iPayment Flagship Merchant Services Avoid, Fraud, Scam, Lies, Hold Money, No Payment, Do not use Internet

Avoid iPayment AKA Flagship Merchant Services like the plague.  Actually, one may survive the plague, but your hard earned money will not survive iPayment.  Here is our story:

DECEPTION - We are a small online merchant.  After researching online for a "cheap" company to go with, we settled on Flagship Merchant Services.  We were well aware of iPayment and the fraud reports regarding it so we purposely did not go with them.  Little did we know our account ended up with iPayments after we signed up with Flagship Merchant Services.  

FRAUD - At first our payments were deposited on time (within 3 business days, which is pretty long for industry standards), then on a Saturday we received a phone call from Rick who introduced himself as a loss prevention specialist from iPayment.  That was our first clue that our account with actually with the company we tried very hard to avoid.  Rick proceeded to leave a message saying that our account was only allowed to process up to $6,000 a month and somehow our account was over $8,000 that month.  The truth is, our company processes over $10,000 each month and we set up the account limits as such.

LIES - We were told in a recorded message that if we did not contact Rick, our credit card payments processed by iPayments would be placed on hold while they researched for fraud.  The truth is, credit card processors do not hold monies that have already been processed because that money has already been taken out of the customers' accounts.  There is nothing to research or to hold.  If a credit card processing company has doubts about a transaction, that transaction would be declined before it even gets taken out of the customer's account.  

Before we contacted Rick, we went online and researched other customers who had the same thing happen to them.  We decided to stop immediately with credit card processing through iPayment (or FlagShip Merchant Services, which was the company we signed up with) and waited 3 business days for all of our credit cards sells to be credited to our bank account.  We canceled our account with FlagShip Merchant Services AKA iPayment and went with another processor.  

BAIT & SWITCH - In addition to trying to hold our credit card sells receipts, iPayment also increased our credit card processing rates, which during the first month was almost 3 times higher than what the rates were stated in the contract.  

Today we are with a reputable company and our credit card receipts are deposited within 24 to 48 business hours.  

AVOID iPayment and FlagShip Merchant Services.