Video Transcription

Hey, everybody. Justin with B2B Vault: The Payment Technology Podcast with your host Allen Kopelman. And we’ll be providing educational information about business payments, FinTech, financial technology, decentralized finance, and the technology businesses need in today’s world. And in today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about the merchant nightmares that Alan has experienced with his 20 years of payment processing stuff. So here we go, man, Allen taken over. But Yeah, so I thought today we’d have, you know, me and Justin, we have matching hats, you know, nice, nice hats, B2B vol. So We wanted to have like, we call this one merchant nightmares, but I want to, you know, it’s more like stories that happen. When we’re working with merchants, and you know, things happen, it’s business, you never know what’s going to happen when you have a problem, you want to make sure, you know, you’re working with a knowledgeable company. That will be able to take care of your issues to get them resolved quickly.

so that, you know, you don’t have, you know, you don’t miss money or whatever else could be happening, or you get the help you need. And the phone is, you know, always answered. So let’s get into a few stories. I’ve been doing many of these for 20 years, and we started selling this terminal called the lento terminal. One of the great features was it held 1500 transactions. And, you know, back in those days, 2001, 2002, 2003, not the credit card terminals, you would be lucky like the small Verifone units held like maybe 50 hyper com, maybe a hundred. So, you know, to have a 1500 capacity and put that in a busy business is as good. They don’t have to batch out. You know, like if you had a sandwich shop and many people were paying by credit card, you know, you might have to batch out a couple of times if you’re doing two, 300 a day. So they get a phone calling this merchant. And I say, listen, you know, you’re not, you know, I trained you, you know, you run the report, then you run the batch. That’s how you get your money. Like you’re not running any batches. So the guy’s telling me he’s running batches, but he’s not. He’s just running a report. So the guy doesn’t listen for a few hours. Another couple of days later, I get a call; hey, my terminal says full. So the guy said, oh, you got a batch out. So the guy batches out, and the guy’s telling me that the paper’s use like more than a roll of paper and all got batched out.

If that happened today, it would be a complete and utter nightmare because, you know, the Tia transactions in the terminal that were like 30 days old, the rules kind of change, you know, the rules change now. So, especially if there were any debit cards in there and those people had no money in their bank account, there would be transactions that after that batch hit the processor and they went out to get funded the money back, they would be transactions missing. Right. So, you know, you would lose money, but he got fortunate. I think he had one or two debit cards that didn’t have enough money on them. And that’s it. That was pretty lucky out of 1500 transactions. But that was a crazy nightmare. It all ended well because, but we tried to tell the merchant, don’t do that. Now, another thing that happened was one of the big changes, you know, I’ve been doing this 20 years was the S the at one point in time, the full credit card number printed on the receipts, which is crazy, right? If someone could pick up your receipt, they have your credit card number and the expiration date. Sometimes they can be committed in all kinds of fraud. Right. So, they started, they wanted to mask the numbers on the credit card receipts. So at first, the first level of that was, oh, we’re going to show the last four digits of the credit card on the merchant receipt on the customer receipt.

But the merchant receipt would have the whole credit card number on it. Right. The one the merchant, had would still have it. And then they later changed it where, you know, no numbers, just the last four digits. Right. But what happened was when this rule went into effect, oh man, the ambulance chasers, the same guys who were out doing those ADA lawsuits. Cause your ATM is too high. You’re, the bathroom’s not good. You don’t have a ramp. Like I owned the building. Right. And there was they, they, they, this guy came out to the building, and I owned it with several people and the guy didn’t, they got measured the, a handicap ramp. Right. And the guy and they’re trying to like, make us have tried to have a lawsuit against the building for the, a handicap ramp. And we were like, what are you talking about? There are ramps everywhere. People can ride up the ramp to get into the, get onto the sidewalk. Right. And the guy was going crazy. And then what we didn’t realize was there was a building next to our building, and they had a ramp, but the grade was too high was too steep. Right. But that wasn’t my building. So I said to the guys, I don’t own that. That’s not mine. That’s next door. You know you have to talk to them; you have to talk to them. And you filed a lawsuit against them, wrote the book to me, buddy. Well, we didn’t know what he was talking about. We said, come out to the building and show us.

Cause the guy was sad pictures. We didn’t know what he was talking about until we saw two weeks until we came over, and he goes that ramp over there. And we’re like, that’s not ours. It’s not on our property. It connects to the pro; it’s right on the property line but wasn’t ours. But the same lawyers who were doing that started going after, you know, they would even tell people like, oh, when you go in somewhere, try to take the merchant receipt. Right. And then they would Sue. And then most of the merchants would have to, and we had a couple of merchants who got lawyer letters. And then they ended up having a cough up, you know, like five grand, six grand to get rid of these people. It’s crazy. Do you know? And that was, that was really, that was nuts. There was like a couple of God, and a couple of people running around, down here in south Florida that was going on all over the country, just ambulance chasing. So this next story was hilarious. It took me a long time to get this guy; he was a drug rep, and he had a girlfriend, and she was she, she worked in a hair salon and then he wanted to open up a sunglass store why he won, but sort of sell sunglasses.

Right. So he was selling had this set up this whole store, running sunglasses. And he got his girlfriend, and she had all her girls, and they’re working, and they’re selling sunglasses, so he calls me on the phone. Oh, my bill was so high, blah, blah, blah. So I get a hold of the bill, and I look at it, and I go, yeah, you’re like a key entering a lot of cards. So he goes, let me find out. So he goes over to the store, calls me on the phone, and he’s like, yeah, they say the credit card machine doesn’t work. So I’m like, okay. He goes, well, where are you in? The area I happened to be in was near my house. So I drive over there now park go inside. You know, I don’t talk to anybody. I go over to the credit card machine. I call him over. I take my credit card goes right there I go. I don’t know what you’re talking about. So he takes his credit card. He runs it. No problem. So I called one of the girls who worked in the store, and I handed her my credit card. Show me how you run that credit card on the credit card machine. She goes, yeah, it doesn’t work. She puts the credit card in, and she goes, look, see it, doesn’t read the numbers. You know, it’s supposed to read the magnetic strip, Omar, the card puts it, putting it in the slot and the, you know, where you slide it? Not now; EMV sticks it in. It’s right. Yeah. This is back in the old days, and you just slide it through. Right. And she’s like, it doesn’t read the numbers.

See, I think God just looks at me after he cursed me out on the phone. Right. Like literally was, he blasted me like the credit card machine is up POS get over here. Now it doesn’t read the numbers. Then we called over more girls. There were like three or four girls working there. They all were doing it the same way. I was like, so we showed him. I was like, not try. I could not like a laugh. Right. Because I would have started laughing. No, I couldn’t laugh. Like in front of the guy, he was getting p****d with the employees. Right. He was right. He was p****d. So they were swiping the card wrong. You know, we used to get a phone call. I had one guy that used to, and they used to have, they used to clean the store, their store all the time. And every time they would do a big cleaning, they would call me on the phone, the credit card machine doesn’t work. So I’ll be like, dude, you have to check. Like, make sure that the power’s plugged them. The phone line or the internet is plugged into the correct port on the machine. And I said, listen if I drive over there because I’m going to drive over there and you’re going to see, it’s like something stupid. So I come over there one time, and the machine’s not even plugged in. There’s no, the power cord not even plugged into the machine. It’s plugged into like a phone line. I’m like, come on. Like, and then the next time I go over there, I tell him, I go, well, if I come and it’s something stupid again, I said, you have to pay me a hundred bucks. He goes, you’re on. I checked it. Boom. So I drive over there. The machine, again, the internet cord is plugged into something. I don’t even know what the pin pad is for it.

