Why did I get kicked off of Stripe, Square, PayPal etc.? | Match List | Terminated Merchant File | Payment Processing | B2B Vault: The Payment Technology Podcast | Episode 117

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 discuss what to do when your account gets dropped from a payment processor, meaning you are selling CBD, kratom, or you're a high-risk merchant or whatever you were doing at, you know, and all of a sudden You can't make sales anymore, you can't accept payments, um, you're stuck up crap creek without a paddle. Um, yeah, there's a, you know, there's— this happens a lot, you know, believe it or not. Um, can be caused by many different things, um, really simple things for you to fix. It could be something very complex. It can be something as simple as you uploading a document to make sure that all your products are, you know, supposed to be where they're supposed to be. But yeah, there's a bunch of different things that you can do. And there's a lot of things that you shouldn't do. So in this podcast, Allen Kopelman is going to talk about steps that you can take to A, prevent, and B, what to do after, you get dropped from your payment processor. Hopefully that doesn't happen to any of our listeners. Hopefully you take all of our advice that we've been giving and, uh, you're, you know, implementing this on into your stores and your businesses so that it doesn't happen. But yeah, man, yes, what you got?

So a lot of people, you know, want to take like the easier route, so they find themselves processing with, you know, Square, Stripe, PayPal, right, Shopify. And then they go to find out— like, I've had at least in the last 2 weeks between people who made a Wix website and a Shopify website contact me, and they're like, oh, I made this website, then I— after I spent all my time making it, right, or money in some cases— let's go to find out that Shopify doesn't support the product, right? And then they find out that they have to pay extra, or Wix doesn't support their product, and now they got to rebuild the whole shopping cart like a WooCommerce shopping cart and plug it onto a Wix site. WordPress, you know, WordPress. Yeah, they got to make a WordPress, um, separate shopping cart, you know. In order to do that. And that becomes kind of complicated, and it can be a little bit onerous when it comes to like hosting that, because now it's not like one website, or you got to switch your whole website, and then there's extra cost. So you have to, you know, you have to make sure that when you're using a service like especially like a PayPal, Stripe, and a Square, that you're going to their list of prohibited business types, right? Because people don't understand, like, there's prohibited, right? And then there's restricted. But it basically, it just means they're not going to process for you, right? Right. And they have, you know, basic stuff, you know, illegal products and services. So it has to be a legal product, you know, anything infringing on intellectual property rights.

Products, meaning fake clothes. Yeah, fake clothes, fake handbags, celebrities' pictures on it, right?

Yeah, we've had people like try to get— like, we have clients that sell watches and handbags online, and they have to send— they have to supply us with a supplier letter for each product showing that they're licensed to sell Kate Spade handbags or Swatch watches or whatever it is that they sell, right? Because we don't want to have— you know, you could go and there's tons of these websites, like we have marketplaces that we have too, right? And you know, we have to tell the merchants that run those marketplaces, hey, you know, you need to make sure that your, your client, right, you know, you, you don't have clients on there selling fake handbags and stuff like that because you're going to get your merchant, you know, your whole marketplace shut down. You You know, other things are products deemed to be unfair, predatory, deceptive. So that can mean any— just the wording on your website.

My CBD cures headaches. You can't say that on there, right?

Claims, especially when it comes to any— not just CBD, but health-related products like creams and lotion, pain anymore vitamins. Oh, this, this special cream cures arthritis. You can't say that. You could say may help with arthritis, and then, you know, you know, you have to research like your product and go to like the FTC and the FDA website if you're selling a supplement, vitamin supplements, you know, nutraceuticals sometimes they refer to, and go see what they, you know, what, what things you need to put on your website. Lots of websites require that. We're going to get into that, like tobacco website, you have to have a thing on there about you know, tobacco can be harmful to your health kind of thing. And, you know, and a lot of products are age-restricted, like tobacco, selling alcohol online, you know, even a gift basket company. We had one come to us, they get— they're like, oh, we had to remove all the wine from our website because the credit card processor said we're not allowed to sell wine. So I asked the guy, I said, you got a, uh, want a license, you know, alcohol license? The answer is no. So, you know, if you have— want to sell gift baskets with wine, one, you need an alcohol license, and, and two, you need to be getting a signature upon delivery where the UPS or FedEx is getting a driver's license from the person, having them sign. That's one of the few things that they make people sign for, even if you're shipping cigars. And stuff, they should be signed up with UPS and FedEx that they're shipping a tobacco product and getting a signature, you know. But I'm sorry, in some cases, uh, in some cases I would say UPS and FedEx kind of skip the signature 99% of the time, but not for alcohol. Not— they will not do it because you have to tell them you're shipping alcohol, you know. Other prohibitive services like um, these like adult content, not every processor takes, accepts adult content, or it's an adult product.

Most, right? Yeah, you got to be really careful even on WordPress, right?

So, you know, we accept, we have banks that will accept adult products like lingerie, toys, videos, you know, pictures, even streaming video. As long, you know, as long as you're following the rules. And like MasterCard has new rules for like adult websites, so you have to be compliant with their rules. They're very, very strict. Every single person has to be registered. That's why there's so many problems. OnlyFans and Pornhub are constantly under fire from the card brands, and a lot of banks have shut them down because they weren't following the rules of making sure that there was no underage people. And that they identified each person that was appearing in a video.

How can they stop people from lying?

They can't stop people from lying, but at least like they checked the ID. They did— you did your part, you know. You use some kind of ID identification software or something.

Man, I've seen some IDs, they're real.

Yeah, exactly. But I'm just saying you got to do the best you can do.

I agree. I mean, I have 6 daughters, so like, yo, if If I ever, you know, anyway, carry on, right?

