Mar
It is now Tuesday night.
Monday morning started out normal enough.
Answering emails, doing my daily submissions.. a little bit of surfing. At 3:00 I was hanging out at Traffic Exchange Live like I normally do.
At 3:30 I checked my email and noticed two messages from a very well known payment processor that I use every day. I don’t want to say the name here on my blog because I am still a little bit afraid.
The first email was titled “Your xxxx Debit MasterCard has been deactivated” and the second one said “Your account has been limited until we hear from you”.
My first thought was that this was another phishing scam. I get at least one email a day with subjects like that. They are usually pretty obvious. Especially when you notice that the link they want you to click is nothing like what it appears to be.
But this one was real.
“After a recent review of your account activity, it has been determined that
you are in violation of (our) Acceptable Use Policy regarding your sales
/ offers on http://www.autoresponderprofitsystem.com/.
Therefore, your account has been limited temporarily.”
Uh-oh.
I checked my account and sure enough I could login but sending or receiving money was no longer an option.
I was out of business!
Earlier that day I had received an email from them stating that someone had attempted to do a charge back on an upgrade they purchased from me way back in January.
“We recently received a complaint regarding merchandise that was never
received or received significantly not as described.
We are contacting you to let you know that we will not be continuing this
investigation because this complaint was filed 45 or more days after the
original transaction date. However, we reserve the right for the next 180
days to begin an investigation if we later determine that this complaint
should be examined.”
No big deal, or so I thought until they decided to exercise that right to investigate my account.
I am very careful about the things I promote. I stay away from the pyramids schemes and ponzi schemes and most business opportunities in general. My Autoresponder Profit System site isn’t any of these things but from an outsider’s perspective it may appear that way.
I did everything I could to plead my case to the anonymous person who held my life in their hands. I even created an account for them to login and see everything a member would see to verify that nothing was violating their terms of use.
The problem is that you only have so much control in these situations. I had a similar experience years ago with Google Adwords (I don’t mind saying their name here). I had a very lucrative keyword business that was earning me a lot of money until one day they decided that one of my hundreds of campaigns violated their rules. “Which rule?” “Here is a copy of our rules.” “Can you be more specific?” “Here is a copy of our rules”. “I’m not breaking any of those rules.” “You are suspended forever. Have a nice day”.
When Adwords shut me down I had a very hard time starting over. Without my primary payment processor (and all the money I left in my account) it was going to be even harder this time.
Almost exactly 24 hours after having my account suspended I received this email:
“We have further reviewed your case and determined that your account is
currently not in violation of our Acceptable Use Policy. As such, the
limitation on your account has been lifted.”
Oh yeah!
But wow was that scary!
Lesson learned… don’t put all of your eggs in one basket. It’s time to do a sizable withdrawal and start keeping my money in a real bank. Also, I probably need to start looking at other payment options. That fact that my entire business can be shut down for 24 hours because of one idiot is not something I want to deal with ever again.