And the pin pads plugged into the thing. And I’m like, come on. You know, what are they doing? Like who’s taking the machine apart. It’s like if they got to pick it up and wipe onto the counter, like, I don’t know, part in the first place. Right? Why know they moved it or something, but still like, you know, it’s not that simple. It says it’s on the machine. Like literally, it says phone. It says, I, you know, ethernet for the ethernet cord. It says pin for the pin bad. I mean, it’s pretty spelled out on the machine. I wouldn’t assume so. So you know, that happened, you know, we’ve had, we used to have that happen. Like all the time, you know, printers would break, oh, the machine’s not printing. Hey, can you turn the paper the other way? Cause they have the paper in the machine upside down, especially thermal printers, paper only prints on one side. It doesn’t print on both sides. Like, you know, the bond paper would, right. So another time, I went onto this hair salon about four or five times as a very upscale hair salon. And the guy, you know, I showed them like the equipment and everything, and he seemed pretty happy. And then the guy calls me on the phone, and he says, can you come over to my shop? I go there, and I see you the same piece of equipment. I was trying to sell them. He bought it from somebody else, and he signed the lease and all this. Then he says to me, ” Yeah, it goes up off this machine. I’m calling the company. They can’t help me, blah, blah, blah. The machine doesn’t work. And he showed me his American Express card.

And now this is like 2003. Okay. So 2003, they started putting cards with an EMV chip on them. But the chip didn’t do anything at pride. It wasn’t even programmed. Right. It didn’t do a thing. So you got to show me the stick. I’m like, dude, that doesn’t work. Just cause the machine is an EMV reader, there’s no EMV network. There’s nothing read in that thing. Right. He went nuts. The guy literally like he went crazy. He called the company up. He bought the machine from told them they ripped them off. Cause they’re selling them on this. Oh, you got to have the EMV EMV EVM machines. And the first set up the first couple of sets of machines that came out with EMV chip readers on them. The readers didn’t even work. You know, they didn’t even work. So it was kind of crazy, you know? And that was kind of hard to tell people like, Hey, that doesn’t work. There’s no reason to have it because there’s no network on the back end to read. Right. So why spend money on a machine with the EMV reader? They were super expensive, you know? But he ended up getting to send the machine back to the company. Cause he only had you had it for one day.

They lied to him, and they sold it to him for like 3000, like on some lease that it was crazy. Some crazy lease price. I told him, dude, I was going to sell you the machine for a thousand bucks. You paid like $3,000. He was like, oh, but it has this EMV. And I’m like; I’ll make you a bet. You can’t process an EMV transaction on that thing. So it didn’t work. This was literally like a crazy story. So I got I’m driving in the car, and I’m in up in like coral Springs somewhere. I think this client calls, oh my, my credit card machine is broken, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I need a new credit card machine. So I’m like, wow, I’m far from the office wherever I can get, you know, I don’t have that driving around machines in my car. And so I said, Hey, you know, you have a machine at your other restaurant. There are two different machines over there. And the cause he wouldn’t give them to me to keep, you know, he was very, you know, very tight, you know? So he wanted, I said, so I’m going to go over there and get one of those machines. I said, oh, you need the printer you need. He goes, yeah, everything. Get the printer, the wires, everything. I’m like, what’s wrong with the machine. He goes. It just doesn’t work. I was like, man; this guy’s just like getting crazy with me, like on the phone, hurry up.

And I remember, I think bill Clinton was in town. That’s how long ago this was. So the highway was like all blocked off with, you know, cops and the secret service. Cause as he was driving, you couldn’t even go the other way. Right. The opposite direction. So that whenever they have a dignitary on the highway, they block it off so that people can’t, I don’t know how those guys figure that out the secret service, but they have a way to do that. So nobody’s on the other side of the highway. I have no clue how they’ve been on the freeway when they’ve done it before, and it’s nuts. I had to like hurry up, and I had an, I ended up taking, I went to this other restaurant, got this stuff and the manager was complaining. He didn’t want to give it to me. And I had to call the guy on the phone, and I finally got it in the car. And then I said, oh, I got to. And so I went past the airport on the streets cause he was flying in and out. He was coming in or out of West Palm beach. So I went up; I was in like Boeing. And I went up the street on the regular streets to pass the airport, got on the highway, got up to this place, was like in North Palm beach. I walk into the fire departments there. The cops are there. I’m like, what happened? And I walk up. I said, oh, where’s the, where what’s going on.

I go over to where that credit card machine is supposed to go. Cause he, he had, he had like three or four of them and this place was a big, big restaurant bar. So there were like three or four credit garment chains. I go, which one is it? And then he goes, oh, the one on the bar. So I walk over as I start to come around the corner to see the bar; I see all these firemen and everything. I’m like, oh, what happened? Oh, what happened was they fired a bartender. So the bartender got p****d, and he took it at the end of the night; they shut off all the breakers so that after they did that, he took bleach and poured it on the power strip that was over there. And then when the bookkeeper came in, she turned on the breakers in the restaurant, and poof, the whole power strip went up in flames. The fire meted the cash register and the credit card processing machine. I was like, wow, the fire melted the whole bar. So I had to go set it up in another area. And then I had to go and go to radio shack because you know who I’m this? I’m not, and I don’t carry around like a hundred-foot phone line back. No, no. Back in those days were phone lines. Oh, right, Right, Right, right. That’s ether, net. We didn’t have ethernet for a long, long time. Ether, net terminals. And even when the ethernet terminals came out, people didn’t have internet. So the whole bar is burnt to a crisp. So to set it up in another part of the bar, they had to buy another cash register at Office Depot, but it was pretty crazy. I got it all set up. I’d run the radio shack, get a hundred foot of phone line. Hey, just real quick, your little, a commercial break. Once you guys do a check us out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher, Pandora Amazon music, and anywhere else that you’re streaming we’re on, on every DSP that you can imagine, check out B2B vault, that info. If you want to fill out the questionnaire or have any comments, or if you were interested in becoming a guest, we have a contact form for you to fill out there.

You can contact us that way. We’re B2B vault at B2B vault on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. You can connect with Allen on LinkedIn at Ellen Kopelman. It’s pretty simple. KOPELMAN is his last name. And this is episode 60, by the way. So, you know, we’re on a thousand plays over a thousand plays of the podcast and going good, man. So thanks to all the listeners. And We just had a press release put out on us, And someone published a press release about the B2B vault. So the green sheet. So check that out. If you’re, you know, you’re into, on our Following Feeds back to you, but All right. So here’s another crazy story, Justin. This one, this one actually like blew my mind. So I get a phone call from this guy, and he says, oh, I don’t know what to do. I said, what happened? He goes by accident. I was supposed to charge this person $150 by mistake. I charged 150 grand, and it went through. He batched out the salt back then; we didn’t have virtual terminals. You use the software on your PC. That acted sort of like the virtual terminal. This was pre virtual thermal. So we had this software called a PC charge or something like that was, you know, you installed it like on your local machine. And so I go, what did you do? He goes, oh, and then I batched it out. And then I ran a refund. I was like, oh my God. So, I was in the area I drive over. I’m like, no, there’s no way to fix this. Right. So I’m like, Wait. So like he bested out, Right? So the hundred It’s already done. So then, when you try to Find the Fund, there’s no transaction. There’s a transact.

You can run a refund. Cause their card was already run as a sale. So here’s the problem with the bank. When you, when you, when banks do stuff at the bank, they do debits before credits. Okay. So they take your money out before they put your money in. When the guy does that, they will try and get hundred 50 grand out of the account. They don’t have 150 grand. Whoa. So the guy was flipping out, and it turned out that it was the son of the owner of the company. So he’s like, oh, you can’t tell my dad. So I’m like, dude, I got to tell your dad because your dad’s kind of flipped out because it’s, you need to tell your dad, I’m Like, we have to do something. I got to tell your dad, and We have to talk to your dad. Right. I have to talk to your dad. He was like, oh my dad’s not here. And blah, blah, blah. And his dad had another business. And his dad was also an attorney, and I was doing, I did all their credit card processing, and they, this kid, also owned like he used to buy a VHS and DVD, like D CD ROMs and DVDs and stuff. Not DV. I don’t remember what was before the, what was before the DVD player. It wasn’t CD ROM. Yeah. CD ROM. But you can play it like on a video. It was like the Plate on your computer. Right. But you could also play it like on a, on a, on a, maybe it was a DVD player. Yeah. In the GD rounds, we’ll work on a DVD player. Right. Cause it’s like, if you put the DVD in, there was always that little space in the middle for a smaller disk. Right. We’ll just sit here. He was buying all these VHS tapes from all these videos stores going out of business and some DVDs. And then he had like a warehouse, and he was selling the stuff.

