- Joined
- May 16, 2012
- Messages
- 5,265
- Reaction score
- 7
- Points
- 0
- Location
- Vancouver BC Canada
Good heavens the "big machine" of bureaucracy and faceless drones spread out over the globe, with zero idea what anyone else in their company is doing/has done, and their dogged determination to do their damned best to make a complete clusterf*ck out of the simplest of things.
(not just AMEX of course, it's just them I am dealing with at the moment)
My company gets paid by cheque for the work we do.
A few years back, due to one or two big customers wanting to pay this way, we reluctantly agreed to finally accept Visa and Mastercard. It's a big hassle, and we get charged a zillion stupid monthly fees, and have to go through a lot of hoops for depositing the funds etc.
We don't have a Point of Sale terminal or anything at our office, just the old style paper slips hand written out by me. Maybe 3 or 4 sales a year are done with Visa/MC. No one has ever wanted to, or attempted to pay by American Express.
So. One day last year, we get a phone call from a "Merchant Services" purportedly connected with American Express, demanding our bank account information. Not asking or requesting, but demanding.
This sounded fishy, so we called the place we deal with for CC charges, to confirm they were on the level. They said it was ok, so we called them back to ask what they needed our bank info for.
"There has been a payment made to you by someone."
Ahroo?!
"Who? How? We have no sales made that were accepted, to do with American Express. Ever. I don't even know how to go about doing that, and I'm the only one in our company that does the CC sales."
"I am sorry Sir, we cannot give out that information, it's private."
"What!? But that's stupid. We have no record of a sale, we have no dollar number matching the figure you are giving us, no Invoice number, no name, nothing! We don't want this unknown money."
"We cannot give you any personal information. This amount will be credited to your bank account. Goodbye."
Months pass.
Now, American Express has started repeatedly phoning us and sending us demands to "Immediately settle a Fraudulent debiting of a customer's card, without their consent or knowledge of a purchase."
I've lost count how many times we've retold the story that we didn't want the damned mystery money in the first place, and we have no idea about it. We would never have had anything to do with it all, until American Express got a hard on to put the money in our account, with protests from us having zero AMEX sales in the history of our company.
Arrrrrgh!
(not just AMEX of course, it's just them I am dealing with at the moment)
My company gets paid by cheque for the work we do.
A few years back, due to one or two big customers wanting to pay this way, we reluctantly agreed to finally accept Visa and Mastercard. It's a big hassle, and we get charged a zillion stupid monthly fees, and have to go through a lot of hoops for depositing the funds etc.
We don't have a Point of Sale terminal or anything at our office, just the old style paper slips hand written out by me. Maybe 3 or 4 sales a year are done with Visa/MC. No one has ever wanted to, or attempted to pay by American Express.
So. One day last year, we get a phone call from a "Merchant Services" purportedly connected with American Express, demanding our bank account information. Not asking or requesting, but demanding.
This sounded fishy, so we called the place we deal with for CC charges, to confirm they were on the level. They said it was ok, so we called them back to ask what they needed our bank info for.
"There has been a payment made to you by someone."
Ahroo?!
"Who? How? We have no sales made that were accepted, to do with American Express. Ever. I don't even know how to go about doing that, and I'm the only one in our company that does the CC sales.""I am sorry Sir, we cannot give out that information, it's private."
"What!? But that's stupid. We have no record of a sale, we have no dollar number matching the figure you are giving us, no Invoice number, no name, nothing! We don't want this unknown money."
"We cannot give you any personal information. This amount will be credited to your bank account. Goodbye."
Months pass.
Now, American Express has started repeatedly phoning us and sending us demands to "Immediately settle a Fraudulent debiting of a customer's card, without their consent or knowledge of a purchase."
I've lost count how many times we've retold the story that we didn't want the damned mystery money in the first place, and we have no idea about it. We would never have had anything to do with it all, until American Express got a hard on to put the money in our account, with protests from us having zero AMEX sales in the history of our company.
Arrrrrgh!
