Bryce Van De Moere Joins Us To Talk About Matchlist & Chargebacks! | Biz To Biz Podcast

Welcome to the Biz to Biz Podcast, your number one source for all business news.

Hey everybody, welcome to B2B Vault. Today we have an exciting podcast coming at you. We're going to be talking about the match list. This is the list you don't want to get on. And today's guest, we have Bryce Vandermoor from Global Legal Law Firm. And I've had other lawyers from their firm on the podcast before, James Huber, Chris Darden. Probably will have a few others in the future, but they specialize in law revolving around credit card processing, merchant accounts, and anything to do with that kind of good stuff. So if you have a problem with your credit card processor, you want to contact Global Legal Law. That's not a commercial, just they— they— this is what they specialize in. So welcome to the show, Bryce, and tell us a little bit about yourself.

Oh, thanks, Allen. I, I've been practicing Well, I said I'd been at the bar in '98. I did. I've been doing litigation pretty much the whole time, but for a while, for mostly it was insurance defense, you know, like, you know, fighting against injured people. And as a result, as you can probably guess, I wasn't really enjoying that too much. So I got a referral to this, to Global Legal, and got involved in the credit card processing niche. It's a very new industry. There's not a lot you learn something new about it every day. And a big part of my practice has become trying to get merchants who I feel are unfairly placed on this match list, the Member Assisted Control High Risk list, which if you get on it for whatever reason they think you did, they shut you down for 5 years. You can't get payment processing, puts most merchants out of business. And I really kind of found my calling, I think, in match litigation because it's, it's just, it's always changing. It's always, it's always interesting and it's supremely unjust, which also kind of gets me going.

No, it's definitely unjust. And I mean, we've dealt with that and we've helped merchants that were on the match list obtain merchant processing. And basically what a lot of people don't understand is it's, it's up to the credit card processor sometimes, and sometimes it's up to the bank that they use, the acquiring bank, whether they want to accept that merchant and what reason were they put on the match list and so on and so forth. But we can talk, we can dive into some specific cases. You were about to tell me as we got on to the podcast about something that you're working on currently. You want to dive into that?

Oh, absolutely. And because the overriding theme that come to understand that I've been actually doing this for about 5 years now is that it's given the ramifications of the decision to make, to put a merchant on Match, I would think that people over there would actually know what they were doing, what they were putting in motion. And I'm coming to understand that by and large, banks, ISOs, processors, they don't understand match at all. All they know is that they want to stay on the good side of MasterCard. And so when push comes to shove, they're just gonna— they're just gonna pull the trigger on you and then just hope that you can't dispute it. And as far as they're concerned, their, their, um, their number one goal is to stay on MasterCard's, you know, uh, good side. That's their whole reason for existing. And, uh, they're not going to think twice about stepping over somebody, stepping on somebody, to make sure that, that, you know, that they stay in good graces with MasterCard. And so, for instance, so this is the case that I'm working on now, and, and this, this has kind of become an angle in, um, in, in fighting these, these things. So I have a client who sold a, uh, a weight loss, a weight loss drug, and, uh, it was legit, but somewhere down the road the FDA decided to say that this, this this weight loss product was actually being sold, was being taken by whoever, scammers, fraudsters, and they were adding something to this product which could increase your heart rate, had all kinds of ramifications, and they were selling it on eBay. And so FDA said, you know, let's, you know, don't buy this product on eBay or related sites like, you know, swap meet sites like Craigslist or whatever.. And so my client was like, okay, this, this is, this is, could be bad. Let's just discontinue the product. Let's just stop, stop selling it. And evidently that wasn't good enough because they, they got matched twice based on the FDA, uh, the FDA notice alone. And I'm going back to them going like, well, what does this have to do with match? Like, the FDA is one thing. FDA does not involve credit cards. Match is for credit cards.

