Instabill.com INSTABILL - BEWARE OF THIS PROVIDER! Greenland New Hampshire
First the good.
There is a guy, Jerrry, at that company who seems legitimate and is willing to telephone you with your questions or comments. He seemed to me honest, and upfront. The good news is, they will accept just about any business.
The very bad news.
Their customer service team does not respond to any of your email communications, and their phone support tells you to send an email. Only after I threated to write this report did they answer my email, and only to tell me to go ahead and do it.
This is NOT a REAL merchant account. They are a re-seller for ECS-WORLD in London, and use a latvian offshore merchant account to process transactions. You account with them is a so-called SUB merchant account, and there is a BIG differrence.
The Problems specificlly:
1. You will have NO control over your merchant account.
2. You will not be able to issue refunds to your customers.
3. They will not issue a refund to your customer on your bahalf.
4. According to their policy they charge $10.00 for every refund, but that was not even an option for my account.
5. According to their terms they will pay you, basically when ever they decide to pay you and for however much they believe you are due, which does not go by any contract but by their "GUT" feelings on that matter. Slowing your processing from one week to another, infact would be grounds to freeze your entire account. YES -- Just by not doing as much sales as the week before, would be all it took for them to consider you a risk to them. They also looks at about 400 other things.
6. The Latvian Processor and Visa 3-D Secure - is not a reliable gateway combination. I found that half (at least) of transactions would be declined for no reason at all because of this horrible gateway.
The Insane Fees (but they were upfront about this)
1. 7.5% on every sale.
2. 10% held as a reserve for 6 months.
3. Paid 2-3 Weeks in arrears.
4. Paid only if you have accumulated at least $2,000, otherwise you are not paid.
5. 50.00 per WEEK statement free. This is the most loony of them all. They actually require you to receive a weekly statement.
6. 10.00 for every refund (regardless of trans size) GOOD LUCK on getting them to issue your customers a refund. If they do a refund, you will not be refunded the 7.5% transaction fee.
7. If your chargeback ratio is increases .01 percent, for every increase it adds an additional 10% reserve requirement. You could easily find yourself having 30% of your funds held as reserve with just the slightest chargeback increase.
Bottom line is this company will skim you, they will damage your company's reputation with their bad business practices, and I doubt they would even pay you. Or at least anything near what your contract tells you. I was never paid, so I cannot vouch if they pay.
James
Fort Lauderdale, Florida
U.S.A.
3 Updates & Rebuttals
James Greene
Fort Lauderdale,Florida,
U.S.A.
Instabill deadbeats. Fraud, Cheats, Lowlifes
#4Author of original report
Sat, March 15, 2008
Originally I stated INSTABLL.COM was a fraudulent credit card processing company (a company that offers services to merchant so merchants can accept credit cards), and that comment was rebutted by the Instabill company themself in a post below my original complaint. I will now take apart piece by piece this greasy, lousy, deadbeat, scumbag, fraudulent, flacid undertaker.
1. Runwayco.com is a payment services provider, and it does not sell replica clothes.
2. TrendPuma.com and Trendlot.com have never been used to sell products or provide any service although they may be in the future.
3. Instabill knew very much and agreed to allow brandpolos (which is the only store that sells replica clothing), credit card processing services. As stated, the agreement with this merchant was to sell replica clothing. The gateway problem HAS NOTHING to do with what website sent orders to it. Its a lousy, crappy gateway backed by a hird world country bank that all US banks consider likely fraudulent. This is why your customers credit card will get declined 50% of the time.
4. The "so-called" product instabill refers to is replica clothing, which is the maintream of their commercial business with merchants along with other high risk category products. What they meant by "So-called product" that we don't know, but we are laughing.
5.We did do a very small amount of transaction with this processor, 31 I believe. We requested a refund due to a buyer cancellation when we started, and found it very odd that instabill had a very BIG PROBLEM with issuing a customer a refund. Now as anyone would tell you it is NEVER in the best interest for a processor to NOT refund a customer, so we took their actions as quite odd. very very odd.
