving companies?
Yes! A lot of times these guys come to us, they’re like these moving brokers and stuff. Now, that’s hard to do. You got to get, have people that have moving trucks and stuff like that. Cause I don’t like dealing with middlemen anyway! Yes, it’s you just got to be careful, like what you’re dealing with. Straight to the source buddy.
And you just got to make sure, like when you start your business like another woman contacted me, oh, I’m starting a CBD, I can’t get banking. I’m like, I don’t understand You go to the bank, you say, oh, I sell health products, and that’s it. You don’t need to give them your website. You have your corporate name.
Like we get into this all the time when we talk, I talked to a group once about startup at this startup place, and I got up. And they started asking me questions that I think Oh, I should name my corporation the same name. No. So, I said, the only reason you would do that is if you had a pretty mainstream product.
If there’s anything that you think would not be like a mainstream type of thing, let’s say you, your company, you had a company 13 digital 1380, right? Digital 1380. Okay, digital marketing. Okay, so you’re going to go to a bank, say, oh, I sell digital market. They’re going to be pretty; most banks are going to be pretty okay with it.
There, I had, Yeah, they’re getting a bank account anywhere. But if you go, let’s say you were selling CBD and the name of your website was Justin CBD Haven. Yeah, not going to go! You’re not going to go to the bank with Justin CBD Haven, LLC. LLC and they’re going to go no, we don’t really want it! But if he just has Justin’s Haven. Healing. Healing? No, not healing. No, just Justin’s Haven, LLC. Yes, there you go. And he goes, oh, what do you do Justin? Oh, I sell health products. Okay, great no problem! Sign up. Boom, you’re done. And you have a bank account. You don’t, sometimes less is more the bank. I don’t think the banks really care.
They just don’t want it to be blatant, blatant. Like they don’t want to sign up for a strip club and it’s, And the name of the strip club is Big Boobies. Yeah. Whatever. The Booby trap, chef Sopranos. And that’s the name of your, what was it? There, what was the name of their club?
The Boom Club. No, it was the Booby. I thought it was the Booby Trap. No, I think it was the Boom Boom Club. The Sopranos but get out Google right now and check out. Yeah, we got to, so you don’t want to name your comp if you’re selling something that might be controversial or new or something, you want to pick a more generic name. Like you have a strip club called J and A Restaurants Inc.
Justin and Allen Inc. It was the Bada Bing. The Bada Bing club. Oh my God. I can’t believe I said the booby trap. That’s actually a real, That’s a real strip club. It’s down the street from here. What are you talking about? That’s one of yours, never mind. No, so I’m just saying you want to pick a more generic name for your company.
Listen, if you go into the bank doesn’t really care that you are a strip club. You just don’t want the thing that they don’t want. It’s really funny banks are really against cash. Okay. Like they don’t like handling cash at the bank. They don’t. And it’s really disturbing to me. You know why. Why?
All the bank robbers, man. I guess they, oh, they literally don’t keep cash at the bank, Hardly at all! What’s Bonnie and Clyde and all those guys? Yeah. Those guys ruin it for all of us. That was way, I just said earlier, but I’m just the banks don’t really love cash and I hand it to Congress.
There’s a bill in there now, and it’s sponsored by John Rose from Tennessee, and I think Maxine Waters is in on it too now. And they want to keep cash in society. It’s said cash is still king! That was like on the headline in there. Yes. The ACLU wants cash to be, what underserved communities need cash.
Underserved communities need ATMs. The other thing is that it’s very important, but you want to make sure. And the other thing that can get people shut off with credit card processing. This is another thing and I want to address this, and then we’re going to end the podcast. Another thing that will throw off everything is international credit cards.
Oh yeah. And so, some processors, how to wait. How to set that up that does not make, accept over to overseas money. So, you got to make sure okay, Stripe actually has, I think that they have a setup where you can take international payments. Yes, unless it’s on one of those platforms. Right. No, no only Stripe.
I don’t think the other ones do. You could set it up through PayPal, but if their international rate is crazy. But I’m saying like to convert the money to the US. You’re not going to make what? You’re going to have to charge a lot. You’re going to have to understand the pricing, and how that works.
