Cannabis Market Stuck In Limbo | Cannabis Payment Processing | High Risk Merchant Accounts | B2B Vault: The Payment Technology Podcast | Episode 119

What's up everybody, it's Justin live from B2B Vault, the payment technology podcast sponsored by Nationwide Payment Systems with your host Allen Kopelman. And we'll be providing you educational information about small business, fintech, payment processing, and the technology businesses are using in the world today. And in today's podcast, we're going to be talking about cannabis, and it's still stuck in limbo. The market is not going anywhere. No one knows what to do. The government tried, Biden tried. He—

they're kicking the can down the road.

Yeah, literally, they're kicking rocks at each other, and it's ridiculous. I don't know what really— I stopped paying attention, I could say.

Um, well, the biggest shocker was that, you know, Biden passed this law. They made a whole big deal about it, right?

Right.

And then it came out a few days later that it only affected around 2,800 people, something like that. And then over the weekend, I read a story And in the story it said that it all— out of all these 2,800 people, nobody's getting out of jail. I was like, what? How's that possible that no one's getting out of jail, right? Well, no one's getting out of jail because the only thing he pardoned people for was possession of marijuana. Nobody's in federal prison for possession.

So I was telling my father about this. I was like, how much cannabis do you have to have to for it to be a federal case? And if it is a federal case, how is it a simple possession charge, right?

That's what I said. I did not— I was like, when they announced the whole thing, I was like, that's just pandering.

So I could see how it would affect it on a state level if he forced the, the states to release everyone who was on Yeah, you know, like currently in county or whatever for, for it. But I, as soon as he said the feds, I was like, I just didn't understand it.

That's what I said. I was like, and then they were interviewing, um, some guy and he's in jail and he's like, I should be out of jail. He goes, he goes, I got convicted on this, uh, whatever, for growing a bunch of plants or something. One of the guys.

So that's what I said to my dad too, was like, it was, is that— but that's, no, it's not. That's not possession either.

Well, no, he had the whatever. The guy had a lot of weed. Yeah, I don't remember how much, but I was reading the story and I was like, man, that's just out of control. Like, what are they doing? Meanwhile, you know, they got all these laws ping-ponging back and forth. We have the SAFE Banking Act, right, which has gone nowhere. Just pass the thing already. Send it to the— they have enough votes to send it to the floor in the House. Yeah, right, but they're not doing it. So they need to just send it to the floor, everybody vote on it. I mean, here we are, we're in this massive recession, we got tax, uh, deficit, you know, big tax, you know, tax problems. They could be taxing this thing, taxing this cannabis transactions and making money. Plus all these people making money off cannabis are not paying any federal income tax. In both cases, it sounds— it's just a straight up loser. Some of them don't have bank accounts, right, and stuff like that. And that's very dangerous that these businesses are not— can't get a bank account. I mean, I was reading an article and was talking about there's this company called GreenCheck Verified, and they have compliance services, but they've only have like less than 100 banks, or around 100 banks, signed up for their thing.

And What does that even mean?

Oh, so basically the way the law reads right now, it's not illegal for a bank— let's say you had a cannabis dispensary— it's not illegal for the bank to open up a bank account for you, but they have to have compliance. So compliance means that you have software in your business that's tracking that all the marijuana you're buying is legal. And you're selling it, and then you're accounting for your inventory and your sales and all that, making it a compliant business. But you have to have compliance services. So in order to have compliance services, banks have to have a compliance department to make sure, oh, Justin's dispensary is compliant, Allen's dispensary is compliant, Rocky's dispensary is compliant, so on and so forth. They have to have these compliance services that go out and, and check this stuff So then they say, oh yeah, well, Justin's compliant. Probably part of that is providing reports on a monthly basis to the bank, showing them that you have all your inventory and everything is accounted for, right? Right. And then on the other side of it, there's no possible way for the dispensary owner to pay taxes, federal income tax, on all the money they're making. So they're not even paying taxes on most of the money they make. It's a little crazy. It just seems that like with all the states legalizing it, I mean, just figure it out already and stop playing around. Like, it's just like a ping pong ball, you know, going back and forth for, for a couple of decades.

Logistically, I'm sure it's a nightmare for people who are serving time in jail for marijuana possession, people who are on probation. And people who are sitting in the county jail, right? Yeah, for all the states that are left, right, who haven't passed like some sort of law.

Yeah, well, criminalized. But the problem is, is that even though they passed some of the laws, some of the people that are actually like in jail are, you know, not getting out. They're not letting them out of jail.

