Complaint Review: CCBill

CCBill.com or CWIE, (Cavecreek WebHosting Internet Exchange) started off sometime around 1996-1998, i dont remember for certain, the company is ran by the cadwell's one of the richest family's in the world, or at least in my existence and the only time i've actually seen in my presence an American Express Black Card, the company was actually started in the backroom of a small chiropractor' practice and at time was one of the few webhosting and online billing processors that didnt discriminate strongly on what content they would host and provide billing serives for. CCBill unlike many companies is what you call an LLC (Limited Liability Corporation) and merely acts as a middle man, unfortunately for this middle man the majority of requests came from adult sites, mostly international sites wanting secure processing services for some of their questionable content, which at the time included lolita, and beastiality porn and if it werent for a VISA intl customer service initiative to discontinue credit services for these questionable sites, they would probably still be billing for them,

Now CCBill is not just one big scam, i had worked for the company for a period of almost 2 years while i was attending college, at the time they provided health and vision insurance, gave free webhosting to employees provided you use it for personal content and dont use it for any personal gain or profit, and something you dont see a whole lot anymore, an onsite cook that provided lunch daily, and let me tell you, it was good food, plus how many jobs involve looking at porn, trust me when you're 19 this is a deal and a half

at first there were no quality standards, required greetings, and any claim that couldnt be proven beit because of bad record keeping, your request being ignored or our general database crashing, was denied and dealt with in a your word against ours manner, and for a startup company paying a bunch of kids 7 bucks an hour to answer their phones this is kind of expected, the only reason most of these companies ever decide to enforce metrics for quality and courtesy is because the company becomes just big enough that the FCC begins to take notice, but at the time CCBill was not at this point and it was just a job with free food and all the porn you can swallow, now i will openly admit that requests were at times handled poorly and many times resolution of your issue was determinate on the overall mood and demeanor of the CSR you spoke to, and asking for a supervisor was almost impossible, *passes phone to agent sitting next to him* "hello this is the supervisor"

over time i began to become a senior agent and started learning some of the legal and administrative side of things, in addition to your rights as the customer and our rights as the merchant, and I will actually come to their defense in saying that several times the customer service department was restructured as the company grew eventually leading to call monitoring, corporate trainers, quality standards, and of course with any call center, an average call/handle time metric, or AHT of 8min,

for a long time i handled the majority of faxed in inquirys and requests for cancellation in addtion to some correspondence by mail, and although I cant speak for some several times I went out of my way to cancel billing for charges that other agents couldnt locate, and although there is no refund policy, "YES, THERE IS A BUTTON" and yes "THEY ARE ALLOWED TO CLICK IT" under extenuating circumstances, the event of fraud or the threat of a chargeback, the last 60 days which at the time was the legal entitlement would be refunded to your credit card in a matter of a few days and your card would be blackballed in our collective database that was shared with a few of the other major online billing processors forever, that was at least a few years ago but at the time it was ran like any other call center, callbacks were made, the agents flamed you when they muted the phones and supervisors were there to handle escalations, and really i saw the company grow in leaps and bounds from processing roughly 1500 websites when i started to processing a gasping 18,000 around the time of my leaving

the company i remember had good benefits and was really a small company trying to blossom into its own, at any given time there were never more than 20 csr's on staff, and as i became more and more fed up with the company especially after they cancelled benefits for non executive employees, but by the time I left things were changing quite a bit, the call time went from 8min, to 3min, and i believe at one point to 90seconds, plus i remember at one point a policy being in effect to reduce the refund rate by a certain percentage and refunds were only processed if the customer was threatening chargeback, chargebacks are a funny thing, did you know that a company that makes that much money has to maintain a chargeback percentage of less than 2% otherwise whatever credit agency they break the 2% barrier with will pull their services and they would no longer be able to process cards of that type, also anybody who's worked at a startup company may have noticed that when they started at the company all the employees hired were held to a standard and everyone hired originally seeems to have some form of normalcy about them, but as the company gets bigger and the turnover rate is more than 20% companies tend to be a little less discriminatory and tend to take whatever can or cant spell it's own name and lets just say some of the people that worked their towards the end of my employment there were a little bit shady, but in the end i became a thorn in their side as I saw plenty of eager young less morally aware people step into management and executive roles, as I seemed to just kind of be reduced to a basic phone jockey with no say or tenure, while the company became more and more professional, while the customer service department was reduced to a mere liability offering no service other than to cancel whatever debit you are calling about in the time it takes to warm up a hot pocket

what I can tell you is that it's as legal and binding as the constitution itself, curse the man whoever had the idea for a statement of severability and limited liablity probably should be shot, but this allows CCBill to sit off to the side and handle the workload and rake someone elses cash which they get a modest percentage of while the webmaster can provide whatever minimal amount of service he needs to to his subscribers, and as long as their is a content disclaimer, he doesnt have to have the girl you saw in the preview, he doesnt have to have a reasonable amount of content in comparisson to price, and he can neglect to provide the service advertised,

but this is the world we live in of terms of service and disclaimer contracts as long as our arm,

THE INTERNET IS A SCARY F---KING PLACE!!!

but you dont have to tell me that, I work in IT, with the combination of viruses, worms,spam, spyware,malware, adware, scamware, and trojan horses, that take over any john q public's computer that doesnt happen to be a network security specialist, its no wonder that something such as this can thrive on this global marketplace of grey areas and dont ask dont tell policies we call the internet, sure CCBill does some bad things, but in the grand scheme of things at least their legal and they have a legitimate facing, if you have some extra time do google search on a company called paycom they truly were unreachable and for it there company got audited and is no more, it's been the same phone number for seven years, granted I havent worked their in a few years and things may have really gone downhill,but I know the game that they play, and the people behind the helm of that company, are the best of their league, and even though it pisses us off, they play by all the rules, trust me, they're not going anywhere...

I ask you kindly not to judge me as I am no longer involved with this orginization and haven't been for some time, the information in this rebuttal is so you can form your own answers and maybe understand the game of internet credit card billing a little bit more, dont hold anything I say attestable in court or any other proceeding as in the legal spectrum of things this is merely heresay and the personal opinion of an employee that didnt like what they saw and left, all the people who feel they have been defrauded by this company have my condolences, and this isnt directed at anyone, but remember companies dont just rake credit cards off the world wide web, and insulted you may be, remember that a person had to fill out a form just as detailed and secure as any other online credit card purchase if not more, the same as they would for any other online purchase,

whether they bought sporting goods and chocolate or 3 hours on some bimbo's website, the credit card company doesnt look at this any differently

just because its porn doesnt mean you're being screwed