So the FDA will report back to the processor processor, like, oh, we found the FDA violation, because we've had merchants selling nutraceuticals before, and the FDA will find out who they— I don't know how they figure it out, but they'll figure out who's processing the cards, and they will send a notice to the bank.

Well, see, but that, that, that's my angle, is they, they nail my client, but they can't show that my client actually processed a payment for this product. They have no, no record. So in order to be like— in order to violate CARB brand rules, the cards have to be involved. Like, money has to change hands. It's like, it's not illegal to have a product in your inventory that the FDA decides is, you know, prohibited, but it is a violation of CARB brand rules to sell it. But you can't have one without the other, you know. If you decide, okay, I'm done, I'm not going to sell this product anymore, as far as like Match is concerned, you're not even, you're not even on their radar, or you shouldn't be. But ever— but these guys are— and I'm saying this stuff to them over and over again, like, show me the processing history, show me where there was a transaction for this prohibited product. And if money didn't change hands, and it didn't, and it's never going to, um, but we're like on the eve of litigation because they just can't grasp that, you know, that you have to actually exchange money to go on the match list. I mean, and, and so here we are on the litigation. I'm giving them one more shot, but, um, it's like every time I talk to these guys, it's like, it's like the first time. It's like, you know, it's like, I, I understand that at this point because I'm, you know, well into this. I probably do understand it a lot more, and it's a difficult subject, and I'm, I'm sympathetic to that. But again, you're like ruining people's lives, like, based on—

oh, definitely—

supposition. And they don't even have a reasonable belief. Like, the MasterCard, you know, requires you to have a reasonable belief before you do it. But then they're like, okay, well, like, somebody will, will say, hey, go investigate these guys. And they'll be sitting there going, well, you know, we, we got one merchant here, but we got like thousands over here that we're still getting processing from. What, what do we care about one merchant? What do we care? Let's just terminate them, match them, and then, you know, quite honestly, let's see what they do. And the downside— or there's all downsides of this— but, you know, merchant comes to me, his revenue's been cut off, he didn't have any more money, and right now he has to hire a lawyer to, you know, like, to try to do this. And the bank has unlimited resources, and the merchant is just, you know, one small mom-and-pop. And It's not even fair, man. It's not even fair. And I, I really feel for these merchants because it's just like, you know, you always say like, oh, businesses— most, 98% of businesses fail within their first year. And you're— and first I was like, oh, it just must be really difficult to be a merchant. And turns out it is. But businesses are failing because they can't navigate the banks and the processors that they're working with. And the banks and processors aren't helping them out. They're just collecting their fees. And at, you know, the first sign of something getting, you know, murky, and if you're not big enough or processing enough volume to like make them get them to think to look the other way, you're dead in the water. And then you have to come to me and I have to do my best to try to work it out without—

the small— the smaller merchants really have a hard time like finding somebody who's going to listen to them and say, okay, we're going to give you another chance, or we see like, okay, you did this, but this happened. Like we were talking before about the, the guy who had the adult novelties, right? And he was processing for 4 years on PayPal. All of a sudden, after 4 years of successful processing, no problems, no chargebacks, nothing going on, the guy didn't have a single chargeback. They cut him off, put him on Match, and then we had to convince the bank that, you know, we had to prove that he processed for 4 years. And then the bank told the processor, if you want the account, you take the account. Because that when you're, when you're on the match list, you have to deal with somebody who's a full liability shop because they're full liability. They can tell the bank, yes, we're going to— we believe that this is a good merchant and we're going to take the account. Yeah, but they're not a full liability shop. They then the bank has the last say.

Well, yeah, the bank always has the last say because of the card brand rules. These agreements between the credit card, they're just with the banks. They only want to talk to the banks. And they, they make it clear that whatever happens, no matter what anybody does, ISO processor, blah blah blah, it's the bank. So when you're always— yeah, when— and so like the first thing we do when a merchant comes in, and, and, uh, I assume you know this, Allen, but this will probably help you too, like send an email to match— or matchbusinessowner@mastercard.com, right?