That's what I'm saying. That's why— that's my point. Like, logistically, that has to be a nightmare. Yeah, for the state itself to try and figure out a way of— because I mean, I'm sure that it's even hard to even know who's in there for what, right?

Well, exactly. Like, yeah, because not only that, somebody's in there and they got cannabis possession, right? Yeah. But then they did other stuff.

Yeah, they could be on a parole violation.

Yeah, weapons charge. Who knows? That's what I'm saying. It's not that simple. But you know, people use— I mean, I remember when I was a kid, right, if you had a one doobie on you because— but that's not gonna take you to jail.

But, but now, but there's no one in jail. I, I highly doubt, like, there's anyone serving time for a simple possession case right now. Yeah, I don't believe it. No, I mean, unless— no, no, they might be somewhere in South Dakota.

There was that lady who, like, Trump got out of jail, that the— there was a lady and she was selling marijuana.

I'm saying that have just got like yesterday. Oh, they got pulled over, whatever.

No, that's not happening now, but I'm saying there are people in jail.

I'm sure it happens every once in a while, but there's people who are in jail from years ago, right, who got caught with weed or—

yeah, there was one lady, the Kardashians, or who was that? They got a bunch of guys and then they got out and Trump got them out of jail. It was like some lady and she did like 20 years in jail for selling weed.

There's a guy that just just got out. He did like 30-something years in jail in Louisiana for like 2 joints.

Yeah, it's crazy. It's not right. It's totally wrong, you know. And then they were talking about also in a couple of the articles I was reading, you know, these cannabis businesses, how do they get paid? So right now, like, they— people either come in with cash. There's one company called CanPay. They said they only have 100,000 customers that use that, and it basically transfers money from your bank account to the dispensary's bank account. But that— the legality of that's not 100% legal, plus it's not easy to do.

That sounds shady.

And there's a bunch of those kind of apps around doing that. People don't like to use them because you have to take money from your bank account, then put it with that company, then take the money from there, move it. So it's a complicated transaction. Most people just pay cash.

Do dispensaries like take cash? That's not—

yeah, they take cash. That's their main form of payment is cash. You know, the other thing is, is in the end of 2021, so basically, and the beginning of this year, and also most recently, Visa put out a whole— and now they put out a warning to banks So the banks are the ones where, like, they're the one processing transactions, right?

Right.

So they put out a warning about these cashless ATMs saying these cashless ATMs are in violation of core— Visa's core rules and Visa's product rules. And then there was a couple of lawyers that in the article— I don't want to quote any of them, but they basically said, oh, well, this only applies if the card was being processed through any networks that are owned by Visa or MasterCard. Now they own a bunch of the networks like the Plus Network, the Maestro Network. Those are owned by Visa and MasterCard, right? And they said that the fine could be up to $2,500 per day. And the other thing is, is that a lot of these cashless ATMs are at businesses and they're being miscoded. Like let's say you had a dispensary but next door is a convenience store. So they set up the cashless ATM with the, with the address of the convenience store. So that's not, you know, that's in violation of rules too, by you're disguising where the machine is. And they just basically don't want these machines out there anymore. And then somebody else wrote about the same thing, that as long as the card has a Visa logo or a MasterCard logo it shouldn't be used for a cannabis transaction. And that's basically what Visa is talking about, that it's in violation of the— violation of their rules.

That is just so confusing, right?

Well, you know, Visa is never clear. They don't come out and go, oh, you can't do this, you can't. Plus, it's hard to stop. Like, you program an ATM. So there are companies out there, they take a credit card machine They put— you can load encryption keys into the machine. I don't want to say how to do it. And then you can set up programming, but basically you have to lie to your provider. Like, if I wanted to do it, I would have to lie to my provider and then program these machines and put them around. But I'd be too scared to do it. I would be putting out, you know, putting all my business at risk. Yeah, exactly.

Why would you want to put your business at risk, right?

Now there are solutions. So you can get like an ATM put in your business. Like, we work with one of our banks. As long as you have to sign all these cannabis disclosures— oh, it's— we get their license and all that. We're not using their money, right? Right. We're using our, our money and putting it in the machine, and then they can do that. And we're also working on a program to possibly put put, which we saw at the ATM show, those cash recyclers into the, into the cannabis business. And then as long as they have a bank account, they can load money into these, um, put a recycler in there or a couple of recyclers, the way some of these places take a ton of cash, and then have their funds electronically deposited, right? And then the armored car would come pick up the cash. That would solve a lot of problems.

