TD Bank Arbitrarily Refused Payment To My Vendors
A Cautionary Tale Of Using TD Bank As A Small Business Owner
I own a small business that relies on emailing approximately 90,000 subscribers two to three times a week. Failure to email in any given day can impact my monthly revenue by nearly 10% for every day missed so I use the autopay aspect of my debit/credit card with TD Bank so no payment could be missed by accident.
Unfortunately TD Bank has a policy of suspending payments through my card when they determine there to be “suspicious activity”. In November of 2019 they determined that the monthly charge from my email company, that had occurred every month for nearly two years, was suspicious and denied payment. This resulted in the email company failing to email to my subscribers for several days reducing my monthly revenue in November by nearly 20%.
Two issues: First, why is a regularly debited amount from a known vendor considered suspicious? (they say they can’t tell me why); and second, why am I not notified that such activity has caused an audit freezing activity on my card?
Their response is they can’t disclose the suspicious activity (it must be a TD Bank secret) and they have no idea why I wasn’t informed of the “audit freeze” but would take steps to rectify it.
Alas, now in January, 2020, just two months later, it happened again. With the same responses of “we can’t tell you why it happened” or why I wasn’t notified.
I am writing this to warn any small business owners that TD Bank cannot be trusted to perform the payments you authorize or to notify you when they halt activity on your business debit/credit card.
TD Bank has not been “small business friendly” to my business.
1 Updates & Rebuttals
Robert
Irvine,United States
Emails?
#2Consumer Comment
Thu, January 30, 2020
You send 90K emails 2-3 times a week. You sound more like a SPAMer than a legitimate "small" business. While I don't know for sure, it may seem likely the "suspicious activity" isn't you. It is your vendor. If a bank gets numerous complaints about a specific vendor they may start to question that vendor. The fact that they are your email provider and you are sending basically a quarter of a million e-mails a week could raise a lot of red flags. In that the bank has complaints that this company is actually just a SPAM provider and is getting a lot of chargeback requests so they will question people using them.
Another possible reason is the location of the company. If they are not based in the US and are in a Country known for fraud, this could also be a reason for rejection.
As to the effect, if you are paying monthly and the payment was rejected. Did the email company notify you of the rejected payments? They are an email company...seems like that would be automatic. As you said this caused them not to email your subscribers for several days. Why didn't they notify you the second the payment was rejected? If you say they did then how come it caused a several day delay in the emails?
If these e-mails are sucn an income generator wny aren't you paying this company on a yearly or at least quarterly basis? Every legitimate provider I have dealt with makes the "monthly" payment option the most expensive option. They want to lock you in for a longer period. If your answer to that is you don't trust them or have some other "issue", I think you just answered your own question as to "why" these transactions are being blocked.
First, why is a regularly debited amount from a known vendor considered suspicious? (they say they can’t tell me why); and second, why am I not notified that such activity has caused an audit freezing activity on my card?
- NO bank will tell you the exact reason or notify you in advance. This is for many reasons, but mainly because they don't want to give the true criminals hints where they may adjust their actions to try and get around this. While you don't appreciate this now, if you ever did have a fraudlent transaction that they blocked you would be very happy.