How Sophisticated Fraudsters are Nailing Merchants
- New company (often foreign) calls to order product. Very nice and say they will pay with credit card. Merchants always pay the shipper after they charge the customer for the shipping. Of course you (the merchant) pay the shipper after the credit card(s) go through.
- You check the company out on the internet, check their address, etc as best you can without hiring a private investigator
- Someone picks up the product to deliver or so you think
- The new company calls a few days later and asks for another order - praising your product - and you pay the shipper after you charge their cards and their cards are approved.
- At month’s end, the true cardholders check their credit card statements and dispute the charges.
- It turns out the credit cards were stolen (identity theft)
- (You would think using the wrong name would result in the card not to go through but the card goes through effortlessly every time you charged it several weeks ago)
- You have paid the shipping.
- The credit card company refunds the card holders’ disputed charges and demands IMMEDIATE full payment from you, the merchant, even though you were defrauded. The merchant is responsible to repay all of it.
THE ACTIONS
- You call the local sheriff and he says call the FBI
- You call the FBI and they say it is happening thousands of times a week and never send anything toEurope and they tell you to call the Secret Service
- You call the Secret Service, they inform you that they can not wire tap a foreign country…
- You file your complaint on www.ic3.gov (the internet cyber crime dept of the FBI) but no one contacts you and the trail to the fraudsters goes cold
- You contact lawyers and are told that you have no recourse but to immediately pay the total money due to the cardholders, in spite of the money that you have lost
- You as the merchant is now left holding the bag of liabilities, which includes all the bank charges, the credit card processing fees, the stolen funds, and loss of product if you shipped any out….
THE RESULT
- You are responsible for any charges.
Here is a comment from our friend, Dr. Deva Khalsa, who wanted to help us and who heard about our issue. She was involved in a similar issue when she heard about ours. She took immediate action and it has saved her many thousands of dollars and from ending up like us.
- (Deva Khalsa VMD Deserving Pets - "In my case, we paid a shipper $700, but when we heard the Natural Plus Plus story, we stopped there and are calling the Secret Service this morning, after talking to the FBI last night and we have not shipped out product.
- The FBI says we are so very lucky to have found this out because it happened to friends of ours and says these people are super slick. Our money to the shipper was transferred to Washington State (US) account so maybe the Secret Service can head it off.) Will keep you posted."
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--Dr. Deva Khalsa VMD