So like I had a lot of merchant accounts, I had to see his dad. And then we had to go to the bank, and he had to go, the bank made them sign a paper saying that he wasn’t going to disrupt, you know, they’re loaned him 150 grand for 10 minutes, you know? Wow. And so he could, he was a good customer at the bank, so the bank covered it. And then the credit card processor we got, you know, cause the payment bounced, I couldn’t stop it in the morning. After five o’clock at night, there was no stopping this thing from happening the next day because it happens in the middle of the night. Right. So the bank agreed, they loaned the guy that money. And then we got the bank to rerun the debit and the credit, and then the bank got their money back. So that was pretty crazy; I mean, that has to be like one of the reasons why banks have to be something in place for big transactions like that. No, but I’m just saying, like, you know, you, if you make a mistake, I always tell merchants, like if you run the credit card and for whatever reason, you made a mistake, you have to avoid it out. But the guy panicked, Right. Instead of calling me on the phone, like what to do, he panicked. And this place used to do a ton of business. At one point in time, it was a huge pharmacy business. And they, they supplied like diabetic medication, diabetic strips medicines for the vet. They had a deal with the veterans, hospitals, the veteran’s insurance, or something. And there were supplying medication shipping out medication, like all day, man. It was like a huge business.

They had like five, six pharmacists in there. They were, the wild to do like a million dollars a month. No kidding. Yeah. It was crazy. And this next story, this one blew my mind. One of my biggest customers. I was to check their batches every day and make sure they batched out, you know? Cause they had a lot of locations of different restaurants and I called them. I go, listen, here’s the problem. There’s no batch. There’s no batch on you’re no, and there’s no batch. And I’m out of town and blah, blah, blah. There’s no batch. And the girl’s like, you know, back then there wasn’t like, you know, take a picture with your iPhone deal. Right, right, right. There’s no that didn’t exist. So she gets the receipts, and I’m telling her, look on the receipt, scan it. That says to send it to me by email. And I look, and I go, it says demo mode. They searched terms to find out that now this restaurant used to get chargebacks. So these, the imprint, all the cards take an imprint of the cards because they used to get so many chargebacks, you know, cause it was in a tourist, south beach area and people would just charge, ship back all the time. They would just chargeback, Watch your Language. Right. Okay. Bomb on B2B vault. First is the first explicit podcast episode. I don’t know that the other day we might’ve had something Because I watched it and we did great. Oh, we did. Yes. I could not believe it. Although I was moving my hands weird. We were very itchy.

No. So it ended up that for like two days, none of the credit cards went through the former manager before he got he like whatever he quit or whatever. He went in the back and turned the system on to demo mode, Where he thought that was going to be this payback to Them. Yeah. So thank goodness they imprinted all the cards. And then I came back from vacation. I came back like two days later I went down to the restaurant. I got all the tickets. Oh, there were hundreds and hundreds of tickets. I had to go through them one by one, sit in my house, and key enter all these cards into a credit card machine because they were never run. Yeah. Wow. Crazy dude. It was crazy. This story was also when I first got started in the business, I just got a call from this client, and they go, 500 books came out of our bank account. So I don’t know what’s going on. Drive over to the business show me the receipts from the credit card machine. Let’s see what’s going on. Right. And I look at every single one says credit credit credit. I’m like, what are you doing? And, one of the girls that work there, instead of hitting sale, was hitting credit because I guess she thought credit card, correct. That logic makes sense. Save all the people, the money back. So then we had to sit there. We had to call up the credit card processor back then. All the numbers were on the receipts, though. This is pre that time. So we had the credit card numbers. So we had to go. So let’s say someone bought something for 50 bucks. You had to charge them twice because 50 to make it zero. And then another 50 to get your 50 bucks. Wow. So that was a, it was a mess. People were calling them up, complaining and everything. But you know, the sale means sale. Credit means you’re given a refund or a credit back. Another time like chargebacks is always, nobody wants to deal with chargebacks, but we had a bar in downtown Miami, and they had 150 chargebacks come in over.

Like it may be a 60 day period of time. That year we had the orange bowl, the national championship, the super bowl, maybe even the pro bowl, where like every sink, there was like all kinds of games going on. Like at one time in Miami. So they got blown up. We were getting phone calls from the bank, the processor, the card brands we had to get on phone calls with them. We explained to them look how much business they did. Right. Millions of dollars of sales. Okay. This is a small number of tickets, you know, 150 receipts is nothing. This place did like 50,000 sales, right. Or some, some crazy amount of sales. Right? So we’re like, this is, you know, they were like freaking out, cause it’s 150, but you go on the list. Like if you have a hundred chargebacks in 30 days now, it could be any 30 days. It’s not like they don’t measure it from month to month. It can be in any 30 days. You’re like on a list for excessive chargebacks. So what do you, what do you do with This? No. Well, we had to help them with like all the chargebacks. Some of them were crazy. Some people wrote, oh, I was never in there. And these kinds of bars where people are spending money on bottles and stuff like that, they get your driver’s license. They print your thing, and they got cameras in the place. So you can see the person, you know, like someone who goes and buys a bottle or rent a room or a couch or whatever the deal is, you know, they go over and to a certain place and they have their picture and all that. So that’s, you know, that they have it. So it’s, it’s crazy. So, you know, whatever, we were swamped helping them write the letter and sending it into the chargeback department and getting it.

In one of the letters, there were all kinds of letters. Like I would never go to this type of bar. What’s the strip club. Oh, I would never go to this kind of place. I was never there. No, but there are pictures of the guy. So I will be like, man, I’m just sending this all to your wife. You’re going to pay me now, or I’m emailing it to you. Well, we’ve done that before we Go there. Every time We had a chargeback where the guy wanted, he went into a strip club in Vegas and the, he paid with one credit card for the, he had dinner there and then paid with another credit card for the fond that he had. And he tried to charge it back. We just looked the guy up on LinkedIn called them on the phone. We’ve done that before we find people say, Hey, you know, you’re doing this chargeback. Or maybe the merchant lost the chargeback. We tell them we want the money or go to the merchants going to file charges. Because basically, it’s the fraud. Anytime you’re going to a restaurant or bar, laws on the book date back into the 18 hundreds called the fraud of an innkeeper. And they say, how does he know that? When I went to chef school, that’s one of the things that we talk about like dine and dash, dine and dash, or what they call that dine and dash. So what you know, like what you do about that. Well, there are laws against dining and dash. It’s actually in Florida. I know for a fact, and in many other states, it’s a felony.

Oh yeah, no, it’s a felony. It’s a felony. So you can’t do it. Dine and dash. So, if someone defrauds a restaurant or a bar unless the police saw them and they were completely intoxicated, right. They could say, well, I didn’t know what I was doing. When I ordered that Dom parent young, I was completely out of mind. Right. And the cops witnessed it. Okay, well, maybe you could get out of it, but not really. You’re going to, and you know, we had one place; they filed charges against the guy. And then he ended up paying, and we had another one where we had this customer, and they charged up about 40 grand in AMAX. And we went; we had two cases like that. One went back and forth, and one went to court. And I remember I had to go down to the courthouse, and I had to give a deposition at, and I had to talk to the attorneys. And I explained to them, you know, like, Hey, the guy was there. There are pictures. There’s this there’s that it’s a legal business. Anybody you know, you’ve got a federal tax ID, bank again, business licenses, liquor licenses. You’re a business, whatever, you know, whatever your business is, otherwise wouldn’t give you a merchant account. Right? So the judge, there were pictures of the guy, the judge; basically, the case never went like into court because the judge said he wanted to see the evidence. And then, I had to do a phone call with the judge to explain how the merchant account worked. And the judge told the guy you have to pay, or you’re out of there. We had another one where a guy did 40 grand, about 40 grand, and another bar. And we went back and forth, back and forth with American express for months with the chargeback department. And we wrote, kept writing letters and letters and letters. And we said, Hey, the guy was there. There are pictures.