I—

yeah, man, I'm just waiting for it to happen there. Apparently, like, the banks are— the couple of the banks that work with the cash recycling company are talking about it.

Why do they have to talk about it?

Because they got to come up with the legal mumbo jumbo of how they're gonna do it. So, you know, that's what it always—

everyone— I mean, it's always— I get it because people are, they're, you know, money laundering.

I know, but the thing is, is are they going to take just the cash you're generating in your business? Are they also going to allow like the dispensary to start bringing some legacy cash in and taking that legacy cash too? Or is it just going to be from this day forward? So that's what they have to decide. Make it easy, that's what I say. Press the easy button. Because even now it's dangerous. Let's say you have a dispenser.

Yeah, why would you want to let them bring legacy cash? Don't let them do— come on. Okay, that's kind of open the door for the little, you know, money laundering.

Yeah, right. So my point is this, like, a dispensary— and also it's not just dangerous for the dispensary business, it's dangerous for everybody they deal with. So let's say a supplier comes, right?

Dangerous for the customer too, right?

But I'm saying supplier comes, right? He needs to get paid. Well, they're not going to pay the guy with a credit card, just going to whip out some cash and pay the guy. Then let's say now you got to go downtown and you got to pay your sales tax at the end of the month. Well, you're going to take a bunch of money, put it in a suitcase, hire like 2 dudes with guns, right? Go down to the sales tax office and go, here's your— no thanks. Now it's dangerous for the sales tax, right? I bet they don't have a cash recycler. They need one. Then what do they do? Then somebody there has to call the armored car to come and pick up all the money. I mean, it's just dangerous all the way around. Like, solve the problem already. You know, yeah, I mean, these cash recycling machines could solve a lot of problems because then the money gets picked up by—

why wouldn't the Fed just open a bank? Like, it's the Fed bank, they control the bank. I know, but I'm saying like a cannabis bank. Like, if this bank is only for the federal government, they're gonna run it, right? And that's it. There can be no other bank. You can't get a different bank account anywhere else, right?

But the problem comes down to compliance. They need to figure out like, hey, who's going to do the compliance? And then just do it. And then just make the decision. Okay, there's your legacy cash. Sorry, we're not touching it, right? Your new cash from this day forward, we're going to touch. But some of these guys have millions of dollars, you know, hidden in private banks and stuff like that. Like in California, they busted a, uh, say this place that was in a mall, right, and had a bunch of safety deposit boxes in there. Well, apparently there were several people who had cannabis businesses that had massive safety deposit boxes in there with money in it, and the FBI took the money. Uh, they got the money back. Did they? Yeah.

Good, good.

They got a lawyer and they got the money back because they said, no, that's proceeds from our business, can't just go in there and They opened up all the safety deposit boxes and took everybody's cash. That's a private bank.

That's ridiculous.

Well, I'm just saying that the feds are—

that's what I'm saying.

Just legalize it. Forget about all this tax. Tax it. Collect the taxes. Like, dude, let everybody pay their income tax.

Can you imagine all of the shit— sorry— of stuff that the feds have gotten over the years from the war on drugs?

Yeah, tons of stuff. Probably airplanes. Come on, man. I saw— I was— guys have gotten it.

I mean, you've been going in a goodie bag for the past 40 years, dude.

I remember when I was living down— when I came down here to Miami once when I was visiting. I was living in Atlanta and I came down here and they were having an auction down in Miami. Yeah, I was like, man, what are they— they were auctioning off houses, boats, yachts, planes. Lambos, trains, automobiles, everything, cars, all from people they arrested for, uh, you know, drug dealing. I was like, man, this is insane. Like, my friend took me, we went to the auction. I was like, wow, this is like insane. Like, people are just buying all this stuff.

Yeah, it's crazy, man.

It's, it's crazy. But you know, they just got to figure it out. But if you have a dispensary, you want to get an ATM in there, we can help you with that. Once we figure out this cash recycling thing, that if this one of the banks we work with decide— two of them are talking about it, two banks, they're talking about it, you know, and allow—

and the armored car company, because the recycling thing, like, at the end of the day, they got cash and they just throw it into—

yeah, they just put it in the recycler, it would count it, and then—

and then they can't open it though, right?

No, no, they can't open it. The business can't open it. The thing's, you know, secured. To the floor, probably locked in a room maybe, right?