Yeah.

And the merchant has to do it Nobody else can do it or they'll ignore you. But within 24 hours, you're going to have the bank, the date you were placed, and why you were placed. And you'll reach out to whoever and they'll be like, oh, it's not me, it's not me, it's somebody else. And I just show—

it's always somebody else.

Yeah, I just show them like, we're not that bank and it's this other bank. And I just have to show them like the MasterCard email, like they say it's you and they put a disclaimer in the email that, you know, MasterCard cannot take any action with regards to the match placement. It has to be the bank. And so, right, you can tell me all day long that you're not responsible for this, but no movement— there's going to be no movement on a match placement unless you submit the recommendation. Regardless, I mean, that's just the way it's going to be.

And yeah, the other thing that we see, we've seen a number of people who had their, um, like identity stolen and they're on the match list for stolen identity. And we're dealing with— we're dealing with one right now, and we just dealt with a couple of others, and we proved the person pulled out, you know, got a police report, sent it into the bank and showed, yeah, we did this, and the letters and the information that going back with Equifax. And, you know, we were able to get those, those merchants approved. A lot of times you can— if somebody is doing tremendous amount of volume, like millions, there's a bank that will listen because they're going to go, okay, here, this guy's doing millions of dollars. What did he do wrong? Maybe he did something like a little bit wrong. Like we had a merchant that had some videos on their website that should have been marked like it was paid advertising, right? But they weren't. And they got slapped on the match list by Stripe. But we ended up getting them processing because They never got a warning. I mean, that's just something they should have got a warning about. I find that Stripe and PayPal and few other banks don't really dish out warnings like, oh, you have this on your website, we want you to remove it. If you remove it, nothing will happen. But if you don't remove it, you're going to get, you know, we're going to shut you down. Yeah. That guy selling cigars one time and he had a, he was selling a humidor and said, oh, keep your weed fresh. Oh, above the— you know, that was the ad for the humidor. So I get a note from the bank, says, hey, tell this guy to take it down. And the guy was all upset. I was like, you got to take that off your website. You know, you're going to get shut off and then you're going to go on the match list. So the guy took it off the website.

And I mean, that's funny. Like, the guy has never, like, walked into a head shop before and, like, pulled out a bong and they go, now this is for tobacco. You know, it's just like, dude, you didn't— you didn't even know.

But it's always been Yeah, but it's different, like online versus online, a website, right, versus what's being sold in a store. I mean, listen, today there isn't a— I mean, walk into a— not a Wawa, but a Rick, you know, a single-owned gas station, into their store. I mean, there's a variety of items in there. Let's not even talk about— I mean, I've seen kratom, CBD, who knows, other other products that I don't go look at all the labeling on them. Bongs. I mean, they got like a mini head shop inside the, inside the gas station.

Oh, yeah.

So, you know, I think that, you know, like from a standpoint, I think Visa and MasterCard just go, well, we can't police what's inside everybody's retail store, but they can police what's online.

Well, it's just they could, but they don't. And that's the other fallacy. If any bank ever tells you you need to go like write MasterCard, you need to call MasterCard, you just, you just ignore it outright because MasterCard and Visa are clear that they are just the custodians of the list. They don't investigate anything. They don't know anything about anything. If you mention a merchant, they're going to be like, who? Go, go back to the bank. They depend on the banks to do all of the research. But then As we both know, the banks aren't doing any research. They're just, you know, shoot first, maybe ask a question later, because again, they're so afraid of, of pissing off the car brands.

And so a lot of times, a lot of times evidence comes to the credit card processor via a chargeback. So they'll get a chargeback in the mail. Like, we had a client once and we told them, hey, don't run credit cards for thousands of dollars in your smoke shop. Nobody's going to believe someone walked in a smoke shop and dropped 2 or 3 grand and guy was trying to wholesale kratom, gets a chargeback, $3,000 chargeback. Says, I bought kratom in there and whatever, and it wasn't whatever, it was defective or whatever.