6. While Instabill may have refunded a customer that has called them threatening them, what we can't figure out, is why INSTABILL won't refund OUR customer at OUR request. The honest and decent way. The normal way.
And I will tell you why, because they are counting on most customers to drop this as a loss and a lesson learned, unfortunately negatively impacting the merchant rather that this sorry credit card processor, who is truly at fault.
Instabill has a very BIG problem with paying you, and in my eyes are worse than paypal.com.
Instabill does not have a leg to stand on with the FTC, and they are being sued by about 30 merchants, and are under criminal investigation. (again).
James Greene
Fort Lauderdale,Florida,
U.S.A.
Instabill is full of crap - Jerry Smoyer Ripoff
#4Author of original report
Sat, March 08, 2008
Guys, Instabill is a fraudulent merchant account provider, that provides services to merchants that offer products that are legal in one country but may be illegal in another. As such they use that very reason to not pay you. There are about 200 very recent customer complaints with regard to this fraudulent company, Instabill and the officers of that company which alleged to have done time in prison, run pharmaceutical companies, and currently under investigation.
I Pray to God no one else falls for this Instabill Trap.
As for the comment above, we never shipped products to customers that used INSTABILL to pay for their purchase because we were given many many reasons to believe we would never receive payment from Instabill, and about 10 other scary business practices that led up to our decision on that matter, including noncontractural fees, and their unwillingness to do a simple refund. The denial of these SIMPLE requests showed us clearly this processor could not be relied upon.
We requested instabill to refund customers, which any processor would do if you asked them, but they refused. * Friends this single handidly proves their illegitimacy. No legitimate processor has a problem with issuing a refund.
Instabill never terminated us, we terminated them. We have a great credit card processor that pay us on time with no hassles, try Google Checkout.
Trash Can this b***** crappy scumbag merchant account, they will ruin the reputation of your business.
Fraud Department
Greenland,New Hampshire,
U.S.A.
J D Rudy/James Rudy/BrandPolos.com/ Runway Co Fraudlent Merchant
#4UPDATE Employee
Fri, March 07, 2008
James Rudy (Greene) opened a merchant account with our company with the intention of processing transactions for the following websites.
Below is the information he provided direct from his application:
LIST OF ALL URLs INDUSTRY Description of Products/Services
www.runwayco.com Clothing New Brand Clothing (replica)
www.trendlot.com Clothing New Brand Clothing (replica)
www.trendpuma.com Clothing New Brand Clothing (replica)
1. www.runwayco.com does not provide Replica clothing. They offer payment solutions for ecommerce businesses.
2. www.trendlot.com provides replica clothing, though no products appear on the site. Coffee tables, sofas, apple peelers, nut crackers and computer images appear on this website as of
3.5.08. This website has been created to defraud the bank, and the processor.
3. www.trendpuma.com is not an active website as of 3.5.08.
Instabill's service was to provide this merchant with the ability to sell replica clothing from these websites, through a third party account. Runwayco was unable to qualify for a direct merchant account, because it was high risk. .
Our software determined that transactions were actually coming from another website www.brandpolos.com that was not registered with us. James Rudy used an unauthorized website to run credit cards. All these transactions are FRAUDULENT.
31 transactions were processed before the account was closed. Not ONE of these orders was ever shipped. The customers that have contacted our office have had their transactions refunded, because the merchant was unable and unwilling to provide the products offered.
He said he was never paid. That is correct the transactions were refunded and he never provided a service to his customers. We do not believe it is unreasonable to require our merchants to deliver the products they claim to sell. Our contract specifies:
7) The access, merchandise or services described for sale by the Merchant must actually be delivered or performed immediately or in fully disclosed time frame otherwise specified to all users.''
Instabill is not a lending company. If a merchant legitimately ships a product to its customer, Instabill pays the merchant. Runwayco.com is not a legitimate company as they expect to receive the money before they ship the so-called product to the customer. We have terminated this merchant and are currently communicating with the FTC, Federal Trade Commission as well as the BBB Better Business Bureau.
Additional information will be posted to this website