Right.

And then they would just put their cash in there, would count it, and then electronically at some point in the day he would say, oh, at 4 o'clock in the afternoon, we're gonna— whatever's in there, they're gonna electronically deposit it to their bank account. Then when the machine is full, probably hold a couple— some of them, I mean, some of them look like they could hold a few hundred grand, right?

Yeah, the big one.

Yeah, that big one.

Who knows, that's probably a quarter mil in that joint, right?

So then they would just come by with the armored car, unlock it, take all the money out. It's already counted. They take it to the— they take it to the armored car place, count the money, right? And then when it refills again— but meanwhile, the business, it's a— it's, it's, it's a win-win for them because they're not having to take this money anywhere and it's actually going into a bank account. That—

yeah, man, when, when that guy was like running through all the possibilities of what it could do, yeah, I even thought it was great for a lot of businesses.

Like, let's say you had a convenience store and you don't want to go to the bank, or let's say you go to the— you had a, a bar and you have a lot of cash in your bar. Any kind of business where there's a lot of cash, it would work great. And then you just But, but you know, they're got to work out everything because I was asking them questions. How much is it? Can we lease it to the business? Like, lease it to them?

That's very—

what's the service charge to come pick up the money? Then they're like, well, we got to work all that out. Yeah, because you know, no one's gonna buy— I mean, some of those things were 10, 20, 30, 40 grand. Well, no, like the big whole giant thing where you got the ATM.

Yeah.

And then the— and then the cash recycler, it was like 40 to 50 grand. And that was the biggest one. Yeah, but I'm just saying, you know, you have to do a, uh, you know, cost analysis, put it in some place, see exactly like how that's going to run, how it's going to work, how often, you know, when the armored car goes there, how much are they going to charge for each pickup. But listen, for these businesses, it's going to be worth it, you know.

I mean, we were talking about it for strip clubs.

I mean, yeah, strip club, any kind of bar that has a lot of cash in it, right? And you don't want to, you know, you don't have— you don't want to have it just sitting in a safe somewhere.

Yeah, well, I mean, then you don't got to pay the ATM company anymore.

Well, no, they— you're still paying the ATM.

I mean, they come and fill it.

Well, they got to come out and service the machine anyway, so somebody's servicing this.

Not as often.

Well, the idea— well, the idea would be too, it's like, let's say you had an ATM company, they might be the one to supply the cash for the whole thing. So they're like putting the cash in the machine, right? So that's part of the whole— that's what they got to figure out. Like, let's say we— you give a club $100,000 loaded in the ATM, then they have to take the money, put it in the cash recycler, and then they take the money from the cash recycler and put it back in the ATM. Who's going to do that, the club, or you're gonna have—

no, you gotta have ATM, right?

The ATM company's gonna come out once a week and go, go empty the cash recycler and put it in the ATM. But meanwhile, the club doesn't have to take that money to the bank, right? Because basically they got— people took the money out of the ATM, now they spent it, right? Now they're putting it back in the cash recycler, and then it's go— getting deposited into their bank account because that's their profits, and then it's going back into the ATM machine. It's like they got to figure out the pro— the business process of that. But you know, there are other businesses related to the cannabis business. So cannabis seeds, cannabis doctors where they give people the card, cannabis-related products. So we've recently gotten some of that. Like, we just recently got one guy with a seed website approved for a merchant account. The bank is allowing that. We've had— we have a bunch of these cannabis doctors.

Yeah, I got approached yesterday about, uh, some seeds, so I would— never mind, we'll talk about that.

Yeah, and then cannabis-related products, like people that sell bongs and rolling papers and all that, we've gotten them merchant accounts before too for wholesale, you know, wholesaling of products. Like, we have one guy that sells special marijuana pipes. And then also he sells a thing that will test the marijuana. So you put it in the, in the special pipe, and then it'll tell you like the potency of the marijuana or something. I don't know, there's all kinds of stuff out there. Yeah, man. And then, you know, other things that are related in the industry is, you know, CBD and kratom. And I get approached by these kratom guys all the time. We have a bank that will take kratom, but all these kratom guys come to me and they're on the match list. And then, you know, if you are on the match list for, let's say, CBD, but you have a big business, like you have some decent cash flow, there are some banks now that, that are pretty open to like taking those businesses.

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Yeah, like you're gonna have to cough up, you know, put some money on deposit there. We're working with something kind of—

for what the cannabis is, what kind of merchant account did I need for that?