The guy— Kratom, is there any—

And it was key-entered in a retail store, right? No AVS, no CVV2, nothing. The merchant had nothing and whatever. And ended up the chart, you know, they saw kratom and the bank went nuts and the guy was shut. I mean, literally calling me on the phone about the chargeback. And 2 hours later he's calling me, my credit card machine doesn't work. Yeah, I call the processor. They're like, oh, let us check. About 10 minutes later, like, yeah, this guy's on the match list. Did you see what it said on the chargeback letter? Then they didn't give the guy a chance to say no, I didn't sell the guy kratom, but Whatever. He, he clear— he basically, they called him on the phone and he admitted that he sold it. Yeah. So you have to be really careful. I think you guys sent me a guy who is a kratom merchant and he was doing about $1 million a month, but somebody made him a fake website that was like fronting up his site. I don't know if I got it from you or somebody else. Somebody made him a fake website selling other stuff, but he was actually selling kratom. He claims that he claimed that he didn't know what the guy did, that the guy showed, you know, whatever, the fake website to get him approved, claimed he didn't know about it until he got on the match list and then he found out about the URL.

Well, the chargeback system is kind of a scam, too, because the issuing bank is always going to side with the cardholder. They don't care. What, what evidence? I mean, it has to be like so crystal clear, but I can give you an example of one that's even more ridiculous. But just, and I just as a caveat, like when, when you just be, you know, be reminded that when you lose a chargeback, they're not saying that the charge is invalid or that it's not a valid, you know, debt. They just don't want their card associated with it at all. They want you to go after the dude or gal personally. So, and so don't, don't be thinking that just because they deny your chargeback that somehow you're, you're not still entitled to collect that money. It's still yours. Um, I, I, we do chargeback appeals here. Um, occasionally they work. Uh, it's really hard to get a bank or a card interested in something where they're not going to get anything out of it at all. They're not getting any remuneration. Uh, so I just have come to the point where I'm just like, let's just, let's just Let's just hit 'em up direct. I mean, and if I had charged back somebody and I knew they performed the service and I get served by a sheriff, I think, and I have realized I have absolutely no defense, I think I'm gonna come back and negotiate fairly quickly. But just to give you an idea of how ridiculous it is too, so I have another case in the works where, I don't want to forecast it yet, but basically he was doing a remodel on like a $25 million home. And, and as part of it, he wanted these beams that, that were going to be delivered and placed in the house. And after they were— I guess two of them were warped, but— and the guy, the, the vendor was on scene, he's like, hey, I'll, I'll replace those for you. This is just one of the, you know, one of the problems in the industry. Sometimes these things work. And the guy's like, no, don't worry about it, we'll just put them in the house. And so He charged him back $300,000 for the beams. And we have pictures of the beams in the house. I mean, it's just like, like, what, what, what possibly is going to be your defense? The beams are in your house. You're using them. You— they were delivered to you. You accept.

They'll say they're defective.

Yeah, but they, but they still approve the chargeback.

That's crazy.

They just don't want to be involved with it at all. Let me see.