So then, you know, like League, like different, and also different businesses like require certain types of registration with, with the card brands. Like, you know, selling firearms or firearm products, you have to have special licenses. You're gonna sell liquor, you got to have licenses. You got to have different, uh, exclusions. Some states don't allow you to ship into their state unless you have a license in their state. So you have to follow all the rules. Like, you can't get set up for gambling through many companies. There are companies that accept these kind of merchants, but you need to do your research and find somebody and make sure that they're— you talk to the credit— say, I would like to speak to the underwriter, I would like to speak to somebody at the bank, right? When you're going to get set up with one of these accounts, because the biggest mistake people make is the aggressive sales rep will say 'Oh yeah, I'm gonna put this down as something else,' right? And then get you approved, then the next thing all your money's held. You don't want to deal with that. And many times people go and— like, some guy was trying to get an account.

Wait, so before you get into that, okay, you, you, you passed right over something. So when, when you said the sales guy, meaning the guy that's setting you up for the merchant account will set you up in under a different business.

Business, like he'll put down you're a restaurant and it's actually a strip club. And maybe the credit card processors, some of them are— I, I always like to talk about, you know, underwriting, like, like I always put it in a funnel, right? So some places have like PayPal, Square, Stripe, right? These kinds of companies. And there are credit card, right? They have a big funnel, right? So Everything is— it's all open, right? Everything comes, comes in, right? And then it gets skinny later, right? As they see transactions come through, then they go, hey, this guy processed $10,000 at this, uh, you know, Billy Bob's Restaurant. They go Google the address. Hey, that's not— and there was a $5,000 check-in, you know, charge. Uh, no, that's not a restaurant. This is a strip club. We don't do strip clubs, right? So we're gonna have to shut them off. And they shut the account down. Maybe they have some money, you know, that's coming into the, into the processor. They'll hold the money. And then, you know, how long does it take for them to give you— they can hold your money up from 180 days to 280 days.

Wow.

Yeah, so you could lose your money. We had a strip club come to us one time, and then we did an investigation And what we did was we got the guy set up. He was on the match list because some rep wrote him up as a restaurant, and it's clearly a strip club because they thought that— the strip club thought, oh yeah, we're going to get lower rates. No, doesn't matter. You're not going to get— you know what I mean? You're, you're just playing, you're just playing a game. You need to deal with a company that says, okay, we, we know you're a strip club, We don't care you're a strip club and we accept it, right? Right. And it's getting fewer and fewer because in our business, so many companies are getting acquired by venture capitalists, PE firms, which is some other kind of investment companies, right? Acquiring companies. Then once they acquire the company, they go, whoa, look what the heck is going on. These guys are processing for all types of crazy businesses. You know, we're a public entity. You know, and they either— they say, okay, we have to stop accepting those, right? And then any of them that get out of line, they get rid of them right away, right? So you want to be— you have to make sure, like, oh, this company— oh, I'm gonna sell firearms online. Okay, you know, is this company listed with the NRA or whoever, right? Recommending like different companies. Oh, you know, they have— you can, you can get references. Oh, do you do other you know, firearms companies. Oh, you do other adult websites? Who's— what websites do you do? Understand, like, don't just believe them and say, oh yeah, you know, or their person's going to send you to 50 companies to see who's going to take it. I want to make sure, like, their experience— they know what to deal with, they know about the complex compliance things that you have to go through with your site. Same thing with CBD. We get CBD merchants all the time. And we go to their website and they have this post of the COA, certificate of analysis, and then they're, they're over a year old. Not acceptable by the bank.

There you go.

They might be processing somewhere that's not monitoring the site, but that processor could get fined by Visa, by Visa and MasterCard for having a merchant selling expired product or not having the right thing. So you got to make sure, you know, but simple things go on and in this business that, that people don't understand. Like, you could get shut down for, you know, what your business is not what you said it was. So that could get shut down. You get approved for one website and then you got 3 or 4 more websites, right, that you didn't tell the bank about, and then they find them. And they say, hey, we didn't approve these websites. We just went through that with a merchant. No, they called us up, they go, oh, we're making like 2 more websites. Like, oh, you got to contact underwriting, you know, get the information over to them, let them look at the site. There was some back and forth email with some language they wanted added to the guy's website, blah blah blah. It was all done and happy. Um, you know, like I said, you You know, make sure the application's filled out correctly. They're not, you know, lying about what you do. You're selling— you have a marijuana shop and the guy puts down it's a CBD store. You know, that's not— they're gonna find it. You're gonna get shut off. You're gonna get— you might get fined. You could get your money held. You can end up on the match list, and then you're on there for 5, 6 years. Yeah, you're screwed. Then you're not going to get that, you know. Or let's say you have to register. Like, I had a guy with an adult site. I'm like, well, you have to register. It's $1,000. Okay, well, we could do it in a couple of payments or whatever, but you have to register. You know, it's $1,000 every year. Tobacco, you have to register. Some people don't want to register. I can tell you later on you're going to get caught, and then you're going to have a big problem because they're going to say, oh, you're selling product without registering, right? You know, that's why a lot of times I'll see places like selling tobacco through PayPal, Stripe, or Square. Eventually they get shut off. They just shut them down. They go, no, can't, no can do, because they don't— they're not set up to register people, you know. Then, you know, you have to follow requirements for certain businesses like CBD. We talked about the certificates. Firearms, you need an FFL license, Federal Firearms License. And, you know, and like when they ship firearms, right, You have to, you know, you're federally— let's say Justin has a gun store and then he wants to sell me a gun and I live in Texas. He can't just send it to my house, he has to send it to another gun shop in Texas. That person's gonna check and make sure, like, oh, I'm licensed, I have my driver's license.