Regular merchant account. It's from just from a specific bank. Like, check the website, make sure the— make sure the website doesn't have any—

what kind of documentation do they need for seeds? Any?

Um, not really. They just need— they don't— there's no test for seeds, right? So there's no test on it. It's not marijuana until it's— until it— right, until it hatches, right?

Right.

So they just look at the website to make sure, like they're not selling somebody— I'm sure there's some limits, like they can't be selling somebody, you know, 500 pounds of marijuana seed, or maybe they can. I don't, I don't know. Just saying that they're— the guy got approved. It was like a website. They were selling like little baggies full of marijuana seeds. I guess some people, you know, there's a lot of states where you're allowed to grow marijuana.

Yeah. So just Does PayPal let you?

No way. PayPal, no.

I didn't think so.

No, there's a— there's some banks that are gearing up for legalization of marijuana and allowing it to be, you know, processed to credit cards. There's companies— there's one company from Canada came to the U.S., set up a U.S. office. They're waiting. They have the compliance software and everything.

Really?

Yeah. So it— yeah, because what it does is records like your driver's license and all that. I just think they the federal government needs to like take control. There's a lot of laws where they go, oh, it's up to the state, it's up to the state, it's up to the state, it's up to the state, it's up to the state. Stop saying it's up to the state. Just like, just like, okay, like step up to the plate, like make a decision, come up with, you know, look at all the laws across all the states, right? Come to some kind of consensus, right? I don't want to mention any laws because everybody will get upset about different ones. But I'm just saying, come up with a consensus and go, this is what we should be doing. Like, you know, they, they don't think about things in a business manner, right? And that's why the federal government's messed up, because if they would just take a more business approach to it, right, go, okay, from a business standpoint, how should we do this? But they don't think about it. And I look at some of these people who are in office, I'm like, man, these people never ran any kind of business. You know, I think, uh, like Ron DeSantis. Yeah, that he was involved in some business. Like, I don't even know how. Like, they had this bridge, right? They had these 3 or 4 bridges over there on the west coast of Florida completely— I mean, one of them was completely destroyed, okay? One going to this little island, man. I don't know, in 3 or 4 days this guy has all 3 bridges fixed. Granted, you You can't drive, you know, a gazillion cars. It's like one car at a time, you know, going across the bridge. But, you know, they got the— you know, now they're shoring it up and— yeah, right, fixing it. But I'm saying, like, now they were able to get all those, uh, FP&L trucks over there to fix the electricity, or try to fix the electricity. I mean, I have a friend of mine whose house is on Sanibel Island. I was like, what are you gonna have to do? And They said, well, we're either gonna have to sell the house or we're gonna have to build it up because it's not on stilts. They have to put their house on stilts. Another one of my friends' house was on Sanibel. They were— their house was on stilts. Nothing happened to the inside of their house. House survived like the whole thing. It was probably built over 20 years ago.

Nice.

Up on stilts. But whatever was down on the bottom you know, adiós. That's all gone. All the bushes, everything, landscaping. The landscaping's gone. The pool got, you know, jacked up. You know, the air can— you know, they didn't have the air— they had the air conditioner up in the air too, not on the ground, up smart, tucked underneath the, uh, you know, tucked on, tucked on the thing on a deck. Yeah, like facing west, like behind the house, up I've seen that before. So they had, um, yeah, everything like totally secured, even like the pool pumps and all that was all up. So nothing got like completely messed up. But you know, that's what you got to do. Like, you see, you see pictures of the beach and it's all, it's all, it's all, you know, it's all stuff is all gone. And then you see all of a sudden you see a couple of buildings, a couple of houses up on the stilts still there. You know, even up in the Panhandle we saw that too. The other issue is, which we did a podcast, we've done a couple of podcasts about—

real quick, before you get into that, yeah, if for the cannabis seeds, got what, or like where do they go for on our site?

Oh, go to the npsbank.com site, click Apply Now, fill out that, or set up an appointment and we'll talk on the phone. All right, and explain it to— explain to them. We can even get them like a pre-approval. We just send the website over to the bank, say, hey, will you approve this merchant? They say yes, we give you a list. I mean, they ask for everything, bank statements, you know.

Okay, because all right, so they got seeds, they have papers, and they have bongs, I think.

A bong? Yeah, they can get approved.