Let me Let me teach you something about chargebacks. I deal with chargebacks all the time with my clients, and I have sometimes potential clients that come to me and they go, we have these chargebacks. And I go, you guys are going about fighting the chargeback the wrong way. First of all, the chargeback department is not going to read— they don't care about your contract that you have the person sign, whether it's 1 page, 10 pages, 30 pages. They are not going to read your contract. Okay? They are not. Going to enforce your contract either. Like, even if you signed up for 12 months for a gym and you decide not to pay after 3 months and do a chargeback, the gym's not supposed to keep trying to charge your card. If they do, that's a violation. And if they want to go after you for the remaining 9 months of the contract, they could go to small claims court. So Visa and MasterCard do not enforce contracts. That's number one lesson I try to teach merchants that have contracts. That you can make sure that, like, if they bought something from you, a service, and all sales are final and you have them sign it and it's within 1 inch of the signature, you're going to win that 99.9% of the time. Okay? Even if the person canceled the service, you're still willing to perform the service, you're going to win. The, the, the thing that you have to prove in a chargeback is, number one, did the person authorize to charge. So you prove that, that you have positive AVS, positive address match, positive zip match. If you have all of that and you delivered the product and let's say it was something shipped and you had a— you have tracking numbers and everything and you present it in a businesslike fashion, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom down the list. The person ordered this, they paid on this day. We had positive AVS, CVV2 match, boom, boom, boom. The person got it delivered, right? You're going to win the chargeback if you start writing a story. Oh, the customer called me on the phone, cursed me out, this, that, their chargeback department just goes, hey, we're not dealing with that. Boom, cardholder. If you just give them— because we have people that go to a strip club and they'll go, I was never there. Okay, we got the guy in the club. We have a copy of your driver's license, which they don't want you to send anymore. Copy of the card. A picture of the person in the club from our security cameras, and the guy uses his card and we read it with an EMV chip. When we write the letter explaining all that, the merchants win every single time. They don't lose, even if it's American Express. They just don't lose because you have to only prove that the person authorized the charge. You don't have to prove anything else. You delivered the goods, they got their food, they got their service, whatever it is. And the other thing is that merchants don't realize is when you send in a chargeback letter, you have to explain what kind of business you are. Oh, we teach swim lessons, we sell clothing, we are a bar restaurant. Whatever it is that you are, you have to explain it to them because they're not going to go look it up and they're not going to read any kind of contracts. So you have to really be like, say, oh, this person signed the DocuSign. Our cancellation policy is clear. It says in big bold letters, all sales are final. No refunds. It says it right there. You can reschedule your swim lesson if you have to, right? Whatever it is. So, you know, as long as you have all your ducks in a row, you can do that. But I've talked to many merchants who think that the card companies should, like, read their contract. I'm like, they don't enforce contracts. There's no force.

There's nothing in it for them. Why would they?

Right. But they'll enforce that was authorized. You delivered the service and you can prove it. You're going to get paid. Yeah, you're going to get your money back. But if you try to, like, send them a whole— they're not going to read, like, all your whole contract.

No.

And if you have to set—

well, why? Yeah, why? Why would you even send them the contract? It's the contract that you're disputing. I mean, that, that, like, my guy in this one with his chargeback, he just sent them the invoice and I'm like, well, yeah, that, that's what we're disputing. You need that. You need more than the invoice. The contract is not going to get you.

Yeah. Like I tell companies who, like, install things at people's homes, After you're done installing, take some pictures, have the homeowner sign off. Hey, yeah, this was installed, you know, job was done, you know, because we have a lot of like contractors, fence contractors. We had this fence contractor one time who installed the fence. They got a huge chargeback for like $18,000. It was all over a $200 clasp that was on the fence that the owner didn't like. I was like, dude, just give the guy— he got a new clasp. Refund the guy like $300, $400, $500 and just forget about it. And then the chargeback would be over. But instead they wrote like a 5-page nasty letter, right? And all this stuff. And then they lost the chargeback. Then they had to take the guy to court, sue him, where they won. But they ended up, you know, with the big, you know, couple few thousand dollars, you know, the legal fees and all that. And it took them like 4 years to drag the guy into court.

Well, yeah, that's the problem is I can, I can get you your costs, but we got to go the whole— we got to go the whole way, you know? I mean, I got to, I got to get it to trial or get it out like, like a motion for summary judgment, which is basically just saying like, there's, there's no defense to this. We should win like right now. But if you don't do that, it's just going to— you're not going to get your fees back. You're right. So that, that, that is the other, other problem for these, for these merchants.