Gotta understand how much the shipping is going to cost you. It’s really a pain. But also, let’s say you have a regular merchant account and then you get a bunch of charges from some other country. There’s no, there’s basically no way for you to win the chargeback. Let’s say you sell some guy 30 grand worth of makeup, and you ship it to Japan, and he does the chargeback.
You’re basically done. You’re going to have to go to Japan and get your money. You’re not going to get it, yeah. But now there’s a way to do international payments. It’s messed up that we can spend all the money in the world over there though, and it’ll come to us. Might not get it when we. Or you come?
The biggest lie about credit card processing is that it’s the worst, Visa and MasterCard advertise, Oh, there’s a world economy. That’s not true, that it’s sectioned off and there is no protection. But we are linking up with a new company now. As a service to our merchants, which we’re going to be, we’re getting it ready to do some marketing.
We might have the guy, the provider, on the podcast soon. And basically, what they’ve done is they linked up a bunch of different wallets from all these different countries and you’re really protected with these wallet transactions because it’s a wallet, they’re paying from their wallet. Because that’s how they do it over there. I think the wallet thing is going to come to the US. Do you see what meta mass just did? No. What’d they just do? Meta mass, they’re, they just changed the game. Oh, so you can fund your wallet straight through your bank account now through meta mass, right? Yes, but I’m just, so now you’re going to be able to, you can fund your wallet and through meta mass, straight from your bank account, right?
Choose whatever Ethereum base coin that you want. And then purchase it straight through meta mass. Oh, so they’re just becoming another exchange is, yes, they, but they, but that’s the first one that I know about. No, you can fund your bank accounts to Coinbase. But you can’t bank purchases. Yes, you can. No, you can buy coins right through meta mass, I’m saying.
So, the meta mass is like your entryway to the Oh, you buy stuff in the metaverse? Yeah. So now you can’t, now you, instead of you have in the fund your wallet, you can do all that other stuff. Yeah. So, it’s a game changer. So, I think this wallet technology that’s being used in other countries, it’s all-over South America, Mexico, in all Asian countries.
Alipay is part of it. UnionPay is big, those are the bigger names that are part of it. There’s the China Union pay, right? So, now that these wallets are coming to the US because you have these wallets like there’s the PayPal wallet, you have the, you have your Cash App. Wallet, yeah. But Google Pay and Apple Pay are using your credit card.
These things are linked back to your bank account, right? Yes. Now it’s not popular in the US and it’s going to have slower growth in the US and that’s because people like their rewards of no credit cards. But we’re releasing this product and it’s going to enable, Let’s say that you want to, let’s say you’re in an area, let’s say you’re in Miami and you have a ton of customers that come from Asia to your business.
Soon, very soon, within the next couple of weeks, you’re going to be able to sign up with us. Get set up with this technology. And advertise, hey, if you want to pay with Alipay in the store or on the website, you’ll be able to do it. Oh, nice. And then there are no chargebacks. That’s the best part. So, it’s very exciting because of international payments for us.
Damn. In 20 years, it’s been a huge pain in the butt. So, we got a few merchants getting set up with it. We’re testing it out, looks like it’s working cool. And then we’re going to do a rollout. But that could get you shut off. All of a sudden you, you got somebody come on your website from another country, buy a whole bunch of stuff.
Yes. Okay. The red flags go up. This funding flag goes. That risk manager is on the phone calling your business. That’s why it’s important that you make a phone call. Definitely mention that. Otherwhere, you mentioned that earlier as well. Make sure you’re responding to your calls, right? You get a phone call, you get an email, and your sales rep calls you, hey, the bank contacted me.
You have 10 chargebacks. Are you aware of what’s going on? Is there something going on? Did you get a new employee, blah, blah? Some businesses are just prone to chargebacks. Like nightclubs, they just get chargebacks or rolling in daily, So the banks, and if the bank is friendly to that type of business, they’re going to set, they know, oh, that was a card present, EMV transaction.
This person is just being difficult. Got it. So, you have to, that’s why you must understand like, who are you working with and making sure you’re working with the right type of company, and you have the right fraud controls in place? Cause it’s different if you have a digital product or a physical product, then what kind of fraud controls can you use?
And let’s say you’re doing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a month, there are services that we can recommend to you where that handle your chargebacks, right? They go, and they get access, as long as you can fix it, where they have access to your systems so they can get the tracking number. Time of your purchases and all that, and that showed that the person received it and got the gateway info and then, send them, send the letters for you and all that.
