We are an ecommerce company primarily doing business internationally through our web site. We opened our Flagship Merchant Services account after reading positive reviews at http://credit-card-processing-review. Toptenreviews.com / which turned out to be a site set up by them and promoting their disgusting business services. During the process, we specifically told the rep (Mike Stanger) that we will be processing international credit cards. Our site at that time was in Turkish. He said there was no problem, there will be no charge for the first month. Then he set up our merchant account and gateway account with First Data and rip off started.
After a week and only 5 transactions, we received a call from First Data informing us our account will be closed because we accept international credit cards. The Security guy explained that it was a high risk business model that his company can not participate. Although we explained him we do business with 10 other countries he recommended finding a processing company in each country we do business in. We told him that we are a US based company and can not start up a office in every country. The guy had some listening issues and went ahead closed our account.
Afterwards we called Flagship Merchant Services and explained the situation. They said they will get back to us. And of course nobody did. However they continued charging our account with fees they seemed fit. One example being the gateway fee and customer services fee and misc. Fees which had never been discussed for the whole month although our account had been only open for 1 week.
The questions we had for them:
1- Why did you set up our account if you were not able to support international transactions?
2 - Why did you charge our account for the whole month after closing our account in one week?
3 - Who will pay the fee for our web developer who integrated our site with First Data gateway?
4- Don't you feel shame on not fully disclosing fees you will be charging?
5- Why did you lie us about for the first month being for free and charge our account without our authorization?
Of course, there was silence and we will get back to you bullshit. We called their account retention scam office many times with no results.
The Flagship Merchant services is a company which talk nicely to your face but f* you from behind without notice. We will never do or recommend doing business with them. We will continue advertising their scam so that they can not hurt other small business owners like us.
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