We paid this drop shipper for a website loaded with products. We were told bluedollardays.com would be our site.instead, we were shown a webpage that directed to albanyheadsets.com with bluedollardays in text on the home page. We had no access to this page other then a general viewer but told this was ours.
Day 1 when the site went up we were told by phone from their resellers representative that we had sales.
We were surprised the site was noticed in one day being that it can take months for a site to be recognized through SEO and many other things but they said We Have Sales lets hit up your merchant processor which we did.
We entered in, as their rep instructed, the few details for the card they gave us including how to make it go through as approved.
We did this on many sales and we found out later it was for the same buyer. We were under the impression we sold a physical product and asked why we didn't get notified of the sale ourselves through our merchant processor. We were told many things over the course of the first week including, we have the wrong type of merchant account.
More sales from the same party came in and again, we were told how to process the card. We were not given home addresses or phone numbers at that time or given the opportunity to verify these cards with the CVC code. We were told, albanyheadsets.com never uses those and never had issues. "Nothing To Worry About".
A total of five charges were made by our first customer.
Two weeks later chargebacks started rolling in on those purchases. We asked albanyheadsets.com for information on those cards to send to our processor and discovered that not only did albany know in advance the card was reported as stolen but they wanted to process more orders using that same card.
They said "they know how to make the charge go through".
We did not process anymore orders from that card. The chargebacks resulted in over $2,000.00 dollars for the one customer.
The address Albanydistribution.com gave us was obviously fake that anyone can spot. Same street address in three states that didn't exist and on in India with the same street address. Names and phone numbers were also fake.
Albany knew this in advance of our processing this card yet they tried to get us to recharge that same card for more orders and for the amount of the chargebacks which is illegal. At this time, we also found out we sold them "packages". Non tangible store packages much like the one we purchased to set up our store. Not physical products like we were supposed to sell.
We also had a second customer at this time who purchased another 1,000.00 in orders. Again, we were not notified of the sale until the rep at Albany said we had one. Put the card through with the CVC numbers this time at our insistence and told Albany we would not follow through with the sale unless a signature could be obtained by the buyer on delivery.
We were told they would do this. They did not.
Again, our second and last customer charged back the purchases and they won. We did ship to the address on file with Delivery Confirmation but they still got their money and we are not over 3k behind. Albany later admitted they don't have the software to do signature confirmation but it was too late. I would not have followed through if they additted it in the first place. They should be responsible for all the chargebacks and the loss of my savings getting this site started.
We also paid 252.00 for customer service to represent our so called site but later found out, all calls that go through that service we get no commission on. Any orders processed using our paid for CS service profit wise, stayed with albanydistribution.com 100 percent. This was admitted to use on the phone by Matt, a reseller advocate for Albany distributing.
With the chargebacks and my investment loss, we have now lost over 5k.
A bit about me.
I get $740./mo from Social Security so this loss is more then devistating. My partner who makes about the same amount each month checking account is in the hole for 5k All the money we though we made was transferred, by wire at albanys insistence to facilitate these these orders. They are a drop shipper of electronic goods so we had to send the money to them to fulfill the orders. We kept a small profit for ourselves.
This falls right in line with the old Nigerian money order scams where a party sends you money and all you have to do is send a small amount back and keep the rest. The money orders are always fake. There is no money other then what the victim send the scammer.
We started asking more questions about how these cards were being processed before we were given the card numbers. Why we were not being notified about the sales through the site or our processor before hand.
We started asking questions about the site itself and why it was being directed to another company.
The only answer we got was that both sites were ours or promoting the items with our credit card merchant account and we should be glad. But, we never had access to either site but to look at them like the general internet user would.
We had our doubts at this point about the site being ours and told them to fix it and make sure bluedollardays.com did not redirect to albanyheadsets.com. They said they would fix it and neither site has been up at this point and it's been a month and a half.
Good ole Matt, our sellers rep for albany, who used to call us four to eight times a night stopped calling us at this point. Emails get five word responses but never answer my questions. One forced call from this rep lately and that was to say we can't have our domain name agreed apon at the very begining of all this? I would have to buy my own yahoo store to keep the domain name. He told me the site is ready to launch, once again after being fixed and to buy into the yahoo small business account. I did. Later that night, he said he still can't do it that way and again, I'd have to lose the bluedollardays.com domain and they'd have to buy the yahoo site and charge me another $35/mo for it.
Still trying to get money out of a more then broke person who will be homeless shortly. Still no site at either albanyheadsets.com or bluedollardays.com as of today. Nothing on our original contract was honored by albany distribution. Albany said, "but we did write an article". I've asked to see it many times but never got it. Part of the contact about promoting the site.
There is so much more to this story. I'd like to hire a lawyer but can't come close to affording one.
I'm 51 years old trying to find a way to make some income to live decently and ended up homeless.
My partner will never gain another bank account nor will we be able to try this again being we are now black balled from having a merchant processor.
We were out of business with the first fake credit card sale and we hadn't even started.
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