Does that fall under one bank or does that—

no, that's one, one account. The place that will take the seeds will take all that stuff. Okay, I got websites selling rolling papers, pipes, all kinds of stuff. I mean, listen, you know, there's, there's a bank for just about everything. Like, we had a guy come to us that sells flavored vapes, couldn't get a merchant account anywhere, whatever. We have one bank, that's it, they'll take it. But they check all the language on the site. They gave us a list of products the guy to get rid of. You know, that's what happens.

You just don't want—

you know, merchants always think, oh, I'll just send the bank some URL like, you know, oh, babyclothes.com, and put a bunch of fake stuff on there. And then they're going to really go sell all this other stuff, and then the bank catches them. You end up on the match list, and then you're done for 5, 6 years. So don't do that. Like, we've did a thing where, you know, they fake— or they just get set up with a virtual terminal from PayPal, Stripe, or Square then they find out what you're selling, you get shut off, and they keep your money, man. Yeah, and they keep your money, and good luck trying to get them on the phone. Yeah, I was dealing with a guy—

get your money back. I was dealing with—

I'm dealing with a guy now who we're helping get on a bank that had a CBD business. Square's holding like $250 grand of their money, right? $250,000 of their money. They've had it for like 2 years They don't know how to get it back. They got some lawyer. I was like, I don't know. I said, I could give you the name of another lawyer. It's worth a phone call. Find out, do they know who to talk to over there? I don't, I don't know the answer. You know, we have people all the time. I have another guy's in a crypto business, right? They had a merchant account from, uh, First Data and First Data didn't know that they were selling crypto.

Oh, so First Data found out they were selling crypto, yet it didn't go well, right?

And holding their money now for like 2 years also.

How much money is that?

A couple hundred grand. Yeah, and they didn't know who to call. They tried, they got a lawyer, so I sent them to another attorney to go talk to them. I told them, I said, first thing is, if you get on the match list, the one thing you don't want to do is close your bank account. Do not close that bank account if you're on the match list, because if and when you do get your money back, they're not writing you out a check. They're going to send it back to your business bank account related to that federal tax ID number. And if it's closed, yeah, then— and you have to go get it reopened, and you haven't kept up the corporation and all that. No, don't do that. People always make that mistake. Oh, the bank's holding my money, I'll close the account. Okay, take all the money out, leave $10 in there, right? Or $50 or whatever, $100. But don't go and close the account because when it's time to get your money— I know somebody else now, they're trying to get their money back. Um, I told them what to do, now they're getting the money back, about $40 grand.

Nice.

But they got to go get a bank account open first. So now they're working on reinstating the corporation that they let go for 2 years, open up the bank account, and they're going to get the $40 grand back. Yeah, they don't— that people don't know. And I mean, I gave them that advice for free. I mean, I'm not even— I mean, I don't know if they're— hopefully they'll send me a gift certificate, something. I just explained to them who to call So, and, and I said, the 180 days or 280 days, whatever they want to ever— whatever was in the contract is up. But now you need to call them on the phone and say, I want my money. But I told them what was going to happen. They called me back, they go, how did you know? Like, I'm doing this 20 years, right? I know exactly how it works. Don't do that when that happens. Do not do that. Yeah, the thing you— we did the whole thing, we did a whole podcast. What did we talk about? What to do PayPal, Stripe, and Square. What happens when you don't communicate to the bank and they close your account, or one of those companies closes your account? Don't close that bank account because you're not—

if you—

if and when you get the money back, they can't just keep the money, right? They're holding the money in lieu of getting chargebacks. Or fines or whatever. Most of the time they're not going to get a fine because they closed you down. And if they say they got a fine, tell them to prove that they got a fine, right?

Show it to me, right?

I know somebody, they got into a lawsuit where somebody said, oh, your— their point of sale was breached about 10 or 12 years ago. And then they called us and I said, well, we can initiate an investigation. So we contacted a local company to investigate their point of sale system. We charged them, they had to get a scan and all that. Then that company has connections, so they called up Visa and MasterCard, said, hey, we scanned this system, we didn't find anything. They say this processor is holding blah blah blah of their money. And the bank, then the Visa said no, there's no record of them getting, uh, fined or having a breach. So they got— so then the people got that information and they got their money. They got their money back.

Nice.

It took— they had to get a lawyer because they were dealing with somebody that was not on the up and up. But you know, there's what— you know, the most banks, they don't want their— what are they going to do with it? Or your money ends up on that website. What's that? The— like, Florida has a website called the the treasure, treasure hunt. You can put like, uh, unclaimed money in Florida.

Oh really?