And I tell merchants, if you're on the match list now and you have a merchant account, just keep your merchant merchant account, be happy that you have one and that the processor is not taking you off because probably you didn't do anything wrong with them, but maybe you did something wrong with another processor. And, you know, but I also tell people, like, if you have a bit, you know, if you're doing a large amount of like e-com and you're on Stripe, you need to have like a secondary merchant account because if you get yanked off, if you get shut off by like Stripe or PayPal and that's your only merchant account, or by any other processor and you're doing, you know, hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a month and you don't have backup merchant accounts in place that you use, that you run some volume through, you can be caught where you might not get a merchant account for weeks or even months. And it's super important sometimes big merchants to have backup merchant accounts.

Well, absolutely. But I also just, just keep your head down, keep your head down. Don't make any waves. Don't process anything like that. It might even be remotely outside what you're you're approved for. If you are thinking of processing a payment for something that you're not sure if it applies, call them, get permission to do it first. Don't make any moves without checking because they are— they're watching you. And the minute they get the sense that you might be a problem, they're going to cut you off at the knees.

Yeah, people don't understand that the banks have been using like AI for years and like scanning products where they actually take pictures of your web pages and then they have software that might go out every month or every quarter or half a year, 6 months or every year, and go out and check your website again. And if they see something that doesn't match or they see some new product that you didn't tell them about, like we have some guys that sell— some merchants that sell watches and handbags, and we tell them, hey, if you're going to sell a new line of watches, a new line of handbags, you have to send us a letter from the distributor, the invoice, and we send it over to the bank so that you're registered because we can't allow you to sell counterfeit product or get accused that you might be selling counterfeit product on your site. You don't want your processing interrupted. So it's super important.

Intellectual property. Intellectual property infringement. I see that all the time. And half the time they can't explain what, what was done. Like, I have another client, CASA. They're, they're a child advocacy group. They go into court and represent kids. That have been taken away from their parents because of like abuse or drug, drugs or whatever. That's all they do. And Stripe, in its infinite wisdom, has decided to shut them down for illegal transactions because they say that Casa is selling or is engaging in intellectual property infringement. But, you know, as they always do, they won't actually tell me what it was. But I'm trying— I'm sitting here scratching my head trying to figure out like, How is a child advocacy group going to be engaged in intellectual property infringement?

Like, like somebody had to accuse them.

Make that— help me make that leap, you know, but they want somebody—

somebody probably accused them and reported them somewhere to the— reported them somehow. That's what happens in those cases. It could be a logo. Just so it could be a logo, you'd have to search the internet to see if there's a similar logo out there or something like, like reverse image searches and things like that. I've seen it happen where people have a product and there's an image on there and all of a sudden, you know, somebody else has the same image and maybe it's trademarked and it's something, you know, you didn't go look at when you made the item or whatever it is. I've seen that happen a bunch of times in credit card processing. So somebody, you know, give some points of advice like how to stay off the match list. What, what advice would you give merchants that they're in a higher risk business and they, they don't want to They don't want to stay. They want to stay away from getting on the match list.

Well, ultimately, like the biggest advice or the most important advice I can get is make sure that whatever you run, like, okay, so you come in, you get approved, they assign you a merchant MCC code, which is like— which then there's like hundreds and hundreds of them and they're all designated toward the kind of product. That you're going to sell. You got to make sure that you are staying within that MCC code, that you're only selling what you were initially approved to sell. If you decide to make a change, if you decide to add your inventory, if your, if your volume is going up and you're getting the impression that it's not like a seasonal thing, you're just like becoming more successful. And I've never understood this one, but you got to, you need to call them and tell them, hey, my processing volume is rising. You know, we need to readjust this. I don't know why a bank would be upset at processing volume increases because that just increases the fees that they gain. I guess they kind of see it as like maybe you're gonna pump and dump something, like ram a bunch of volume through, take the money, and then you get massive chargebacks. But again, you just, you can't leave it up to chance with these guys. Always gonna— they're always gonna rule against you because it's just a safer option. And like I said at the beginning, like, they got a thousand— they got a thousand merchants out there that, that they're drawing all these fees from. What do they care about one? I mean, they, they'll, they'll just— they won't even think about it. They'll just let you lose. So yeah, just, just stay in contact with the processor, uh, you know, that, that's what they're there for. You're probably not going to be able to get much contact with the bank, but they don't want to talk to you anyway. They're going to do whatever the processor or the ISO tells them to do.

