Fraud, stupidity and bad customer service can ruin your day.

Last week I looked on my Discover card online account and found a few $100 charges (four of them) to an online processing company. I also saw three $100 credits.

Confused, I called the company. I found out that someone was using my credit card to purchase credits at an online casino (I promise Mom, I don’t have a gambling problem). The service rep I talked to indicated that there were 19 total attempts to buy from this online casino and 15 of them were voided before they hit my card. The company recognized that they were fraud.

This company was very nice to work with. I got my last $100 back with no problems or headache. But, I decided to report fraud to Discover Card to be safe.

There were two recurring charges on my credit card that were pretty important to be continued. One was our hosting package from Aplus.net for all the sites that we host… 150+ sites on two servers. We pay good money to keep these sites functioning, backed up and updated. We have had the servers with Aplus.net for sometime now and I wanted to make sure that there were no problems with my service.

Well, this is where the story gets interesting.

Billing should have continued automatically, but…

My last bill from Aplus.net was processed on the 17th of January and my credit card was canceled on the 24th of January so I figured I was good. I was very explicit in my instructions that I didn’t want an interruption of services and Discover assured me that my billing would automatically transfer to the new credit card account.

So, I left it at that.

Houston, we have a problem…

This morning, our servers stopped responding. No websites, no email, no ping and no logging into the back end.

Aplus.net didn’t seem to have our servers working anymore.

That doesn’t happen. So, naturally, we became a little concerned and called tech support. From my VP of Development:

Aplus.net says our account is on hold because of suspected fraud. We cannot connect to our servers. As of today the last payment was disputed, so there is a chargeback on the account now. Because of the chargeback they cannot take another credit card on the account, only a check or wire transfer.

Can you believe that? They didn’t call to find out what was going on. They didn’t check to see if we had another form of payment. They didn’t even try to resolve the issue.

They just turned us off.

If you pay us, we can have you up in a day or so…

I called and the first line support at billing said, until you get the chargeback reversed, we can’t reinstate your account. Nothing we can do about it.

“Can I just give you another credit card number?”

“No,” he says, “You can wire us money but that might take a couple of days.”

You can understand that my blood pressure and voice elevated so that the offices in the next building new.

“Get me your supervisor!”

Deidra answered the phone. To her credit, I yelled and she stayed calm. But, it didn’t make me happy. She told me the fastest way to resolve the issue was for Discover to repost the funds.

Now, we’re looking at two weeks and not two days…

I called Discover and they said they would be happy to… it would just take two weeks.

Yeah… that would mean that my customers would be down for two weeks.

I’ll pay you anything now to make my customers happy… just fix the problem!

“What do you want, a new credit card, paypal, me to run to your bank with cash in small unmarked bills, a vile of blood, my first born, what? I have customers that are down right now because of a stupid clerical error.”

It’s our policy and we don’t care about you!

Came the response, “I am sorry, but our policy is that when there is a chargeback we stop all services and do not reinstate until we have received funds.” But all I heard was, “I am sorry, but because your credit card company made a mistake, we don’t care that you are in a bind and we won’t make it easy for you to resolve this issue. It is our policy and we are sticking to it no matter how much damage it might cause.”

But she said it all with a nice voice… I know, she was stuck. No authority.

Finally, after about 30 minutes of asking, “Who can make an exception to your stupid, customer service wreaking policy?”

I was transferred up the line again and talked with Sheryl in the billing department who finally said, “If you can get your credit card company on the phone to verify that you have asked for them to repost payment, we’ll turn your site on.”

We’re back up, but it is only temporary.

Finally, I got it taken care of after 90 minutes of being down and 80 minutes on the phone.

To pour salt in the wound after we were up, Sheryl said, “I will check in the morning if the funds have reposted yet, if not, we’ll need to turn off the servers again.”

I was able to give her another card and now she was willing to process payment… so I am paid an extra month in advance and guaranteed not to go down.

It is now fixed, but it could have been avoided.

Just to think, all of this could have been resolved before my customers got upset, I had to spend 90 minutes of frustration and their team on the phone with my complaining (not fun to do) if they had simply called me and said, “Please make other payment arrangements.”