We got the pictures off the cameras. We sent them the tape video, and we sent it to American express. We reached out to the cardholder and sent it to him. And we’re like, listen, you know, if you go to court, you’ll lose. Cause we have you on tape. You know, you’re in the bar. You can’t say you weren’t there because they have cameras by the front door. You know we called the company up. You identify the guy like walking in the door, and then they use facial recognition to search through the rest of your DVR to find the guy in the club. So we had a whole tape of this guy who ended up paying the money that people always end up paying. So, and we don’t give up. So we have our program charge, rack rescue, which helps us with cost, you know, keep customers because we help them with their chargebacks. Do you know? So that’s one reason why many people do business with us is to do that. You know, rip-off stories happen all the time. So we had a client one time, they were at a print, it was a printing company. And they got a huge order, like $8,000. And this guy wanted them to print all these brochures and stuff and then ship it to The Bahamas. And he said, oh, I’m going to pay you on a credit card. And then when the freight forwarder comes, I want you to pay the freight, the freight forward company. That’s a scam right there. Boom. Anytime someone’s using a freight forwarder, that’s a big no-no. That’s like the red diff; there’s a flag on the play. There’s a flag on apple. Like anytime you hear a freight-forwarder boom, you’re out. I don’t even know what it is. And it doesn’t, and it just sounds forwarder. Anything like, I don’t want to say No.

It’s like someone’s coming to the business to pick up whatever the product. And then they’re going to take it to whoever’s shipping it to The Bahamas. So like, people use those kinds of services for that. But the thing sounded too fake. I’m like, why are you going to spend all this money? Like a thousand dollars shipping, some postcards, and stuff over to The Bahamas on a boat. You could just get it printed in The Bahamas. I mean, there’s gotta be a print shop. There Is a Print Shop. Right? So it didn’t make sense. I told the guy not to do it. He got ripped off for about nine grand. He Did it anyway. He didn’t listen to me. You guys got so mad at me. Oh, you’re trying to wreck my business and all this stuff. And I was like, no, I’m saving you money. Don’t do it. What did he say afterward? Nothing. He was just p****d. And then he and his business partners, he had business partners. They all got in a fight, and they split up. But like not right away, but you know, in the future. But you know, you just, you know, I tell merchants how it is all the time. I’m like, listen, if you get an order that looks too big. It’s too good to be true. Check the address, make sure where it’s going. You know, like somebody ordered 40 pairs of shoes from a website. I said, oh, where’s it going? They told me about an ups store. I go; that thing’s going to be a chargeback. You’re going to put those shoes in the box. It’s going to get shipped out. You’re going to run your batch. And then you’re going to get a letter in the mail within two days, three days, if a chargeback. Sure enough, boom. It was a chargeback. And that merchant again told me the same thing. Oh, you’re a sales preventer. No, you can make up your mind and do what you want, but you shouldn’t ship to ups store. That’s a Big, any way to Did it anyway to what kind of sneakers was just they owned they own like a shoe, a shoe website that sold shoes on like a reseller.

No, they had a company that designed then no, they had like retail stores, but this was somebody making the largest search on the website. And I said, no way, man, there’s no way, no, we called the guy on the phone, and I’m like, no, do not do that. It doesn’t sound like it’s going to go. We tell merchants all the time. I had another guy at a toner business, and somebody called up once an order, like a hundred toners. And the guy called me who I’m scared of. It’s a hundred donors. Look up the address. Sure enough. It was something mailbox store. Like not even a ups, just a generic mailbox store. I was like, do what you want. But you know, that’s probably going to result in a chargeback. Even though he went in and voided the transaction, he got a phone call the next day from the real cardholder, really thanking him for not doing that. It showed up on their credit card as authorization, but it didn’t go through the client. No, no, it went through, but he voided it. Oh, he was going to, I guess, did it, but they still saw the charge. So it’s crazy. This story happened to a friend of mine where this guy that a furniture store and the furniture store, somebody came in, they used five different credit cards with five different names on it. Then they came back with trucks to pick up some of the stuff. And then the rest of the store delivered the next day, and they set the stuff up in the house where they delivered to. And then, about five or six days later, all the credit cards were charged back. It was a lot of money, like over a hundred grand. My friend called me. He goes, what do I do? Blah, blah, blah. So, and ended up that called the cops, the call. I helped them out.

We called the police on the phone. We called the neighborhood where the house was. And it turned out we got a little got kind of lucky. Cause there, there was a house on the block. My friend went there to that neighborhood at night. And there were a couple of houses that had security cameras on them. Cause they were big houses. Right. It turned out this house foreclosed, and some scammer got all the furniture, but the cops caught the person. But the furniture was long gone. I don’t know if the store ever recovered their money, but they lost the furniture, like a hundred grand. I mean, I’ve seen it happen like sunglass stores furniture stores. People come in, and you know, as the guy came in the sunglass store with Don the same one with the numbers. And some guy came in to buy some expensive sunglasses. They were like gold. They were like three or $400 apiece. And they use fake credit cards, and they keep them in. And I told them, you know, I’m just reading this. Two days later, the card was targeted. And they went over to the house, and the house was empty. They are moving trucks to empty the house. Yeah. The moving trucks. But they got lucky because they got the moving company’s name and called them. But the furniture was moved to like a warehouse somewhere, and it was long gone, you know, long gone. They got a license plate off of a couple of the cars going in and out of the house. And that’s how they call it. One of the people. But even though they caught that person, the person was a minor, a minor, a minor accomplice. And the whole thing, he didn’t know what was going on. They thought the realtor was in on it too, because how would the people get the key to the house? That’s true. It was a complicated thing. But in the end, that, you know, I tell merchants all the time, like, you know, someone comes in and trying to use multiple credit cards. Do you need to check out what’s going on?

Like, is that credit card belongs to that person? I mean, I tell people all the time I’ve gone in to buy furniture. They’re I go once a year, your ID, Right? Letting you pay for furniture. I mean, city furniture rooms to go my bought from Karl’s no way they want your driver’s license. Yeah. I just bought a bed from American freight, and I mean, it was only $240, but they still asked me for my job. Yeah. Because furniture, people get anything someone can steal and put on Craigslist and all that, you know, that’s, what’s happened. Look at what’s going on. I was reading a story the other day about San Francisco people going into these stores and just stealing, and in California steel, the next day, all that stuff ends up on eBay, Poshmark, and all this stuff. And they’re sending letters out to people like me, cause we have marketplaces customers, and they’re like, Hey, what kind of, you know, they want us to police the marketplace like, but we do. We police our marketplaces because anybody selling the name and brand products has to show a company contract. So we know that they have a contract to buy those name brand products. Right. That’s hard to do with Poshmark or any of those websites because that’s all secondhand stuff. So anybody can do it. So it’s hard to control. I mean, Let’s see, you can put products on It, but it’s hard to control for them to control that. But that’s what’s going on now. It’s bad, you know, really, really bad. What were some fun stories? Some of it was crazy, crazy stuff, but we deal with stuff. I get phone calls all the time from merchants. I answer my phone; oh, I have a problem. I have a chargeback. You know, what should I do in this situation?