Yeah, we'll have clients like they'll go over their limit or they'll tell us, okay, we're going to do— we just signed a huge deal and we're going to be doing, you know, double the volume. The bank's going to say, yeah, send us bank statements and that's your financials so that, you know, so they have their comfort level that everything looks kosher when they look at your, you know, P&L report and they see, oh yeah, they doubled their advertising expenditure. You know, they got to— they want to see reasons for why this is happening. Yeah, right. So, you know, the same thing, you're approved to sell cigars, you can't sell cigarettes.

Yeah. And you can't sell weed, right?

You can't sell weed, right?

Definitely can't sell weed.

You'll be on the match list if you try to sell weed. You know, and if someone does end up on the match list, What should they— what they, you know, you know, there's probably a lot of times I would say from all the people I deal with, with match list, it's like 1 in 10 we can help them. 1 out of 10. The other 9 people are either too small or they're either, you know, the volume is not there for the bank to want to get interested in, in doing anything, you know, that, you know, because a lot of people ended up on the match list during COVID For excessive chargebacks. We were able to get around a lot of that because there was reasons for it. And, you know, nobody got hurt. You know, banks didn't lose money. So, you know, we were able to get people approved for accounts that had— that got hit with that. So there are ways to get off the match list. But the one thing I tell people not to do is don't go apply, don't go online and apply for like 50 merchant accounts. No, you— they all—

they all communicate with each other. It goes out, it goes out, it goes out on whatever. Whatever communication line, they all know about it and they're going to know that you're shopping and they're— nobody's going to— nobody's going to accept you. Nobody.

Yeah. That once they see you one time. Yeah. They're shopping around. You're shopping around. They're going to know and everybody's going to see it because all the risk managers belong to like a club.

Yeah.

And they have an online portal and they can, they can go if they have a higher risk merchant, they always go in there and look to see if that merchant's in there and if there's notes about that merchant and if they see somebody applying for dozens of merchant accounts, you're already got a big strike against you.

Absolutely. And then, and then with regards to the excessive chargebacks, the, the, the advice I would give is, is make sure you watch your MasterCard charges very, very closely because there's two, there's two tiers of chargeback, of chargeback issues in, you know, when it pertains to the match list. Like if your MasterCard charges in one month, the chargebacks on MasterCard charges exceeds 1% of your total chargeback volume and $5,000, you're on the match list. There's very, very little that I can do for you because the numbers are the numbers. And, you know, you can try to reason with them. And with a lot of the smaller banks and the smaller processors, you can occasionally get somewhere with them. But with the bigger ones, they're, they're not even going to, going to even respond to you.

But also, and also there's, there's, there's new changes to the VAMP, you know, which lowers the chargeback ratios. We could do a whole nother podcast about that.

Yeah, no, no, no doubt. But so like there's this excessive chargebacks, which is MasterCard, and then there's, I guess they call it fraud, which are higher chargebacks. They can go as high as like 10%. But the point is there's no real bright line that you cross that will get you matched for excessive chargebacks globally, like Visa, MasterCard, Discover, American Express, then it's like a subjective call by the bank. And then you have to be— then I can work with that because I'm like, well, what was your bright line? Like, where was it communicated to this guy or gal that if you go above like 10%, we're going to have to cut you off, we're going to match you? Because it doesn't exist. It's a purely subjective decision. And I can work with that. The other one that we talked about briefly too, that just drives me insane is the identity theft one. It's like, you know, we confirm that it's real. You know that the merchant is not at fault, but you're going to— you're going to punish them anyway. I mean, you're not even going to leave them an out. You're going to put them out of business because somebody got a hold of their Social Security number and tried to, like, make something of it. Like, like, where— what's fair about that? Like, what did the merchant do? What can they do?

