Originally Posted by SwirlsGirl

Let me be clear and precise.....Netbilling never stole 400 bucks from us!

What they did was knowingly hooked us up with a merchant account service company and they improperly called this company a bank.

One day we were supposed to receive a settlement for 400 bucks from the bank...the settlement never came.

400 bucks was collected from a group of my customers and supposed to be settled into our account within 48 hours...the funds never came.

We called to find out where our 400 bucks were and was told *the bank* intercepted the funds and they were concerned about transactions.

We called this pseudo bank and said what is your concern about transactions...has there been fraud, or suspicious activity?

They said no there has not, but this account is supposed to be selling tangible goods right.

We said sure we are selling tangible goods, as well as billing for phone consults, and webcam shows.

This pseudo banker with the nasally accent said well I had no idea you did phone and webcam.

We said really thats funny because wehave been doing it ever since netbilling tech support set up the phone buy now buttons and tested it all out to make it work properly.

He said well where are your sales coming from ....we said sales come directly from the site.

Many customers like to order dvds and then they like to talk candidly about the scenes on the phone with me.

He said can you send me all your marketing materials. We said what does that have to do with releasing our funds and when will you send our 400 bucks?

He said I may need to go back in and re code the merchant account because there is more risk associated.

We tried desperately to use reason and logic...we said look there have been no chargebacks the revenue is steady and growing rapidly, we asked netbilling if billing for phone and webcam would be permitted with this merchant account and netbilling said and I swear to heaven they told us yes you can...but you may not bill for any memberships!!!!

They made us sign a seperate statement swearing we would not use the merchant account to bill for membership subscriptions!!!!!!!

WE NEVER BILLED FOR MEMBERSHIP SUBSCRIPTIONS and we never would want to risk losing something so valuable to us, so why would we deliberately do something to kill our business...thats not us, we would not sit up there and do something we were advised not to do.

Long story short, we asked netbilling to try and explain to this pseudo banker that they set up the phone buttons and tested everything for us, and they are the ones who signed off and said we would be fine doing it!!!!!

Then netbilling does for whatever reason a complete 180 degree turn on us, and said oh my we never knew you were billing for phone.

They said you even signed a letter saying you would not bill customers for site memberships! They said a membership and a phone session is the same thing.

We said well in our book a membership is a membership and a phone session is a phone session.

We said to the banker this.... Listen we have been down this road before we get the sense you are going to try and do everything to keep our 400 bucks.

Just let me know now if you are going to release our funds or not. We did nothing intentionally wrong and we followed every rule to the best of our ability.

We pleaded and said this is a big misunderstanding can we just sort this out as adults, and work through it.

The bank and netbilling kept passing the buck...bank was blaming netbilling, netbilling was blaming the bank and us.

We said listen we value our account we would never have processed a telephone consult if we thought for 1 second we did not have approval to do so.

The pseudo banker as well as netbilling said because of this misunderstanding you are going on the tmf list, you are losing your merchant account, and you are not getting your money!

Thats how they fucking rolled...pure empirical fuck you type of strong arm gestapo business.

So there we are left with no merchant account, ruined holiday plans, pissed of customers, no way to accept phone calls or webcams...it was a big fucking disaster that did not have to be.

My husband tried valiantly to get in touch with mitch farber thru email, telephone, message board because we had seen enough of Mitch's posts on the board to think he was reasonable and the type of guy who cared about his clients.

He never returned a phone call, email, or instant message...he made a post on the boards saying it was unfortunate what happened but it wasn't our fault it was the bank.

We felt let down, betrayed, discombobulated, and bitter for we worked very hard at designing the phone page, investing in the leads, watching the phone calls come in, and sales start to grow only to have a psuedo banker steal our money and shut us down because he can.