As a former employee of IMS Barter I can say with certainty that they do not hold the benefit of the consumer as a priority.
IMS has launched into a full blown campaign to get new members. They have their call center based in Columbus, OH. The employees who man the phones are instructed to entice customers by lying to them. The first thing the call center is instructed to do is to make phone calls to businesses stating that IMS wants to purchase gift certificates. The next step is to convince the employee to log in and join the membership "free". What the employee is not telling you is that the gift certificates are not cash and that the membership, although free, does not mean that fees and service charges will be billed to you and at what percentage.in some cases the percentage the IMS Barter will be charging their members for each transaction is 15%. That percentage is just on hard goods. It does not include travel fees.
The contract of IMS has fine print that states IMS is not liable for anything that a phone representative tells you. This is key as to how IMS stays indemnified from any wrong doing.
The most critical corporate weakness that IMS has is that it keeps all of their clients information on a data base that is accessible to every employee past or present as well as to some non employees. The data that is vulnerable is the business owners phone, address, social security number, account number, etc... It is a perfect recipe for identity theft. Not only are the documents on a web server but they are also in hard copy format that can be accessed by any individual who is in the building. This is not a private building to IMS staff members only. The general public can come in at anytime and browse in the IMS warehouse unsupervised.
No member is protected from identity theft. To compound the matter, IMS does absolutely no background check on any of their employees. Nor do they have any interest in fixing these sensitive issues.
While I was employed at IMS they hired an illegal immigrant. This individual had access to all of the documentation to the client base. They were subsequently arrested while on duty at IMS. Numerous EIN numbers and social security numbers were inappropriately used to create false businesses.
When I brought this information up to Human Resources, Brad Brown, the national sales manager Barb Martin and then to the whistle blowers IMS hotline I ended up getting discharged. The reason stated at the time of discharge was that "it was just not going to work out". None of members who sit on the board of directors asked me to clarify what security issues were at risk.
As the head of security in a government branch I know risk when I see it. This company will continue to thrive as long as people do not do their due diligence.
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