IPayment, Inc. Aka BP Merchant Services Aka CHASE Aka Visa / Mastercard Aka Quickcommerce breach of contract misrepresentation deceptive advertising extortion Calabasas, California

iPayment's agent's sales pitch for a credit card merchant account included a month-by-month committment and $0 setup fee. I confirmed these conditions with him verbally, and he recognized these as specific conditions of my signing the agreement. I was given two pages for a contract but later discovered that the contract contained eight pages, six of which iPayment didn't disclose.

iPayment charged approximately $100 setup fee to my bank account, when the contract explicity stated that the setup fee was "waived." I was not disclosed this withdrawl and discovered it myself upon inspection of my bank statements. It took more than three weeks and multiple phone calls to different departments to be sent a refund. The agent admitted that iPayment had a habit of testing merchants to see if they would allow iPayment to extract the unauthorized setup fee without complaint. This was a clear breach of contract, and I demanded termination of the contract as such.

When trying to close my account in mid-December, I discovered that iPayment was holding me to a "two-year" agreement. Apparently, the agent forgot to include a "month-by-month" clause in a box on the contract. The agent denied he had ever offered it to me. Thus, iPayment attempted to take $350 from my bank account as an "early termination fee," merely for the action of deleting my account from their database after the breach of contract.

The agent I signed with left the company in December. I was neither notified of this occurrence nor provided a new agent. Thus, I had no representative to the company and had to make calls to a "merchant services" department who offered little more service than reading line-by-line what we "owed" them from the contract. The staff refused to put me in touch with anyone who had authority.

iPayment charged my bank account an unauthorized $350.00 for "early termination fee" on April 26. This was not disclosed to me by email, phone, nor mail. I discovered this unexpected withdrawl when an overdraft notice was sent from our bank, First National, charging me $31 for a non-sufficient funds charge. By calling their customer service, I was informed that they closed my account due to lack of payment. Yet I have records that they have since extracted funds from my account, in addition to the "early termination fee." In fact, to greater confusion, my account was confirmed to be in "Inactive" status (I pay a monthly fee, they don't provide any service) back in March by their technical service staff. How can the account be closed and be charged for "Inactive" status at the same time?

Carl
Kokomo, Indiana
U.S.A.