That situation, you know, we helped people with PPP loan stuff, information, and how to do it when that was going on. So, you know, we try to stay informed and you know, try to give P you should only give advice, right? You take our advice; maybe it saves you some money. You don’t take our advice. I’ve had enough experience with this kind of crazy chargebacks and scams that you know, and people will use the same ones. The old ones come back. They come, they come back history, repeat history repeats itself. So thank you for listening to the B2B vault. We’re out at Carpe diem; everybody, have a great day. Follow us on your favorite podcast network and social media; B2B vault, have a great day, everybody.Hey, everybody. Justin with B2B Vault: The Payment Technology Podcast with your host Allen Kopelman. And we’ll be providing educational information about business payments, FinTech, financial technology, decentralized finance, and the technology businesses need in today’s world. And in today’s episode, we’re going to be talking about the merchant nightmares that Alan has experienced with his 20 years of payment processing stuff. So here we go, man, Allen taken over. But Yeah, so I thought today we’d have, you know, me and Justin, we have matching hats, you know, nice, nice hats, B2B vol. So We wanted to have like, we call this one merchant nightmares, but I want to, you know, it’s more like stories that happen. When we’re working with merchants, and you know, things happen, it’s business, you never know what’s going to happen when you have a problem, you want to make sure, you know, you’re working with a knowledgeable company.

That will be able to take care of your issues to get them resolved quickly. so that, you know, you don’t have, you know, you don’t miss money or whatever else could be happening, or you get the help you need. And the phone is, you know, always answered. So let’s get into a few stories. I’ve been doing many of these for 20 years, and we started selling this terminal called the lento terminal. One of the great features was it held 1500 transactions. And, you know, back in those days, 2001, 2002, 2003, not the credit card terminals, you would be lucky like the small Verifone units held like maybe 50 hyper com, maybe a hundred. So, you know, to have a 1500 capacity and put that in a busy business is as good. They don’t have to batch out. You know, like if you had a sandwich shop and many people were paying by credit card, you know, you might have to batch out a couple of times if you’re doing two, 300 a day. So they get a phone calling this merchant. And I say, listen, you know, you’re not, you know, I trained you, you know, you run the report, then you run the batch. That’s how you get your money. Like you’re not running any batches. So the guy’s telling me he’s running batches, but he’s not. He’s just running a report. So the guy doesn’t listen for a few hours. Another couple of days later, I get a call; hey, my terminal says full. So the guy said, oh, you got a batch out. So the guy batches out, and the guy’s telling me that the paper’s use like more than a roll of paper and all got batched out. If that happened today, it would be a complete and utter nightmare because, you know, the Tia transactions in the terminal that were like 30 days old, the rules kind of change, you know, the rules change now. So, especially if there were any debit cards in there and those people had no money in their bank account, there would be transactions that after that batch hit the processor and they went out to get funded the money back, they would be transactions missing. Right. So, you know, you would lose money, but he got fortunate. I think he had one or two debit cards that didn’t have enough money on them. And that’s it. That was pretty lucky out of 1500 transactions. But that was a crazy nightmare. It all ended well because, but we tried to tell the merchant, don’t do that.

Now, another thing that happened was one of the big changes, you know, I’ve been doing this 20 years was the S the at one point in time, the full credit card number printed on the receipts, which is crazy, right? If someone could pick up your receipt, they have your credit card number and the expiration date. Sometimes they can be committed in all kinds of fraud. Right. So, they started, they wanted to mask the numbers on the credit card receipts. So at first, the first level of that was, oh, we’re going to show the last four digits of the credit card on the merchant receipt on the customer receipt. But the merchant receipt would have the whole credit card number on it. Right. The one the merchant, had would still have it. And then they later changed it where, you know, no numbers, just the last four digits. Right. But what happened was when this rule went into effect, oh man, the ambulance chasers, the same guys who were out doing those ADA lawsuits. Cause your ATM is too high. You’re, the bathroom’s not good. You don’t have a ramp. Like I owned the building.

Right. And there was they, they, they, this guy came out to the building, and I owned it with several people and the guy didn’t, they got measured the, a handicap ramp. Right. And the guy and they’re trying to like, make us have tried to have a lawsuit against the building for the, a handicap ramp. And we were like, what are you talking about? There are ramps everywhere. People can ride up the ramp to get into the, get onto the sidewalk. Right. And the guy was going crazy. And then what we didn’t realize was there was a building next to our building, and they had a ramp, but the grade was too high was too steep. Right. But that wasn’t my building. So I said to the guys, I don’t own that. That’s not mine. That’s next door. You know you have to talk to them; you have to talk to them. And you filed a lawsuit against them, wrote the book to me, buddy. Well, we didn’t know what he was talking about. We said, come out to the building and show us. Cause the guy was sad pictures. We didn’t know what he was talking about until we saw two weeks until we came over, and he goes that ramp over there. And we’re like, that’s not ours. It’s not on our property. It connects to the pro; it’s right on the property line but wasn’t ours.

But the same lawyers who were doing that started going after, you know, they would even tell people like, oh, when you go in somewhere, try to take the merchant receipt. Right. And then they would Sue. And then most of the merchants would have to, and we had a couple of merchants who got lawyer letters. And then they ended up having a cough up, you know, like five grand, six grand to get rid of these people. It’s crazy. Do you know? And that was, that was really, that was nuts. There was like a couple of God, and a couple of people running around, down here in south Florida that was going on all over the country, just ambulance chasing. So this next story was hilarious. It took me a long time to get this guy; he was a drug rep, and he had a girlfriend, and she was she, she worked in a hair salon and then he wanted to open up a sunglass store why he won, but sort of sell sunglasses. Right. So he was selling had this set up this whole store, running sunglasses. And he got his girlfriend, and she had all her girls, and they’re working, and they’re selling sunglasses, so he calls me on the phone. Oh, my bill was so high, blah, blah, blah. So I get a hold of the bill, and I look at it, and I go, yeah, you’re like a key entering a lot of cards. So he goes, let me find out. So he goes over to the store, calls me on the phone, and he’s like, yeah, they say the credit card machine doesn’t work. So I’m like, okay. He goes, well, where are you in?

The area I happened to be in was near my house. So I drive over there now park go inside. You know, I don’t talk to anybody. I go over to the credit card machine. I call him over. I take my credit card goes right there I go. I don’t know what you’re talking about. So he takes his credit card. He runs it. No problem. So I called one of the girls who worked in the store, and I handed her my credit card. Show me how you run that credit card on the credit card machine. She goes, yeah, it doesn’t work. She puts the credit card in, and she goes, look, see it, doesn’t read the numbers. You know, it’s supposed to read the magnetic strip, Omar, the card puts it, putting it in the slot and the, you know, where you slide it? Not now; EMV sticks it in. It’s right. Yeah. This is back in the old days, and you just slide it through. Right. And she’s like, it doesn’t read the numbers. See, I think God just looks at me after he cursed me out on the phone. Right. Like literally was, he blasted me like the credit card machine is up POS get over here. Now it doesn’t read the numbers. Then we called over more girls. There were like three or four girls working there. They all were doing it the same way. I was like, so we showed him. I was like, not try. I could not like a laugh. Right. Because I would have started laughing. No, I couldn’t laugh. Like in front of the guy, he was getting p****d with the employees. Right. He was right. He was p****d.

So they were swiping the card wrong. You know, we used to get a phone call. I had one guy that used to, and they used to have, they used to clean the store, their store all the time. And every time they would do a big cleaning, they would call me on the phone, the credit card machine doesn’t work. So I’ll be like, dude, you have to check. Like, make sure that the power’s plugged them. The phone line or the internet is plugged into the correct port on the machine. And I said, listen if I drive over there because I’m going to drive over there and you’re going to see, it’s like something stupid. So I come over there one time, and the machine’s not even plugged in. There’s no, the power cord not even plugged into the machine. It’s plugged into like a phone line. I’m like, come on. Like, and then the next time I go over there, I tell him, I go, well, if I come and it’s something stupid again, I said, you have to pay me a hundred bucks. He goes, you’re on. I checked it. Boom. So I drive over there. The machine, again, the internet cord is plugged into something. I don’t even know what the pin pad is for it. And the pin pads plugged into the thing. And I’m like, come on. You know, what are they doing? Like who’s taking the machine apart. It’s like if they got to pick it up and wipe onto the counter, like, I don’t know, part in the first place. Right? Why know they moved it or something, but still like, you know, it’s not that simple. It says it’s on the machine.