I still think that's messed up, but whatever.

Yeah, I don't agree with like how a lot of that is handled. I don't think you should be able to purchase a firearm on any website.

I don't care what site, where it is in the United States or the world.

They need to put— needs to have— no, there's— it's open.

It shouldn't. That's your opinion. My opinion is I don't think you should be able to buy a gun online, period, plank. There's no exceptions at all.

It definitely should be closed up or eliminated. I agree with that. I mean, there's— I mean, what, you live in Florida, there's a gun— there's gun stores and pawn shops all over the place with guns. Yeah. There's no need to go to a gun shop. But also gun shows, they need to have a way—

gun shows shouldn't exist either, right?

Either that or they should have a table there.

Gun shows, if they exist, they should be existed for the business only. Private people should not— collectors, people who can come off the street and purchase firearms inside of it shouldn't be able—

well, no, they should just have them required to have registration there. Sorry. So you can't buy anything unless you're registered.

Yeah, if you can buy— I mean, you If you can go and look at them, that's one thing, but you shouldn't be able to purchase it.

No, no, but I'm saying they, they could easily set up a place away where people have to show like, oh, I mean, I'm very anti-firearms.

Like, I don't care about all you people about take my guns away. You can kiss my ass. Sorry, I mean, you're not in the military. What do you own an AR-15 for anyway? This is not a political podcast.

You know, like if you're doing a medical type of business, like let's say massage therapy, or it's a doctor's office, or like medical marijuana doctor where they're giving people the card, or they're performing like Botox and things like that. Yeah, we're required to collect, you know, licenses for sure, or look it up and make sure the place is licensed properly. You know, like you have a liquor store, a convenience store, we get liquor licenses, tobacco licenses. Licenses, EBT licenses, you know, same thing. Pharmacies, you know, you just can't just put a pharmacy online and let people buy whatever they want. Although I get probably 50 text messages now. I like it, T-Mobile finally added to my phone when someone sends you a spam message, you can hit spam or junk and then it's gone. Then that person can't send you stuff anymore.

Well, that's because you had AT&T or something.

No, I had a Sprint before, they didn't have that.

But now I was going to say T-Mobile, we've had that option forever. Yeah, now T-Mobile, click that little button, add the block list, you're done.

Yeah, well, you could— I could block them before, but you couldn't stop this SMS messages. But now they're— they came up with this, the wording. If you start flagging those, then you stop getting— I get them less and less now. But that's a huge problem. We're going to do another podcast about cybersecurity because it's out of control.

Cybersecurity month.

Yeah, so the other thing is, is, you know, you can get shut down because you have excessive chargebacks. You're not responding to chargebacks. You're not responding to phone calls. You know, it's important, you know, if you're getting a bunch of chargebacks, contact your rep, contact the company you do business with. Hey, what can we do to lessen this? Like, we just have a guy now, they I have a cigar shop, and then they decided they're going to put up a website. And the guy's been a big cigar influencer. The guy, he just bought the cigar shop, but he was a cigar influencer before, okay? Right. So he has like a huge following on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok of smoking cigars, right? So now the place went from the— when they first put the, the, the company before that he bought was doing like maybe 100 orders a month. That's 2 or 3 a day, right? They're doing 50s plus a day now. Yeah, right. So I started getting a lot of scam orders. So I was telling them, I go, you know, you guys got to figure out like how to do it. You have to have like your whitelist of people who bought from you before, and you know those are good customers.

And then the people who haven't bought from you before, you need to hire somebody that's sitting behind the that is going to manage your shop, right, at your— for your website. And strictly, that's the only thing he's going to do is manage your e-commerce store, because some guy that's sitting in your office is not going to have any idea what they're doing. So in my humble opinion, hire someone like myself to manage your website, so then that way you can keep making money..

But you also have to manage the payment part and make sure they should be doing— who?

The person managing the website. If they're, if they're accepting payments for a product, and they're getting the emails and managing the website, they're going to be the first ones to know when someone makes a payment, when someone makes a purchase, right? Literally the very first person, even before the owner, if it's set up how I would set it up.

Okay.

I would know.

It would be—

it'd be— it's the same as the owner and myself. We would get the same notification at the very— yeah.

So the problem they're having is, is people are going in with a real credit card, real data, so they have the correct billing address, you know, it's somebody that, you know, they bought it off the dark web, and then the shipping address is a different shipping address. So then they flagged— they started flagging those and checking the addresses, which I told them, I said, you know, there's probably software you can buy. You're doing 50 orders a day, that's a lot of manual work to do that. And then they're checking those addresses.

I mean, they typically on an e-commerce website, they, you know, there's really nothing you can do about shipping to a different address. Well, they're checking them because they got ripped off like I mean, you could check, yeah, but what I'm saying is like people, well, they're shipped to a different address every day.

They're get— they're getting a lot of orders where it's $200, $300, $400, $500. But we gotta be smart. So they're calling— so now on those orders, they're calling people up on the phone. If they don't answer the phone within 24 hours and return the call back, then they're just refunding the transaction. If the person calls back, they'll say, hey, order again. But they're good, you know, they're just taking precautions because they got a lot of chargebacks. Not their fault because they're growing and the employees need to learn how to do that.

There's got to be some way of verification.

Well, no, when you have real credit card data, it's very hard to, to dispute that, right? Their credit card receipt, their credit card information, like, so we looked at the transactions and they got AVS positive response, CVV2 positive, zip code address match, everything was perfect. But it was a— it was a scam. Somebody stole the person's—

that's what I'm saying, like, you've got to have someone managing your site, right?

So they're now putting a guy in charge.