Run by the state of Florida, right? I went on there once and for my business partner I found a couple thousand bucks on there.

Nice.

His parents probably sent him, uh, he found out what it was, they sent him like a Western Union of money and he never went and picked it up. Oh, like 2 or 3 times.

Yeah.

I found money on there once, a couple thousand dollars. It turned out that, um, when I rented an apartment one time, um, the people wouldn't give me back my deposit. And then I was at— apparently the, you know, they closed, you know, whatever. There was some— must have been some records or something, and I ended up getting the money back several years later. Yeah, stuff can pop up on there all the time. Could be you paid a bill, the bill wasn't due, then the company couldn't find you, you moved, and then it ends up— or they're holding— maybe you put a deposit down on your electricity 10 years ago.

Oh right.

And then they lost your phone number, you changed your number, now they can't get, get a hold of you, right? For whatever, which doesn't make sense, but I've seen it on there. I've seen it on there for all kinds of different all kinds of different stuff, I'm sure, you know, like unclaimed, unclaimed money, insurance. Yeah, insurance you paid and or something like that. That I had money from that too. Like I paid an insurance and then I canceled it, then they didn't give me back all my money. And then for whatever reason, whatever, it was a couple hundred bucks, but you know, whatever, it's free money. Yeah. Yes, I don't, you know, don't you You know, when you need to get an account for a difficult kind of business, like you have a cannabis dispensary, you want to put in an ATM, do it the right way. You don't want to end up on the match list. You're selling all these other items, CBD, you have to make sure all your tests are up to date, you know, within a year.

Someone's telling them that yesterday.

Yeah, cannabis seeds, same thing. You know, the bank's just going to look at the language on the site. That's what it's all about. What language is on there? Are they comfortable with it, or do you need to change anything? You have to change something, they're going to tell you like, oh, we don't like the way this is worded. It's the same thing with nutraceutical products, you know, erectile dysfunction products, vitamin products, anything. You can't have promises on there. There's too many eyes on all the— these businesses. You got the, you know, you have the, uh, you USDA, they're looking at anything related to cannabis and CBD. Got the FDA, Federal Drug Administration, looking at it. The DEA, the FTC, which is the Federal Trade Commission. I mean, they just went, they went crazy last week.

And now the—

we talked about on another podcast, the, uh, the, uh, CF— the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Yeah.

And now they got slapped around by the court. Yes, they did, because they said, oh, hold on a second, you, you can't make up all these rules because there's no oversight, so you can't make a law, right? So now all that's getting kicked back to Congress. Good, right? And now Congress is going to have to figure it out instead of trying to make up some— these agencies, right, like the Consumer Financial Protection Agency And then they don't have any— there's no oversight, there's no laws. They're just—

and then they're just making stuff up. Yeah, or, you know, that's ridiculous.

Yeah, they're making stuff up as they go along. I mean, they just had shot down over the weekend, was we discussed before, was this loan forgiveness program, right? So now the courts, 2 or 3 courts already shot it down saying no, if you want to do this loan forgiveness, you have to go to Congress, you have to go get it passed. Can't just say to a private bank, oh, this is forgiven now. I have problems with student loan, the whole student loan industry. So my main problem with it is, number one, like, you have these state colleges, okay, that stuff needs to be like— you live in a state, whatever, there needs to be like a affordable college. You pay a lot of property tax and all that. There needs to be affordable college. If your child grew up in a state, you should be able to have— get some. I'm just saying, I gotta— I'm just saying they gotta figure it out.

College should be free, right?

I'm just saying they— to a point. Yeah, right. They should— they should check.

Like, only place in the world that pays for school, right?

But I'm just saying, like, other things are like having trade schools available so people can— I mean, there's a shortage. Like, you need a handyman, it's ridiculous. You call 10 people to find one guy that can come out and fix stuff. Yeah, I mean, that's a good paying job. The guy who comes around here to go fix stuff, he makes a lot of money.

I bet.

