North American Bancard Deceptive sales complicated contracts Troy Michigan

Regarding North American Bancard and their Merchant Credit card processing accounts.

I am just now finding out how horrible these people are.

We are an interior design business that has infrequent need of Visa processing but sometimes we have clients that want to charge $2000 or even $10000 of goods and services on their Visa cards.

I spoke with a representative, John Tucker and I said I wanted low monthly fee because we can go months with no activity. He promised me $5.00 monthly fee.

Then I started getting charges for $25.00 monthly minimum fees. And when I tried to cancel my account, they said "oh, you are on a 36 month contract". Really? Please show me. So they faxed me the contract, and sure enough on page 4 there it was. But Johh Tucker had never sent page 4 in the first place. Page 2 (which we signed) says "I agree to terms on pages 1,2,3,4,5 and 6" but I never saw the last 4 pages because they were never sent.

And we told the sales person we run few very high tickets, like $15,000 for furniture. Fine he says. And then they gave us a $900 high ticket. And my application was changed to $900.00 high ticket after we had signed it.

So I called them and told them the application had been altered, and I had never received the other fine print pages, and wanted to cancel with no fees. I sent them our original application. I sent them the email from the sales rep with the application file in .pdf that was only two pages long. The girl said she'd look into it with her manager and get back to me.

And when she got back to me she said "I don't know if you received pages 3-6 or not, but you signed the form on page 2 indicating you accepted the terms on those pages, so you are bound by them. Period. And as far as the form being altered, they said they'd go ahead and honor it as I submitted it, with a $10,000 high ticket limit. They don't know who or why it was altered, but they were prepared to "undo" the alteration, so there was no getting out of the contract.

When I probed into who John Tucker was, the sales rep, they washed their hands and said he was an independent sales rep, don't know how this could have happened, we'll look into it, but meanwhile you signed it, and you're stuck with it.

The only possible relief they offered me was they offered to price match someone else's rates. If I could find a place that offered, say a high discount rate on transactions but no monthly fees, they'd match it. So I might be able to do that and effectively cancel my agreement by letting it just run out (providing I remember to cancel exactly when I need to 3 years from now, otherwise it auto-renews!!).

I'm not happy and ready to do battle with them. They had this John Tucker working for them, altering contracts, leaving out pages, and snaring people left and right and then sticking them with high monthly minimums and 36 month contracts. If it's not actually illegal, it's certainly deceptive and dishonest and the fact that they'd go along with it indicates to me that they really have no problem with these sales tactics.

Geoffhazel
Bellevue, Washington
U.S.A.