Can Online Payment Processors Be Trusted?
Copyright 2006 East Tech LLC
Stormpay, one of the larger online payment processors, recently
froze many of their merchant and members accounts starting on
2/9/2006. Stormpay also raided the balances of many of the
account holders and literally took money without explaining why.
So many online businesses and Stormpay account owners were
completely take by surprise with this latest move by the
company. Now that literally millions of dollars were taken by
Stormpay, there are thousands of people asking "Where is my
money?"
Many of us consider payment processors like Paypal and Stormpay
to be safe places to keep our money so we can conduct online
transactions easily. But when a company like Stormpay, who is
owned by a lawyer, decides to rewrite their TOS (Terms of
Service) and basically give themselves complete authority to
take peoples money without having to explain why, that's when we
need to be worried. One of their TOS changes now grants Stormpay
authorization to just go into peoples' bank accounts and take
whatever funds they claim are owed them for who knows what. This
caused a huge rush of bank account owners around the globe to
close their bank accounts that Stormpay had access to.
Thousands of people from all over the world have lost a lot of
their money when Stormpay froze accounts and zeroed out all
their balances. Stormpay claims the reason they did this was to
clamp down on the paid autosurf industry because many of them
are considered scams. Obviously Stormpay didn't have any problem
taking money from these advertisers in the first place, or being
involved with companies that scammed millions of dollars from
investors, but now Stormpay has a change of heart and decided to
take all this money for themselves. They claim to be refunding
money to people but I personally don't know of a single person
who received a refund. I know all my claims were denied and I
lost thousands of dollars of my money thanks to Stormpay.
The BBB and FBI and other agencies are now looking into what
Stormpay and some of the paid autosurf programs have been up to.
The Wall Street Journal posted an article about this very story
on 2/10/2006 so it's starting to get national attention.
If Stormpay gets away with this, there are going to be thousands
of people from all over the world who will be out millions of
dollars. Since Stormpay is owned by a lawyer, and no doubt
consulted with other lawyers before they pulled this bogus move,
you can be sure they tried to cover their tracks to make sure
they didn't get caught. I just hope agencies like the FBI get to
the bottom of this so if other payment processors try the same
thing, they will soon regret their choices.