Do you think, like, these big huge companies that run these, these shops, they got a whole team of people running?

Oh yeah, they got a team, or they're using, like, there's some— there's software you can put on your website but it really won't prevent that because I call that like friendly fraud, where it's like, it's— you have—

it's just people being jerks and knowing how to get away with stuff.

Scammers.

Yeah, I mean, people have been getting away with scams since the beginning of time.

Yeah, and then, you know, like some places have, have software that tells them like, oh, when the person puts in the, you know, like when they get that data out of the shopping cart, like it goes into a CRM system.

Well, we also talked about this too, like, you know, there's a lot of ways to prevent that on, you know, what is your average sale ticket, right? Right.

Well, that's what they're doing. They're monitoring the sales based on, okay, here most people only spend $50 to $100. Anything over that is automatically flagged. So they're making—

yeah, it should automatically put a red flag in, right?

So that's what they're doing.

Let's verify this. But then again, business owners who are trying to do this all on their own, they're more concerned about making a buck and they're not really paying attention to all that. And now they're dealing with chargebacks and they can't access their funds. They're getting kicked off of payment processors left and right. I mean, at some point, at some point you just got to cough up a buck and pay what it weighs for you to operate your business.

You're gonna have to start with an employee if you're doing a ton of volume. There's other stuff you can do, like if you're selling like a SaaS product, right, or it's like a membership, there's things you can do. You can install— you can put RDR, which that basically— let's say Justin goes and signs up for, you know, xyz.com and it's $20 a month, right? And then, uh, then I— and then somebody steals Justin's credit card information, let's just say, off the dark web. They always call it the dark web, right? They steal— isn't— I laugh because I get these notices from like Credit Karma and stuff. It says, oh, your information's on the dark web. Everybody's information on the dark web. I mean, they don't have my credit card data, but at the same— the— so the thing is, so then somebody, let's say someone gets Justin's information and they go on another website and they buy something, then Justin sees it because he checks his bank account or his credit card. And he goes, contacts his bank. Hey, that's not me. Boom, boom, boom. They cut Justin's card. They send him a new card maybe. And then they do a chargeback. So the merchants that are— the merchant that's getting the chargeback, they can protect themselves with RDR because it's not a product, right? It's just a service. And the RDR basically would set— the minute they would see Justin wants to do a chargeback, if his bank is a member of that RDR thing, right? Which it's not all the banks, it's probably 70 or 80%. I didn't even know this, there's like over 30,000 banks in the U.S. including fintechs. I was like, wow, it's a big number. But then, so let's say 70, 80% of them are on that system, it would automatically— like the merchant would— it would generate a refund from the merchant. And you can only really do that with the service-type businesses. Right? Can't really do it with physical product. But there's other things that you can set up. There's Ethika, Verify, which those— I also identify things as a chargeback, but that's also not going to catch like these, these ones. What I'm talking about, this is just manual. Like, we have a merchant that sells like almost a million dollars a month of hand cream, right?, and they sell tons of it. They have hand cream and eye cream, right? And they basically, they have the whitelist, right? These are people who ordered before, they know they're good. And then they have the people who never ordered before, and then they just, they have 2, 3 guys sitting in the office that they're working on those transactions all day. They pick up the phone and actually like call them. I mean, that's the only way to address—

I've been doing this for 10 years, ladies and gentlemen, and I'm telling you right now There's literally no other way of you stopping it. Like, you have to do your due diligence. There's no other— you know, you can rely on technology all you want, but humans are smarter than technology. We created the tech, man.

Exactly.

So we're gonna find a way to manipulate it to, to, to make it do what we want it to do. And, and there are— just be smart, man. That's all. That's, that's all I could tell you.

There are some very expensive products out there that are a few thousand dollars a month.. But yeah, if you're doing millions, then it's time to step up to get one of those products. But here's some, you know, posts that I saw on the internet, you know. So I looked on Google and I saw some on Facebook, you know, stuff that gets posted around, you know. Why did Square close my account? So whatever, I guess this person contacted Square and they said, oh, there's 3 reasons why your account would get deactivated. Nor, you know, higher than normal chargebacks. So the chargeback ratio— when I first started in this business, this is— it's kind of crazy when I think about it. The chargeback ratio was 3%, then it went down to 2%, then it went down to 1%, and now it's 0.08% or 0.07%. Seems pretty good. What? No, I'm saying, I'm saying the— what they allowed merchants to have was 3%.

Oh.

Back.

I thought you meant that's how much it went down.

No, no, 2001.

So that's how 3%— you could have up to 3%, like, percent chargeback transactions.

Now it's 0.07. That's kind of low. Yeah, well, that's what I mean. They tightened it up on the businesses, and with EMV, it forced all, like, the card-present fraud all to the internet. Oh, right. That's why I think, like, they got to have multi- factor authentication on, on, uh, non-card-present transactions. That's just my deal.

I mean, it's really easy. You can send money and get money online in 32.3 seconds, right?

High-risk activity, you know, or breach in the terms of service, which is pretty broad.

But basically that means like yourself didn't read your contract and now you put that product up there and you weren't supposed to have an 8-inch bong on your website, right?

You're not supposed to be— yeah, you have to really read— like, a lot of people don't understand, they got to really read the terms of service of these when you're signing up for an online merchant account from a company where you're not talking to a sales rep. And you got to under— you got to go look at what's prohibited.

Yeah, I mean, Shopify— I mean, they weren't even letting you sell CBD on their website.

Are they? No, exactly.

So I know you can't process payments with PayPal for CBD?

Nope.

So you can't— you're gonna like— you can build a website like on WordPress and you can sell CBD, but you're gonna have to find a payment processing to attach to the website.