Like literally, it says phone. It says, I, you know, ethernet for the ethernet cord. It says pin for the pin bad. I mean, it’s pretty spelled out on the machine. I wouldn’t assume so. So you know, that happened, you know, we’ve had, we used to have that happen. Like all the time, you know, printers would break, oh, the machine’s not printing. Hey, can you turn the paper the other way? Cause they have the paper in the machine upside down, especially thermal printers, paper only prints on one side. It doesn’t print on both sides. Like, you know, the bond paper would, right. So another time, I went onto this hair salon about four or five times as a very upscale hair salon. And the guy, you know, I showed them like the equipment and everything, and he seemed pretty happy. And then the guy calls me on the phone, and he says, can you come over to my shop? I go there, and I see you the same piece of equipment. I was trying to sell them. He bought it from somebody else, and he signed the lease and all this. Then he says to me, ” Yeah, it goes up off this machine. I’m calling the company. They can’t help me, blah, blah, blah. The machine doesn’t work. And he showed me his American Express card. And now this is like 2003. Okay. So 2003, they started putting cards with an EMV chip on them. But the chip didn’t do anything at pride. It wasn’t even programmed. Right. It didn’t do a thing. So you got to show me the stick.

I’m like, dude, that doesn’t work. Just cause the machine is an EMV reader, there’s no EMV network. There’s nothing read in that thing. Right. He went nuts. The guy literally like he went crazy. He called the company up. He bought the machine from told them they ripped them off. Cause they’re selling them on this. Oh, you got to have the EMV EMV EVM machines. And the first set up the first couple of sets of machines that came out with EMV chip readers on them. The readers didn’t even work. You know, they didn’t even work. So it was kind of crazy, you know? And that was kind of hard to tell people like, Hey, that doesn’t work. There’s no reason to have it because there’s no network on the back end to read. Right. So why spend money on a machine with the EMV reader? They were super expensive, you know? But he ended up getting to send the machine back to the company. Cause he only had you had it for one day. They lied to him, and they sold it to him for like 3000, like on some lease that it was crazy. Some crazy lease price. I told him, dude, I was going to sell you the machine for a thousand bucks. You paid like $3,000. He was like, oh, but it has this EMV. And I’m like; I’ll make you a bet. You can’t process an EMV transaction on that thing. So it didn’t work. This was literally like a crazy story. So I got I’m driving in the car, and I’m in up in like coral Springs somewhere. I think this client calls, oh my, my credit card machine is broken, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I need a new credit card machine. So I’m like, wow, I’m far from the office wherever I can get, you know, I don’t have that driving around machines in my car.

And so I said, Hey, you know, you have a machine at your other restaurant. There are two different machines over there. And the cause he wouldn’t give them to me to keep, you know, he was very, you know, very tight, you know? So he wanted, I said, so I’m going to go over there and get one of those machines. I said, oh, you need the printer you need. He goes, yeah, everything. Get the printer, the wires, everything. I’m like, what’s wrong with the machine. He goes. It just doesn’t work. I was like, man; this guy’s just like getting crazy with me, like on the phone, hurry up. And I remember, I think bill Clinton was in town. That’s how long ago this was. So the highway was like all blocked off with, you know, cops and the secret service. Cause as he was driving, you couldn’t even go the other way. Right. The opposite direction. So that whenever they have a dignitary on the highway, they block it off so that people can’t, I don’t know how those guys figure that out the secret service, but they have a way to do that. So nobody’s on the other side of the highway. I have no clue how they’ve been on the freeway when they’ve done it before, and it’s nuts. I had to like hurry up, and I had an, I ended up taking, I went to this other restaurant, got this stuff and the manager was complaining. He didn’t want to give it to me. And I had to call the guy on the phone, and I finally got it in the car. And then I said, oh, I got to. And so I went past the airport on the streets cause he was flying in and out. He was coming in or out of West Palm beach. So I went up; I was in like Boeing. And I went up the street on the regular streets to pass the airport, got on the highway, got up to this place, was like in North Palm beach. I walk into the fire departments there. The cops are there. I’m like, what happened?

And I walk up. I said, oh, where’s the, where what’s going on. I go over to where that credit card machine is supposed to go. Cause he, he had, he had like three or four of them and this place was a big, big restaurant bar. So there were like three or four credit garment chains. I go, which one is it? And then he goes, oh, the one on the bar. So I walk over as I start to come around the corner to see the bar; I see all these firemen and everything. I’m like, oh, what happened? Oh, what happened was they fired a bartender. So the bartender got p****d, and he took it at the end of the night; they shut off all the breakers so that after they did that, he took bleach and poured it on the power strip that was over there. And then when the bookkeeper came in, she turned on the breakers in the restaurant, and poof, the whole power strip went up in flames. The fire meted the cash register and the credit card processing machine. I was like, wow, the fire melted the whole bar. So I had to go set it up in another area. And then I had to go and go to radio shack because you know who I’m this? I’m not, and I don’t carry around like a hundred-foot phone line back. No, no. Back in those days were phone lines. Oh, right, Right, Right, right. That’s ether, net. We didn’t have ethernet for a long, long time. Ether, net terminals. And even when the ethernet terminals came out, people didn’t have internet. So the whole bar is burnt to a crisp. So to set it up in another part of the bar, they had to buy another cash register at Office Depot, but it was pretty crazy.

I got it all set up. I’d run the radio shack, get a hundred foot of phone line. Hey, just real quick, your little, a commercial break. Once you guys do a check us out on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Google Podcasts, iHeartRadio, Stitcher, Pandora Amazon music, and anywhere else that you’re streaming we’re on, on every DSP that you can imagine, check out B2B vault, that info. If you want to fill out the questionnaire or have any comments, or if you were interested in becoming a guest, we have a contact form for you to fill out there. You can contact us that way. We’re B2B vault at B2B vault on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter. You can connect with Allen on LinkedIn at Ellen Kopelman. It’s pretty simple. KOPELMAN is his last name. And this is episode 60, by the way. So, you know, we’re on a thousand plays over a thousand plays of the podcast and going good, man. So thanks to all the listeners. And We just had a press release put out on us, And someone published a press release about the B2B vault. So the green sheet. So check that out. If you’re, you know, you’re into, on our Following Feeds back to you, but All right. So here’s another crazy story, Justin. This one, this one actually like blew my mind. So I get a phone call from this guy, and he says, oh, I don’t know what to do. I said, what happened? He goes by accident. I was supposed to charge this person $150 by mistake.

I charged 150 grand, and it went through. He batched out the salt back then; we didn’t have virtual terminals. You use the software on your PC. That acted sort of like the virtual terminal. This was pre virtual thermal. So we had this software called a PC charge or something like that was, you know, you installed it like on your local machine. And so I go, what did you do? He goes, oh, and then I batched it out. And then I ran a refund. I was like, oh my God. So, I was in the area I drive over. I’m like, no, there’s no way to fix this. Right. So I’m like, Wait. So like he bested out, Right? So the hundred It’s already done. So then, when you try to Find the Fund, there’s no transaction. There’s a transact. You can run a refund. Cause their card was already run as a sale. So here’s the problem with the bank. When you, when you, when banks do stuff at the bank, they do debits before credits. Okay. So they take your money out before they put your money in. When the guy does that, they will try and get hundred 50 grand out of the account. They don’t have 150 grand. Whoa. So the guy was flipping out, and it turned out that it was the son of the owner of the company. So he’s like, oh, you can’t tell my dad. So I’m like, dude, I got to tell your dad because your dad’s kind of flipped out because it’s, you need to tell your dad, I’m Like, we have to do something. I got to tell your dad, and We have to talk to your dad. Right. I have to talk to your dad. He was like, oh my dad’s not here. And blah, blah, blah. And his dad had another business. And his dad was also an attorney, and I was doing, I did all their credit card processing, and they, this kid, also owned like he used to buy a VHS and DVD, like D CD ROMs and DVDs and stuff. Not DV. I don’t remember what was before the, what was before the DVD player. It wasn’t CD ROM. Yeah. CD ROM. But you can play it like on a video. It was like the Plate on your computer. Right. But you could also play it like on a, on a, on a, maybe it was a DVD player. Yeah. In the GD rounds, we’ll work on a DVD player.