So, it just depends. But on front-end fraud, which we talked about earlier, you got to figure that out for yourself. No one, no you can only stop that with human eyes. Yep. Right now, anyway. As far as, yeah, far as I know, I haven’t seen any product on, I went to a whole farm. Even if there is a product, I wouldn’t put my, put all my eggs in that basket.
I’m just saying you got to put it on there. Yeah. You definitely got to install some security plugins. Your ECRI website, monitor it and update it regularly. Watch yours. Yes. Make sure your order size gets and set up flags. Oh, the, so before we end the show, what is something that they should do if they do get cut off?
If you get shut off. Make sure, Are you on the match list or the TMF list? So, the match list is the member alert to control high risk. Or the terminated merchant file, TMF, if you’re on those, if you’re on that list, they, you really can’t get off. You have to start a new business. You really can’t get off the list.
You’re going to have to start over. You’re going to have to get a new sign or new corporation, new addresses, and all that. Now, sometimes you might be able to get around that. Let’s say you have a really big business. You’re doing millions of dollars a month, and all of a sudden you find yourself on the match list and maybe.
It’s not a. Maybe there are extenuating circumstances. Okay. There could be a bank because basically it’s a member alert. To control high risk. Maybe you say, hey, you can, Alan, can you find me a bank? I’ll give, I’ll put a deposit at the bank for half a million, 2 million.
You might find somebody that says they’ll ignore the match list, and they’ll take your account. Nice. So, it depends on like I have another guy he’s spending now like 30 grand with a, they’re doing hundreds of thousands of dollars of business, and they had a problem during.
I put him in touch with an attorney, right? He paid all the chargebacks off, but he had a manufacturing facility and it got shut down. They pretty much couldn’t keep up with contacting all the customers, of, hey, what do you want to do? Do. Your order, you want us to return your money.
And they got, and people, that they couldn’t get ahold of some of the people, and they got a ton of chargebacks. They got put on a match, but they’re doing hundreds of, doing like seven, $800,000 a month. So, we’re getting some information. We found a bank, and they said, hey, long as this guy owns the building that he’s in and all that, and we can.
Cross corporate guarantees and this and that, and the guy signs personally, they’re willing to take the account because they can see that, there is the extent, we had a hotel during the pandemic. Pandemic happened. Basically, what Alan’s saying is money talks and Bull S was. No, but we, but, and make sure that you’re doing, you’re due diligent on your business.
Yeah. Communicate with your processor. Yes. Always, number one. And if you’re, if you get cut off, communicate with your processor. Find out why. See if there’s something that you could do. And most likely there was probably an email or a phone call that you missed. Because they’re going to, they’re going to warn you.
No. If you see something that happened on your account, be proactive about it. Go forward. I’m saying that the processor will warn you too. Advance. Yes. You’ll get warnings too. Change this on your site. Hey, you need to update your paperwork. Hey, this is, we did another podcast you can listen to where we talked about.
A site getting attacked with the right bogus credit cards and people botting the site and then running a whole hundred thousand authorizations on your account. So, we did a podcast about that. Go back and listen to them, go back and listen to that podcast and learn about, having security on your website.
So, stuff like that doesn’t happen. And if something like that does, communicate with the processor, hey, this happened, blah, blah, blah. Hey, da. You know what’s going on. Do you know what I mean? So long story short, communication is key. Communication is key. Making sure your business type is accepted. Read the terms and conditions and understand what business types they accept.
What products are acceptable? What’s unacceptable and find a processor that works with your business type, in need. Yes. And your needs, listen, sometimes, Strike, PayPal, and Square works for millions of businesses, right? Millions. What do you know? Millions of businesses use them.
So, it works for some, Works for a lot of people. Doesn’t work for everybody. Yes. So, you got to just figure out what works for you. What are yours? In your business? Do you need to have somebody where you can get ahold of them? 24-7, right? I don’t like the 24-7, but I make myself available too, there you go. The business we do business with.
So, everybody peace out. Have a great day. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Catch us on social media at B2B vault watch for FinTech Fridays when we go live, and you can answer. You can ask us live questions during that. On Facebook. Facebook and LinkedIn. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube. And YouTube. You can ask live questions and we’ll answer them.
So, everybody have a great day! Find us everywhere at B2B Vault. Peace out! PEACE.