Exactly. And then another one, you know, same thing, PayPal shut down the account. Why? Oh, it's suspected fraud, there was excessive chargebacks, uh You know, you should check, like I said, the terms and conditions. Sometimes, like, they weren't able to debit your bank account was another reason. And, you know, or selling something prohibited product, you know.

Other things, processors, not just PayPal, but a spike in sales, which is super whack to me because I have someone that I know that just happened to somebody I know, right? They they have a product. And it was a skin product.

And they—

it's actually a really tragic event that drove a bunch of— someone got killed, right? And to support, to support the business, they went and bought this skin product. Well, when doing that, their sales, they went through the roof.

Okay.

And what happened?

They're sitting there, and that's why I asked how long does it take for that money to come back, because I mean, well, that's the time where, you know, listen, if you're dealing with a PayPal, Stripe, or Square, so there's literally no one to call.

This circumstance is going to be a little bit different, right? Because it's like the kid was a part of a very popular sorority, so the people that are like— there's gonna be some powerful people that are contacting these banks, like, on their behalf.

But who is—

but a normal person isn't going to get that.

Who's the problem?

Oh, it's probably like Stripe or PayPal.

Yeah. So it's very difficult to deal with them when that happens. Yeah, right. Because they're just— you just got people in cubicles everywhere. You're sending them an email, the custom— the guys that's looking at it, you know, we don't really care, like, we're holding your money, blah blah blah. Right now I just got an email from a client, right? So they called me there an insurance company. Oh, we have open enrollment coming up. We need to make sure all of our, uh, we need more volume of credit card processing. Can you contact, you know, we have— they have a lot of merchant accounts because of the way it's set up, because they process for multiple insurance companies. So they're like, hey, we need this one to increase from, you know, $1 million to $2 million. The one that's at $2 million, we need to go to $3 million. Like, they want more way more volume for open enrollment. Open enrollment, you know, is coming up for insurance. I literally— I hate health insurance, like the worst.

Yeah, my phone number— my phone's been going crazy already, you know.

So you got—

Hello everyone, we'd like to take this time to thank our sponsors Nationwide Payment Systems and NPS Printer. We'd also like to shout out the listeners and everyone that subscribed to our YouTube channel. Thank you for tuning in. If you'd like to reach Allen or myself, head over to B2BVault.info where you'll find two forms, one to contact us and another if you're interested in becoming a sponsor. If you'd like to sign up for a merchant account, click the Apply Now button located at the top of the page of B2BVault.info where you'll answer a few questions and you'll be on your way to processing payments in no time. The podcast is available on Spotify, iTunes, Pandora, and other popular streaming networks. Thanks again for listening.

Really be careful, you know, what's going on with, with when you're getting a merchant account. So you want to make sure that you understand, like, especially if you're in a higher risk type of business, and you know that you're not— like, we had another guy and he was doing over-the-phone like tech services, which is slightly scammy of a business.

What was it?

Tech support. Like, oh, but you know, that's—

so I like, you have a problem with your computer?

Yeah, you— yeah, they're coming into your computer. Oh yeah, no, yeah, I don't do any of that. I don't even like them as clients. Because a lot of them—

trust it.

Yeah, I don't trust that they're doing business on the up and up because a lot of times, like, once my mom called me and she's like, oh, Yahoo called me on the phone. I'm like, Mom, Yahoo is not calling you on the phone. No, you did not. What happened? So my mom tells me the person got, you know, she did a screen share. I'm like, oh no, she paid with her credit card money. I'm like, no, no, no. So my mom called her bank and she did a chargeback right away. I said, whatever that person installed on the computer, go in there and remove it like right now, you know, because it was scraping her computer as well. You don't know what it was doing.

Oh, it was— yeah, it was running a script, right? That's for sure. It was fine.

That's how people get it.

He was trying to find the keystrokes, anything. That's what that—

so I told my mom, shut your computer off. I'm plug it from the internet right now. Like, so she unplugged her computer from the internet, she went in there. I actually had one of my friends who's a computer guy go over to my mom's house, right? Because I, I don't know how to do all that, right? I could, but I'm not— I don't have time.

No, right?

So I happen to call my friend, I go, hey, are you in the area? He's like, well, yeah, I'm down that way. I said, can you go by my mom's house? She messed something up. But he went there. And it was— they, they just, they installed some program. It was like a virus soft—

they told my mom she had a virus and they were going to charge her to remove it.

Yeah. And they're gonna— and, and she gave them the credit card and they charged her. She thought it was Yahoo. I was like, no, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Google, the IRS, the IRS, they don't— none of them call you on the phone.

Social Security Administration.

No, no, my favorite is we had a— I had a guy on the phone. Samantha recorded me one day when some scammer was calling me. It's really funny. We should repost that for Cybersecurity Month. It was a pretty funny video. But you know, they don't call you on the phone. Google's not calling you. Apple's not calling. I had some guy yesterday calls me on the phone. Oh, are you the business owner? Yes. Oh, do you have Apple computers in your office and Apple devices? Oh, we want to help you with your devices. I was like, listen, no, no, thank you. What was another one? Another phone call I got? Oh yeah, I got— I get these emails all the time, right? Oh, your Microsoft account has expired. Please log in. No, do not click that. No, no, no. But let's get back to the high-risk merchant. So you got to really make sure, you know, what business that you're in. You know, we're— you know, we deal with a lot of difficult businesses. I'll give you an example. Like, we have a guy now, he's got a credit product, right? So we took it to 3 or 4 different banks, nobody wanted it. Then we showed it to another bank and they said they wanted it, but then now they're messing around. So We're kind of done with that. We're done with them. And now we found another bank that we finally went to them, explained the business model, what the guy's doing, right? It's a legitimate business. And that—

so it's like credit restoration?