Right. Cause it’s like, if you put the DVD in, there was always that little space in the middle for a smaller disk. Right. We’ll just sit here. He was buying all these VHS tapes from all these videos stores going out of business and some DVDs. And then he had like a warehouse, and he was selling the stuff. So like I had a lot of merchant accounts, I had to see his dad. And then we had to go to the bank, and he had to go, the bank made them sign a paper saying that he wasn’t going to disrupt, you know, they’re loaned him 150 grand for 10 minutes, you know? Wow. And so he could, he was a good customer at the bank, so the bank covered it. And then the credit card processor we got, you know, cause the payment bounced, I couldn’t stop it in the morning. After five o’clock at night, there was no stopping this thing from happening the next day because it happens in the middle of the night. Right. So the bank agreed, they loaned the guy that money. And then we got the bank to rerun the debit and the credit, and then the bank got their money back. So that was pretty crazy; I mean, that has to be like one of the reasons why banks have to be something in place for big transactions like that. No, but I’m just saying, like, you know, you, if you make a mistake, I always tell merchants, like if you run the credit card and for whatever reason, you made a mistake, you have to avoid it out. But the guy panicked, Right. Instead of calling me on the phone, like what to do, he panicked. And this place used to do a ton of business. At one point in time, it was a huge pharmacy business. And they, they supplied like diabetic medication, diabetic strips medicines for the vet.

They had a deal with the veterans, hospitals, the veteran’s insurance, or something. And there were supplying medication shipping out medication, like all day, man. It was like a huge business. They, they, they had like five, six pharmacists in there. They were, the wild to do like a million dollars a month. No kidding. Yeah. It was crazy. And this next story, this one blew my mind. One of my biggest customers. I was to check their batches every day and make sure they batched out, you know? Cause they had a lot of locations of different restaurants and I called them. I go, listen, here’s the problem. There’s no batch. There’s no batch on you’re no, and there’s no batch. And I’m out of town and blah, blah, blah. There’s no batch. And the girl’s like, you know, back then there wasn’t like, you know, take a picture with your iPhone deal. Right, right, right. There’s no that didn’t exist. So she gets the receipts, and I’m telling her, look on the receipt, scan it. That says to send it to me by email. And I look, and I go, it says demo mode. They searched terms to find out that now this restaurant used to get chargebacks. So these, the imprint, all the cards take an imprint of the cards because they used to get so many chargebacks, you know, cause it was in a tourist, south beach area and people would just charge, ship back all the time. They would just chargeback, Watch your Language. Right. Okay. Bomb on B2B vault. First is the first explicit podcast episode. I don’t know that the other day we might’ve had something Because I watched it and we did great. Oh, we did. Yes. I could not believe it. Although I was moving my hands weirdly. We were very itchy. No. So it ended up that for like two days, none of the credit cards went through the former manager before he got he like whatever he quit or whatever. He went in the back and turned the system on to demo mode, Where he thought that was going to be this payback to Them. Yeah. So thank goodness they imprinted all the cards. And then I came back from vacation.

I came back like two days later I went down to the restaurant. I got all the tickets. Oh, there were hundreds and hundreds of tickets. I had to go through them one by one, sit in my house, and key enter all these cards into a credit card machine because they were never run. Yeah. Wow. Crazy dude. It was crazy. This story was also when I first got started in the business, I just got a call from this client, and they go, 500 books came out of our bank account. So I don’t know what’s going on. Drive over to the business show me the receipts from the credit card machine. Let’s see what’s going on. Right. And I look at every single one says credit credit credit. I’m like, what are you doing? And, one of the girls that work there, instead of hitting sale, was hitting credit because I guess she thought credit card, correct. That logic makes sense. Save all the people, the money back. So then we had to sit there. We had to call up the credit card processor back then. All the numbers were on the receipts, though. This is pre that time. So we had the credit card numbers. So we had to go. So let’s say someone bought something for 50 bucks. You had to charge them twice because 50 to make it zero. And then another 50 to get your 50 bucks. Wow. So that was a, it was a mess. People were calling them up, complaining and everything. But you know, the sale means sale. Credit means you’re given a refund or a credit back. Another time like chargebacks is always, nobody wants to deal with chargebacks, but we had a bar in downtown Miami, and they had 150 chargebacks come in over. Like it may be a 60 day period of time. That year we had the orange bowl, the national championship, the super bowl, maybe even the pro bowl, where like every sink, there was like all kinds of games going on. Like at one time in Miami.

So they got blown up. We were getting phone calls from the bank, the processor, the card brands we had to get on phone calls with them. We explained to them look how much business they did. Right. Millions of dollars of sales. Okay. This is a small number of tickets, you know, 150 receipts is nothing. This place did like 50,000 sales, right. Or some, some crazy amount of sales. Right? So we’re like, this is, you know, they were like freaking out, cause it’s 150, but you go on the list. Like if you have a hundred chargebacks in 30 days now, it could be any 30 days. It’s not like they don’t measure it from month to month. It can be in any 30 days. You’re like on a list for excessive chargebacks. So what do you, what do you do with This? No. Well, we had to help them with like all the chargebacks. Some of them were crazy. Some people wrote, oh, I was never in there. And these kinds of bars where people are spending money on bottles and stuff like that, they get your driver’s license. They print your thing, and they got cameras in the place. So you can see the person, you know, like someone who goes and buys a bottle or rent a room or a couch or whatever the deal is, you know, they go over and to a certain place and they have their picture and all that. So that’s, you know, that they have it. So it’s, it’s crazy. So, you know, whatever, we were swamped helping them write the letter and sending it into the chargeback department and getting it. In one of the letters, there were all kinds of letters. Like I would never go to this type of bar.

What’s the strip club. Oh, I would never go to this kind of place. I was never there. No, but there are pictures of the guy. So I will be like, man, I’m just sending this all to your wife. You’re going to pay me now, or I’m emailing it to you. Well, we’ve done that before we Go there. Every time We had a chargeback where the guy wanted, he went into a strip club in Vegas and the, he paid with one credit card for the, he had dinner there and then paid with another credit card for the fond that he had. And he tried to charge it back. We just looked the guy up on LinkedIn called them on the phone. We’ve done that before we find people say, Hey, you know, you’re doing this chargeback. Or maybe the merchant lost the chargeback. We tell them we want the money or go to the merchants going to file charges. Because basically, it’s the fraud. Anytime you’re going to a restaurant or bar, laws on the book date back into the 18 hundreds called the fraud of an innkeeper. And they say, how does he know that? When I went to chef school, that’s one of the things that we talk about like dine and dash, dine and dash, or what they call that dine and dash. So what you know, like what you do about that. Well, there are laws against dining and dash. It’s actually in Florida. I know for a fact, and in many other states, it’s a felony. Oh yeah, no, it’s a felony. It’s a felony. So you can’t do it. Dine and dash. So, if someone defrauds a restaurant or a bar unless the police saw them and they were completely intoxicated, right.

They could say, well, I didn’t know what I was doing. When I ordered that Dom parent young, I was completely out of mind. Right. And the cops witnessed it. Okay, well, maybe you could get out of it, but not really. You’re going to, and you know, we had one place; they filed charges against the guy. And then he ended up paying, and we had another one where we had this customer, and they charged up about 40 grand in AMAX. And we went; we had two cases like that. One went back and forth, and one went to court. And I remember I had to go down to the courthouse, and I had to give a deposition at, and I had to talk to the attorneys. And I explained to them, you know, like, Hey, the guy was there. There are pictures. There’s this there’s that it’s a legal business. Anybody you know, you’ve got a federal tax ID, bank again, business licenses, liquor licenses. You’re a business, whatever, you know, whatever your business is, otherwise wouldn’t give you a merchant account. Right? So the judge, there were pictures of the guy, the judge; basically, the case never went like into court because the judge said he wanted to see the evidence. And then, I had to do a phone call with the judge to explain how the merchant account worked. And the judge told the guy you have to pay, or you’re out of there. We had another one where a guy did 40 grand, about 40 grand, and another bar. And we went back and forth, back and forth with American express for months with the chargeback department. And we wrote, kept writing letters and letters and letters. And we said, Hey, the guy was there. There are pictures. We got the pictures off the cameras.

