I say bank fraud is when your own bank steals from you.
What am I talking about?
Picture a scam artist somewhere in the Internet underground stealing a credit card in the real world. He uses this credit card to buy a job posting on your job board. You review all jobs by hand but you don’t see anything wrong with this one. You don’t know what the scammer does with the resumes he gets from you, but you can be sure it’s not pretty.
When the card owner discovers the charges, he calls his bank who sends him chargeback forms. Next, you are notified the funds from the job posting have been clawed back by your merchant bank AND you have been charged a $15 or $25 ‘chargeback fee’.
So who got hurt? The scam artist? No. The owner of the credit card who might really have been careless? No. The credit card company? No. Your merchant bank? No. You’re the one – the only one to pay for this sad chain of events.
In fact, with good automation, the banks could be running a profit on credit card fraud. That’s what I call bank fraud. When banks work side-by-side with criminals to steal from hard-working entrepreneurs.
Credit card chargeback fees are despicable. My account is up for grabs. If I find a merchant bank with competitive rates that doesn’t hit its customers with these fees, not only will I switch but, I will try to persuade the Internet entrepreneurs I know to move their accounts too.
The merchant banks say they are simply passing on fees charged by Visa and MasterCard. In fact, they say that they are absorbing part of the fee. I say, show me documentation for that! And if it’s really true, get out on record in opposition to the practice. It’s an abuse of monopoly power.
My merchant bank is one of the largest and took federal bailout funds – I won’t name it, but will say that I have been tempted hundred times in the past five years to blog about the poor service. It’s time for change. So stand up for your customers and tell Visa/Mastercard to shove those fees.
I fully support real financial reforms that will stop banks from crowing nonsensically about customer service while they spend all their time and effort doing mergers and acquisitions so the executives can take home multimillion dollar pay packages and bonuses. Enough!
Too big to fail needs real action, not some cosmetic attempt to placate the powerless public. Banks like mine deserve to be shut down so that smaller more agile banks run by high-quality energetic entrepreneurs can grow and offer great service that my bank will never give.
Somebody please take my merchant account away from too big to fail, too big to care, and too dishonest for me. Refer me to a better merchant bank, please!