No, it's basically they're selling a class to teach. Okay, so there's like a lot of services online you can pay like $15, $20, $30, $40 a month sometimes they're more, and they explain to you how to get your credit score boosted. And boosting your credit score is—

is some really good advice for you. Dispute all of the charges that you have. You can do it yourself for free.

No, no, that's not what they do. So they tell you how to boost your score. So that's gonna boost your score, right? So one of the— oh, What, what, when you do a bunch of chargebacks?

No, when you dispute, oh, what's on your credit report and they remove it, right? Yeah, dispute.

That's what they teach you, like how to go on your credit card, super easy, go on your Credit Karma and you see something that doesn't belong there, wrong spelling name, different address, all of those little things, you can dispute that and they take it off. And then they were talking about like with young people that are maybe living at home or maybe they're living in an in an apartment and they really have an established credit, because it's really unusual. Like, a lot of young people move into like an area now where they don't really need a car, right? So they'll take Uber and then they, they'll walk because there's everything in their neighborhood, right? Right. They don't, they don't, you know, like go live out in the country where you got to drive, you know, 10 minutes to go to the store, or maybe you have to drive 30 minutes to the store. People are living, you know, you know, there's like a lot of setups now. Like, you, let's say you live in downtown Fort Lauderdale, you could like walk to the grocery store. They're building like grocery stores in the bottom of all these, you know, buildings.

Food deserts are getting smaller and smaller, right?

So, God, so the, so, you know, that, that's really good. They're putting like smaller version of Whole Foods, a smaller version of Publix, or they're putting it in a very close area where you can Uber over in just a, you know, a few minutes. So a lot of people, you know, working at home and all that, they don't have a car, so they don't have a car payment, and they don't really— and a lot of, like, your debit card doesn't report to the credit bureau. So they teach you like, oh, you need to go out and get a credit card, you need to get— report your— you can you can physically report that you pay rent.

Yeah, there are ways to do it, right?

So they teach you like the different ways.

Truebill, I think.

Yeah, there's some way to do it where you can—

but they got bought by somebody, RocketPay or something.

No, they explained to you how to, how to report your rent to the— you can report it by connecting your checking account.

That works. My— since I started doing that, my credit score went up a little bit for sure.

So they teach you that. It's a one-time fee only, no monthly fee and all that. So it's a great product, just having a hard time, you know.

Why don't they like it?

They don't like it because they think that the person's going to take the data and maybe sell it to credit— another company for credit repair and stuff like that. That's why some of the banks don't like it. I just think that—

what, so can the bank just say, hey, you got sign this?

Yeah, they can. That's what I mean. We just got to find a more That's why I was telling you, like, in, in the business now, you got all these companies getting acquired. No, right? So as all these companies get acquired, all of a sudden you can't—

some guy's got a problem with CBD or whatever, or an adult site, the new owner doesn't want to deal with it. Well, they'll just stop taking. No, I get it.

They'll stop taking like that niche type of business. Yeah. And anytime somebody's got a business that nobody's ever heard of before, right, you got some kind of new product, right, or a new thing, you know, then business— they don't want it disruptive.

They don't want to deal with you.

Well, yeah, they don't understand it. Like, you know, like, I'll give you an example. We do a bunch of like car shipping places, right? They ship cars, they ship freight, they do all this stuff. They're like a broker, right? So some banks are like, no, we don't want that business. I'm like, that's great. It's great business, you know, as long as the person runs it correctly, right? It's a good business. So That's what you have to understand, because they don't—

they're— what are they afraid of? They're selling stolen cars?

No, they're just shipping. They don't understand that. They don't understand the business model, so they don't want to deal with it. So that's why I'm saying you have to go— when you go to somebody, people come to me, they go, oh, do you know how— can you get car shippers approved? Yes, we work with a bunch of car shippers. You want a reference? I'll give you a reference. I'll give you a couple of references. Oh, can you do moving companies? Yes. But you know, a lot of times these guys come to us, they're like, do these moving brokers and stuff. Now we— that's hard to do. You got to get people that have moving trucks and stuff like that because I don't like dealing with middlemen anyway. Yeah, it's kind of, you know, you just got to be careful, like, what you're— straight to the source, what you're dealing with. And you just got to make sure, like, when you start your business— like, another woman contacted me, oh, I'm starting a CBD, I can't get banking. I'm like, I don't understand. Like, you go to the bank, you say 'Oh, I sell health products,' and that's it. You don't need to give them your website. You have your, you know, your corporate name. Like, we get into this all the time when we talk to— I talked to a group once about startup at this startup place, and I got up and they started asking me questions that I think like, 'Oh, I should name my corporation the same name,' and no. So I said, the only reason you would do that is if you had a pretty mainstream product If there's anything that you think would not be like a mainstream type of thing, like let's say you, your company, you had a company, 13 Digital, 1380, right? Digital 1380. Okay, digital marketing. Okay, so you're gonna go to a bank, say, oh, I sell digital marketing. They're going to be a pretty— most banks are going to be pretty okay with it.

I had— yeah, they're not gonna get a bank account anyway, right?

But if you go, let's say you were selling CBD and the name of your website was was Justin CBD Haven.

Yeah, not gonna go—

you're not gonna go to the bank with Justin CBD Haven LLC and they're gonna go, uh, no, we don't really want it. But if he just had Justin's— Justin's Haven Healing—

Healing—

no, not Healing, no, just Justin's Haven LLC. Yeah, there you go. And he goes, oh, what do you do, Justin? Oh, I sell health products. Okay, great, no problem, sign up, you're done. And you have a bank account, you know, you don't— you know, sometimes less is more. The bank— I don't think the banks really care. They just don't want it to be blatant, you know, blatant. Like, they don't want to sign up a strip club and it's, you know, and the name of the strip club is, you know, Big Boobies. Yeah, whatever. The Booby Trap, right? And that's the name of your— what was it there? What was the name of their club? The Boom Boom Club.