We sent them the tape video, and we sent it to American express. We reached out to the cardholder and sent it to him. And we’re like, listen, you know, if you go to court, you’ll lose. Cause we have you on tape. You know, you’re in the bar. You can’t say you weren’t there because they have cameras by the front door. You know we called the company up. You identify the guy like walking in the door, and then they use facial recognition to search through the rest of your DVR to find the guy in the club. So we had a whole tape of this guy who ended up paying the money that people always end up paying. So, and we don’t give up. So we have our program charge, rack rescue, which helps us with cost, you know, keep customers because we help them with their chargebacks. Do you know? So that’s one reason why many people do business with us is to do that. You know, rip-off stories happen all the time. So we had a client one time, they were at a print, it was a printing company. And they got a huge order, like $8,000. And this guy wanted them to print all these brochures and stuff and then ship it to The Bahamas. And he said, oh, I’m going to pay you on a credit card. And then when the freight forwarder comes, I want you to pay the freight, the freight forward company. That’s a scam right there. Boom. Anytime someone’s using a freight forwarder, that’s a big no-no. That’s like the red diff; there’s a flag on the play. There’s a flag on apple. Like anytime you hear a freight-forwarder boom, you’re out. I don’t even know what it is. And it doesn’t, and it just sounds forwarder. Anything like, I don’t want to say No. It’s like someone’s coming to the business to pick up whatever the product. And then they’re going to take it to whoever’s shipping it to The Bahamas.

So like, people use those kinds of services for that. But the thing sounded too fake. I’m like, why are you going to spend all this money? Like a thousand dollars shipping, some postcards, and stuff over to The Bahamas on a boat. You could just get it printed in The Bahamas. I mean, there’s gotta be a print shop. There Is a Print Shop. Right? So it didn’t make sense. I told the guy not to do it. He got ripped off for about nine grand. He Did it anyway. He didn’t listen to me. You guys got so mad at me. Oh, you’re trying to wreck my business and all this stuff. And I was like, no, I’m saving you money. Don’t do it. What did he say afterward? Nothing. He was just p****d. And then he and his business partners, he had business partners. They all got in a fight, and they split up. But like not right away, but you know, in the future. But you know, you just, you know, I tell merchants how it is all the time. I’m like, listen, if you get an order that looks too big. It’s too good to be true. Check the address, make sure where it’s going. You know, like somebody ordered 40 pairs of shoes from a website. I said, oh, where’s it going? They told me about an ups store. I go; that thing’s going to be a chargeback. You’re going to put those shoes in the box. It’s going to get shipped out. You’re going to run your batch. And then you’re going to get a letter in the mail within two days, three days, if a chargeback. Sure enough, boom.

It was a chargeback. And that merchant again told me the same thing. Oh, you’re a sales preventer. No, you can make up your mind and do what you want, but you shouldn’t ship to ups store. That’s a Big, any way to Did it anyway to what kind of sneakers was just they owned they own like a shoe, a shoe website that sold shoes on like a reseller. No, they had a company that designed then no, they had like retail stores, but this was somebody making the largest search on the website. And I said, no way, man, there’s no way, no, we called the guy on the phone, and I’m like, no, do not do that. It doesn’t sound like it’s going to go. We tell merchants all the time. I had another guy at a toner business, and somebody called up once an order, like a hundred toners. And the guy called me who I’m scared of. It’s a hundred donors. Look up the address. Sure enough. It was something mailbox store. Like not even a ups, just a generic mailbox store. I was like, do what you want. But you know, that’s probably going to result in a chargeback. Even though he went in and voided the transaction, he got a phone call the next day from the real cardholder, really thanking him for not doing that. It showed up on their credit card as authorization, but it didn’t go through the client. No, no, it went through, but he voided it. Oh, he was going to, I guess, did it, but they still saw the charge. So it’s crazy. This story happened to a friend of mine where this guy that a furniture store and the furniture store, somebody came in, they used five different credit cards with five different names on it. Then they came back with trucks to pick up some of the stuff. And then the rest of the store delivered the next day, and they set the stuff up in the house where they delivered to. And then, about five or six days later, all the credit cards were charged back. It was a lot of money, like over a hundred grand. My friend called me.

He goes, what do I do? Blah, blah, blah. So, and ended up that called the cops, the call. I helped them out. We called the police on the phone. We called the neighborhood where the house was. And it turned out we got a little got kind of lucky. Cause there, there was a house on the block. My friend went there to that neighborhood at night. And there were a couple of houses that had security cameras on them. Cause they were big houses. Right. It turned out this house foreclosed, and some scammer got all the furniture, but the cops caught the person. But the furniture was long gone. I don’t know if the store ever recovered their money, but they lost the furniture, like a hundred grand. I mean, I’ve seen it happen like sunglass stores furniture stores. People come in, and you know, as the guy came in the sunglass store with Don the same one with the numbers. And some guy came in to buy some expensive sunglasses. They were like gold. They were like three or $400 apiece. And they use fake credit cards, and they keep them in. And I told them, you know, I’m just reading this. Two days later, the card was targeted. And they went over to the house, and the house was empty. They are moving trucks to empty the house. Yeah. The moving trucks. But they got lucky because they got the moving company’s name and called them. But the furniture was moved to like a warehouse somewhere, and it was long gone, you know, long gone. They got a license plate off of a couple of the cars going in and out of the house. And that’s how they call it. One of the people. But even though they caught that person, the person was a minor, a minor, a minor accomplice. And the whole thing, he didn’t know what was going on. They thought the realtor was in on it too, because how would the people get the key to the house?

That’s true. It was a complicated thing. But in the end, that, you know, I tell merchants all the time, like, you know, someone comes in and trying to use multiple credit cards. Do you need to check out what’s going on? Like, is that credit card belongs to that person? I mean, I tell people all the time I’ve gone in to buy furniture. They’re I go once a year, your ID, Right? Letting you pay for furniture. I mean, city furniture rooms to go my bought from Karl’s no way they want your driver’s license. Yeah. I just bought a bed from American freight, and I mean, it was only $240, but they still asked me for my job. Yeah. Because furniture, people get anything someone can steal and put on Craigslist and all that, you know, that’s, what’s happened. Look at what’s going on. I was reading a story the other day about San Francisco people going into these stores and just stealing, and in California steel, the next day, all that stuff ends up on eBay, Poshmark, and all this stuff. And they’re sending letters out to people like me, cause we have marketplaces customers, and they’re like, Hey, what kind of, you know, they want us to police the marketplace like, but we do. We police our marketplaces because anybody selling the name and brand products has to show a company contract. So we know that they have a contract to buy those name brand products. Right. That’s hard to do with Poshmark or any of those websites because that’s all secondhand stuff.

So anybody can do it. So it’s hard to control. I mean, Let’s see, you can put products on It, but it’s hard to control for them to control that. But that’s what’s going on now. It’s bad, you know, really, really bad. What were some fun stories? Some of it was crazy, crazy stuff, but we deal with stuff. I get phone calls all the time from merchants. I answer my phone; oh, I have a problem. I have a chargeback. You know, what should I do in this situation? That situation, you know, we helped people with PPP loan stuff, information, and how to do it when that was going on. So, you know, we try to stay informed and you know, try to give P you should only give advice, right? You take our advice; maybe it saves you some money. You don’t take our advice. I’ve had enough experience with this kind of crazy chargebacks and scams that you know, and people will use the same ones. The old ones come back. They come, they come back history, repeat history repeats itself. So thank you for listening to the B2B vault. We’re out at Carpe diem; everybody, have a great day. Follow us on your favorite podcast network and social media; B2B vault, have a great day, everybody.