Merchant Industry is a crooked organization. They are liars and thieves. We acquired their services to be our credit card processing company. My company is a reputable family owned business for 45 years. This company, Merchant Industry promised us much lower rates than what I was paying my current processor. I guess if it seems to good to be true, then it is. They promised us a 2.25% flat rate on all types of cards, whether qualified, mid-qualified, or non-qualified. What they did was very sneaky. They set up our account so that when we processed credit cards, they only approved charges when a qualified card was being used. When a mid or non-qualified card was attempted, they would decline it. I proved that the cards didnt deserve to be declined (not only were these credit cards from Fortune 1000 companies), but luckily I did not cancel my previous processor service, and when I would try to get approval on the declined cards, I would get an approval 100% of the time. It took me about 6 weeks to figure this out because I kept reporting this problem to them and they had me do new downloads on the terminal promising that the problem would be solved in 24 hours. Well it never got solved, so now that I caught them in their game, I cancelled in writing my service with them. I did sign a contract that I would pay them a penalty of early cancellation of $500.00 if I didnt return the credit card terminal. I did return the terminal via UPS and tracked that they received it.
About 3 weeks later, then withdrew $400.00 even out of my checking account as an ach debit. Why they chose $400, I have no idea. Luckily I noticed it and my bank was able to reverse the payment. There is a 24 hr. Window that a bank can do the reversal. Unfortunately I was not able to reverse the previous debits out of my account that represented charges of 10% of the credit card amounts that did go through their terminal. They charged me $25 minimum monthly fees, which was also inappropriate. I wound up getting about $750.00 in approvals with $75.00 in fees. These people are big time crooks. When you call them, normally you wait on hold for 20 minutes and then get disconnected. When you leave a message they never call back. When you do finally luck out and press enough extension numbers that someone comes to the phone, you get these gruff sounding men answering the call. It sounds like they are talking to you from their house. I have read about the owner Clark Krimer, who is reported to have ben involved with money laundering and prostitution. I cant believe they are an approved Wells Fargo ISO and First Data approved merchant. I wll be contacting Wells Fargo and First Data to inform them about these horrible crooks.
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