That was the Booby I thought it was the Booby Trap.

No, I think it was the Boom Boom Club. The Sopranos. Better get out Google right now and check it out. So you don't want to name your cup— if you're selling something that might be controversial or new or something, you want to pick a more generic name. Like you have a strip club called J&A Restaurants Inc., right? Justin and Allen.

It was the Bada Bing.

The Bada Bing.

Oh my God, I can't believe I said the Booby Trap. That's actually a real—

that's a real street. Yeah, what are you talking about?

That's one of your— never mind.

No, so I'm just saying you want to pick a more generic name for your company. Listen, if you go into the bank, the bank doesn't really care that you're a strip club. You just don't want the thing that they don't want. It's really funny, banks are really against cash, okay? Like, they don't like handling cash at the And it's really disturbing to me.

And I'm really— why? All the bank robbers, man.

I guess they don't—

they— oh, they literally like—

they don't keep cash at the bank hardly at all.

What's the Bonnie and Clyde and, and all those guys? Yeah, those guys ruined it. Yeah, for all of us.

Well, that was way earlier, but I'm just saying like the banks don't really love cash. And you know, uh, I hand it to Congress, there's a bill in there now and it's sponsored by John Rose, uh, from Tennessee. And I think, uh, Maxine Waters is in on it too now. And they want to keep cash in society.

They said cash is still king. That was like on the headline in there.

Yeah, the ACLU wants cash to be, you know, underserved communities need cash, underserved communities need ATMs. The other thing that's, you know, so it's very important, but you want to make sure And the other thing that can get people shut off with credit card processing— this is another thing I want to address this, and then we're going to end the podcast. Another thing that will throw off everything is international credit cards. Oh yes.

And so some processors have a way to set that up that do not make it accept overseas.

So you got to make sure, like, okay, so like Stripe actually has— I think that they have a setup where you can get— take international payments.

Yeah, unless it's on one of those platforms, right?

No, no, only Stripe. I don't think the other ones do.

I mean, you can set it up through PayPal, but if their international rate is crazy, right? But I'm saying like to convert the money to, to US, you're not going to make what— you're going to have to charge a lot. You're gonna have to understand the pricing, right? You gotta understand how much the shipping is going to cost you. It's really a pain in the ass.

But also, let's say you have a regular merchant account and then you get a bunch of charges from some other country. There's no— there's basically no way for you to win the chargeback. Let's say you sell some guy $30 grand worth of makeup and you ship it to Japan and he does a chargeback. You're basically done. You have to go to Japan and get your money.

I mean, yeah, you're not gonna keep—

yeah, so the— but now there's a way to do international international payments.

It's messed up that we can spend all the money in the world over there though, and it'll come to us, right? Not get it when we want it, but it'll come.

Well, the biggest lie about credit card processing is that it's a— you know, Visa and MasterCard advertise, oh, there's a world economy. That's not true. That it's sectioned off and there's no protections. But we are linking up with a new company now as a service to our merchants, which we're going to be— we're gonna— we're getting it ready to do some marketing. We might have the guy, the provider, on the podcast soon. And basically what they've done is, is they linked up a bunch of different wallets from all these different countries, and you're really protected with these wallet transactions because it's a wallet, you know, they're paying from their wallet because that's how they do it over there. I think like the wallet thing is going to come to the US.

You see what MetaMask just did?

No, what'd they just do?

MetaMask, they're— they just changed the game. So you can fund your wallet straight through your bank account now through MetaMask, right?

Yes.

But now you're gonna be able to— you can fund your wallet and through MetaMask straight from your bank account, right? Choose whatever Ethereum-based coin that you want and then purchase it straight through MetaMask.

Oh, so they're just becoming another exchange?

Yeah, they— but they— but that's the first one that Well, no, you can fund your bank accounts to Coinbase, but you can't make purchases.

Yes, you can.

No, you can buy coin, right, through MetaMask. I'm saying, so the MetaMask is like your entryway to the—

oh, to the buy stuff in the metaverse. Yeah.

So now you can't—

now you, instead of you having to fund your wallet and do all that other stuff. Yeah, it's a game changer, right? So I think this wallet technology that's being used in other countries all over South America, Mexico, all in the Asian countries. Alipay is part of it, UnionPay, big— those are big, the bigger names that are part of it. There's the China UnionPay, right? So those— now that these wallets, right, it's sort of coming to the US because you have these wallets, like there's the PayPal wallet, you have the— you have your Cash App wallet. Yeah, but the Google Pay and the Apple Pay is using in your credit card. These things are linked back to your bank account right now. It's not popular in the US, and it's going to have a slower growth in the US, and that's because people like their rewards of their credit cards, right? But we're releasing this product, and it's going to enable— let's say that you want to— let's say you're in an area, let's say you're in Miami, and you have a ton of, uh, customers that come from Asia to your business. Well, soon, very soon, within the next couple of weeks, you're going to be able to sign up with us, get set up with this technology, and advertise, hey, you want to pay with Alipay in this, in the store or on the website? You'll be able to do it.

Oh nice.

And then there's no chargebacks. That's the best part. So it's very, very exciting because international payments for us damn, in 20 years, it's been a huge pain in the butt. So we got a few merchants getting set up with it, we're testing it out, looks like it's working, and then we're going to do a rollout. But that, that could get you shut off all of a sudden. You know, you got somebody come on your website from another country, buy a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah, okay, the flag— red flags go up, this funding flag goes down, that risk manager is on the phone calling your business. That's why it's important to that.