I don't want to say how much he makes, it's too much. I'm just saying because there's other people are unreliable, so you're willing to pay more for a reliable person. And then the other thing is you have these career colleges, and I think that those colleges, some of them have gone out of business. ITT Tech, there was this Art Institute company, there was a bunch of them, Johnson Wales, and then they go out of business and kids change their major, then they make them take out new loans. Like, all of that has to stop. Like these loan practices that they allow. And that happens at regular college too. Like, my daughter had a friend, right? Yeah, he went to, went to University of Florida. He was majoring in whatever, chem— business. Then he changed to engineering. Then they made him take out another loan. No, the school already got the money. Who cares that he got money for this? Now he's going to go to school for that. Like, use the same money. Like, why is the person have to take out more loans, right? I think some of the loan practices are predatory. Oh, it's super predatory, right? And especially like these, um, when I went to school, man, I— dude, no, but like that ITT College, they just got in a whole bunch of trouble. And there's a few other of these career colleges that are all getting in trouble because they, they, they gave the— they made these kids take out huge loans for $100,000, $150,000, $200 grand, right? And these kids didn't understand—

they never make that money back in their field, right?

They're never going to make that money back. And they did it because, oh, you got a loan for $50 grand to go for nursing, you didn't like nursing, now you want to be a med tech, so now you got to take out another $50 grand loan, right? That, that stuff, that's the kind of stuff where there's— no, but that's where I point out where the government needs to set things up so that businesses Private businesses or even state-run businesses or whatever can't do that kind of stuff. Same thing with cannabis. Like, get real. You got the Financial Committee in the House. Maxine Waters is on there. You got, uh, John Rose, who we're trying to get on the podcast. Then on the opposite side in the Senate, there's— they got 2 or 3 committees over there. The Financial Committee, the Judiciary Committee, some other committee. The— what's that one? I forget the one guy's name. He's trying to come up with some other stuff. Forget all these, you know, all these BS bills. Just concentrate on one thing: Safe Banking Act. Just get that done.

Uh, the Safe Banking Act is pretty important.

Just get it done already. Safe Banking Act. Everybody should, should go write your congressperson, whoever represents you in the House, whoever represents you in the Senate. Send them an email. They all have, you know, write an email and just go to their website and copy and paste it. Say, vote, vote.

You know, voting's coming up.

So yeah, voting's coming up. You know, you know, you got to look at what everybody— I always tell everybody, you know, don't vote on personality and all this and blah blah blah, it's complicated things. Vote for the people who actually like look at the policies that they want to— that, that they stand— that they're standing up for. What kind of policies they have, and are they really gonna, you know, how does it affect you, right? And are they really going to deal with them, right?

That's it.

Not— there's a lot of stuff like that's been out there for years and years and years that they're not dealing with. Don't worry about that stuff because they're never going to deal with it. Don't even get excited about it when they start talking about a lot of the stuff that's especially in the commercials now. Congress— that some of these, these problems have been around for 20, 30, 40, 50 years. They haven't dealt with it. They're not going to deal with it. So don't worry about it. What we need to worry about is these economic policies, right, and how those are going to be dealt with from the economic standpoint of getting things straight in the United States of America. Getting stuff like Safe Banking Act. They're not— you don't see commercial, um, you know, Marco Rubio and I'm gonna pass the Safe Banking Act. Where, Marco, where's that commercial, right? You don't see his opponent talking about it either, that lady Val Deming, whatever her name is. They're on TV talking about all kinds of esoteric stuff that doesn't matter. What matters are the laws that are going to change things to make things better from an economic standpoint is what everybody needs to be concentrating on, not worry about these other things. Those things, if the right people are in Washington, they'll, they'll vote, they'll, they'll wrap their head around this stuff and get it done. Yes, but right now the economy is number one, not emptying out the oil reserve. That's stupid. I don't agree with that.

Drill.

You got to do something. The United States needs to be energy independent.

You're turning it into a politic podcast.

No, no, I'm not. Okay, so that's the podcast for today. We covered about— we talked about cannabis, the Safe Banking Act. We talked about hopefully some of the things that are being worked on by some of the banks that we work with to get better services to help these cannabis businesses, how you can get approved for CBD account, cannabis seeds, cannabis doctors, for cards. We talked about cannabis-related products, Kratom, match list. Don't get on the match list.

Stay off the match list.

Stay off the match list. Stay in contact with your credit card processor. So that's today's podcast. Find us everywhere @B2BVault.

We're on all the podcasts, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, you name it. We're on, you know, social media. We're on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Amazon, iHeartRadio.

Yeah, visit the website b2bvault.info. Sign up for our newsletter. You can also get an appointment, text the word book to 827-9818.

954. 954-827-9818.

Yep, text the word book, you'll get back a link, you can set up an appointment with us, and we'll get whatever— we'll talk to you about whatever you want payments related. Everybody have a great day.

Stay groovy. Peace. Peace out.

What? Don't worry, be happy.