A lot of, a lot of times I tell the merchant, make sure you get a police report. If you haven't filed one, file one, even though it happened in the past, and make sure that you report it to Equifax if it's not reported there so that it's documented. And that way you have documentation and you can get a merchant account. But if you don't document that, if you don't document that, you know, you're just shooting yourself in the foot. So we're going to wrap up the podcast. If people want to find you, Bryce, where do they find you?

Globallegallaw.com.

Okay. And you're on LinkedIn also.

But yeah, I think I'm, I think I'm, I'm pretty sure I'm on LinkedIn. Yeah, no, I'm on LinkedIn. You can always get me there too. You know, my, my, my email address is like my first initial, B. Vandemore, V-A-N-D-E-M-O-R-E, at attorneygl.com. And Allen, I'm going to send you all my chargeback cases.

I can help you with chargebacks. I'm—

I am. I'm seeing that. I'm seeing that.

I'm a great— I'm a great chargeback letter writer. That's kind of figured out a formula, you know, over, over the last few years. And we help all of our, you know, customers like they get a chargeback, right? Like, hey, you're not sure how to do this. You want to show us the letter? You have a really difficult case. Let us get involved and we'll help you, you know, you know, will help you put the letter together, put the details in there. Yeah, make it— and, you know, listen, you can only roll the dice on it. American Express is skewed when it comes to chargebacks. They will side with the customer 99% of the time unless you absolutely can prove that you're in the right. And, and, and you can keep fighting them. They'll fight with you for months. Yeah, we had somebody once had a $40,000 Amex chargeback. We fought with them for 6 months and we finally got money back for the merchant because they kept coming back with different, different reasons why they should get a charge, why they did a chargeback. So we went back, we compiled all the reasons that the person used, wrote another letter, and we said, hey, this is not fair to the merchant. The merchant already proved all of these are false.

But, you know, well, one of the things before we go, make sure you actually do the administrative process. Make sure you actually go through the process of fighting the chargeback. Don't run to a lawyer, don't run to anybody like right away. I mean, they'll help you do it. But the first thing they're going to ask is, well, why didn't he submit— he or she submit this to, you know—

Yeah, always submit the chargebacks. Always. Yes.

Even if you know you're going to lose, just, just get something. Just do it. And, and the time parameters, like, what, you're like, you don't have very long to actually—

Well, no, what you should do is make sure your processor either has an online portal or you're getting them by fax or email so that you're notified. Work with your agent, whoever your agent is, so that you make sure you get your chargebacks in a timely manner so that you have more than a couple of days to put things together. You know, super, super important. Not that you don't wait for these to come in the mail because sometimes their mail stinks and it could be past the date when it's due. So you want to make sure you have some electronic way. And the other thing I tell you, if you have a high-volume business, you know, while it's costly, you know, sign up for a chargeback service. So super— don't go with Elavon. Huh?

Don't go with Elavon.

We don't talk about processors. We don't do that. So thanks, everybody, for listening to B2B Vault today. Hopefully you learned something about the match list. If you need help, you can contact myself or Bryce, and we'll get you the help that you need. We'll tag team together. And get you the help that you need to get your business back on track. But either before you end up on the match list, hopefully— yep, maybe you have some issues you need to clean up, or, you know, after you get on the match list and you need to get a merchant account or you need legal advice. So peace out, everybody. Thanks for listening to B2B Vault. B2B Vault sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems, and we appreciate all of our listeners. And hopefully everybody learned something today, and you can leave us some messages or note some comments and we can get back to you. And you can follow us on Spotify, Apple, anywhere you listen to podcasts, along with YouTube. And we're on LinkedIn, Facebook, we're everywhere there is on social. So everybody have a great day and thank you to Bryce for being a part of the podcast today.