You, you definitely mentioned that other way, you mentioned that earlier as well, you know, make sure you're responding to your calls, right?

You get a phone call, you get an email, your sales rep calls you, hey, the bank contacted me, you had 10 chargebacks, are you aware what's going on? Is there something going on? Did you get a new employee? You know, some businesses are just prone to chargebacks, like, like nightclubs, they just get chargebacks are rolling in daily. You know, so the banks— and if the bank is friendly to that type of business, they're going to say, they know, oh, that was a card-present EMV transaction. This person is just being difficult. Got it, right? So you have to— that's why you have to understand, like, who are you working with and making sure you're working with the right type of company and you have the right fraud controls in place, because it's different if you have a digital product or a physical product, that what kind of fraud controls you can use, you know. And also, you know, let's say you're doing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a month, there are services that we can recommend to you where they handle your chargebacks, right? They go, they get access— as long as you can fix it— where they have access to your systems so they can get the, you know, the, the, uh, the tracking number and your invoice and that show that the person received it and get the gateway info, and then they send the, you know, send the letters for you and all that. So it just depends. But on front-end fraud, which we talked about earlier, you got to figure that out for yourself.

No one—

no, you can only stop that with human eyes. Yep. Right now anyway, as far as— as far as I know, I haven't seen any product. I went to a whole—

even if there is a product, I wouldn't put my put all my eggs in that bag.

No, no, I'm just saying you gotta, you gotta put it on there.

Yeah, I mean, you definitely got to install some security plugins to your e-commerce website, you know, monitor it, update it regularly, watch your orders.

Yeah, make sure your order size— get, you know, set up flags.

Oh, so before we end the show, what is something that they should do if they do get cut off?

If you get shut off One, make sure— are you on the match list or the TMF list? So the match list is the Member Alert to Control High Risk or the Terminated Merchant File, TMF. If you're on those, if you're on that list, then you really can't start a new business. You really can't get off the list. You're gonna have to start over. You have to get a new signer, new corporation, new addresses, and all that. Now sometimes you might be able to get around that. Let's say you have a really big business, you're doing millions of dollars a month, and all of a sudden you find yourself on the match list. And maybe it's not a hunt, maybe there's extenuating circumstances. Okay, well, there could be a bank because basically it's a member alert to control high risk. Well, you know, maybe you say, hey, you've— Allen Kopelman, can you find me a bank I'll give— I'll put— I'll put a deposit at the bank for half a million, a million, $2 million, right? You might find somebody that says they'll ignore the match list, right? And they'll take your account.

Nice.

So it depends on, you know, like I have another guy, he's spending now like $30,000 with a— you know, they're doing hundreds of thousands of dollars of business and they had a problem during COVID I put him in touch with an attorney, right? He paid all the chargebacks off, but his— he had a manufacturing facility, it got shut down. They were pretty much like, couldn't keep up with contacting all the customers, right, of, you know, hey, what do you want to do? Do you want your order? You want us to return your money, right? Right. And they got— and people, you know, that they couldn't get a hold of some of the people. And they got a ton of chargebacks they got put on Match, but they're doing hundreds of, you know, doing like $700,000, $800,000 a month. So we're getting some information. We found a bank. They said, hey, long as this guy owns the building that he's in and all that, and, you know, we can get, you know, cross-corporate guarantees and this and that, and the guy signs personally, they're willing to take the account because they can see that, you know, there are extent— we had a hotel during the pandemic, right? Pandemic happened.

Basically what Allen's saying is money talks and bull ass walks.

No, but we—

but, and so make sure that you're doing your due diligence on your business.

Communicate with your processor.

Yes, always. And if you're— if you get, you know, if you get cut off, communicate with your processor. Find out why. See if there's something that you could do. And most likely there was probably an email or a phone call that you missed, right? Because they're gonna— they're gonna warn you.

Well, no, if you see something that happened on your account, you know, be proactive about it.

I'm saying that the processor will warn you too. Yeah, you'll get warnings like, hey, uh, change this on your site. Hey, you need to update your paperwork. Hey, this, this—

we did another podcast you can listen to where we talked about sites getting attacked with bogus credit cards and people botting the site and then running a whole 100,000 authorizations on your— 100,000 authorizations on your, on your account. So we did a podcast about that. Go back and listen to the— go back and listen to that podcast and learn about, you know, having security on your website so stuff like that doesn't happen. And something like that does happen, communicate with the processor. Hey, this happened, blah blah blah. Hey, you know what's go— you know what I mean?

So long story short, Communication is key.

Communication is key. Making sure your business type is accepted. Read the terms and conditions, understand what business types they accept, what products are acceptable, what's unacceptable, and find a processor that works with your business type, you know, and needs. Yeah, and, and your needs, you know. Listen, sometimes, you know, Stripe, PayPal, Square works for millions of businesses, right? Millions. What do you know? Millions and millions of businesses use them. So it works for some, works for a lot of people, doesn't work for everybody.

Yeah.

So you got to just figure out what works for you. What are your needs in your business? Do you need to have somebody where you can get a hold of them like 24/7? Right. I don't like the 24/7, but I make myself available.

There you go.

Business, we do business with. So all right, peace out, have a great day. Thanks for listening to the podcast. Catch us on social media at B2B Vault. Watch for FinTech Fridays when we go live.

You can answer—

you can ask us live questions during that on Facebook, uh, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and YouTube.

And YouTube. You can ask live questions and we'll answer them. So everybody have a great day. Find us everywhere @B2BVOL.

Peace out.

Peace.