Before I start, I would like to first state that I am in the service business and understand how it works, have excellent credit, vendor histories and if I pulled activities like this on my customers, I am sure that I would be the defendant in lawsuits and very likely out of business by now. Aside from being stationed in California, I do not know how iPayment gets away with these practices. Also, I did not sign up under any program that companies like iPayment only make available for high risk merchants.
Problems that I have had:
1. When I changed my iPayment service over from one company to another, they continued to charge the previous company's account for the monthly statement fee. This took 2hrs of MY TIME to correct by waiting on infinite hold, getting cut off several times and otherwise switched over from here to there.
2. Even though the contract that I signed EXPLICITELY excludes Amex and Discover Card, I was billed Discover Card's $25.00 settlement, which once again required over an hour of my time to rectify - both in phone time and faxing.
3. Several months ago, my $10 montly statement fee magically turned into $19.95. When I contacted iPayment (again - 30minutes to do so), I was told that I had been notified via my monthly statement of the new charge and that this statement was my notification of the time by which I had to reply to cancel the service. What?! Anyway, I told them to cancel it and credit my account.in retrospect, and considering the previously mentioned screwups with account debiting, at this point I should have closed the service. I don't even think that such a practice is legal in most states.
4. I decided last month (September) to close the service and faxed iPayment the required written notice to do so. On October 16th, I noticed that my bank account had been debited a $250.00 cancellation fee. At this point, I am livid. I locate the documentation and look it over in it's entirety to see if they snuck in the fee somewhere. I don't find it. I contact customer service, who in turn tells me that a cancellation fee is part of my TOS that I signed. I told the gal that I signed no such thing and to send me the TOS WITH MY SIGNATURE, which I haven't received yet since we only spoke today. At this point, I suspect that I will not receive it, but I'll wait and see.
On further inspection of my paperwork, I notice at the bottom of the 2 pages that I signed that these were 1 & 2 of 8. I look at the top of the fax that was sent to me and see pages 2 & 3 of 3.in other words, the enitre TOS was not faxed for my signature, yet by reading the 2 pages that were faxed, it would appear that they were the sum and substance of the agreement, referring only to one another in content. And another thing, I cannot think of any agreement that I have signed to date where the signatures acknowledging the document preempt the terms of the document. Pages 1 & 2 requiring signature should be pages 7 & 8, with individual sections in between requiring initials acknowledging their contents. This alone appears sketchy and furthermore, I suspect that this is done intentionally.
At this point, I am considering approaching my bank in order to file a fraudulant debit complaint. When you are in business for long enough, you develop a sense through instinct or error for those who operate unethically and under borderline legality.in my opinion, iPayment is definitely one of those businesses. Beware!
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