Archive for Riley Poole

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Merchants Beware

So you are a small or even medium size merchant and trying to start your business. You go looking around for a merchant account and you find someone you think you can trust. A few days later and $1,000.00 spent and that trust is gone, along with your “deposit” or “processing fee”.
Over the past week, [...]

13Jan2008 | Riley Poole | 7 comments | Continued
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Social Security Payments at Risk

In an effort to help reduce processing costs and increase efficiency, the Social Security Administration, in association with the Treasury Department, requested bids from several banks and ultimately settled on Comerica Bank (NYSE CMA) out of Texas to provide Social Security recipients with a prepaid debit card. While prepaid debit cards have become commonplace in [...]

13Jan2008 | Riley Poole | 5 comments | Continued
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Has Google Checkout Stopped Paying Its Merchants?

There have been several unconfirmed reports now that Google Checkout payments haven’t been posted for several weeks now, and support emails are going unanswered for days on end. I am sorry guys if I kept you busy with the PCI thing last week but one word of advice, the quickest way to get a bad [...]

10Jan2008 | Riley Poole | 5 comments | Continued
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Is CitiBank Ready for a Collapse?

Think a company as large as Citigroup (NYSE C) can’t fail? Only a few months ago, one of the largest online banks, NetBank, closed its doors, leaving billions of dollars in account holder funds in question. Fortunately, the FDIC stepped in and made arrangements for ING to pick up the pieces but what if it [...]

10Jan2008 | Riley Poole | 6 comments | Continued
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Update on Google Checkout and MasterCard

Google Checkout. I am happy to report that I received confirmation from Google directly that they have taken the necessary steps to complete their PCI certification. In less than a week after our post about Google not being PCI Compliant, the good people at Google quickly responded to the matter and have completed all of [...]

9Jan2008 | Riley Poole | 7 comments | Continued
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New iPhone Trojan Horse Targets Personal Data

Just announced publicly this week, the first iPhone trojan horse has hit the public. At first glance, the trojan horse appeared completely benign but further research revealed that the attack targeted multiple applications including OpenSSH, the middleware solution which powers most SSL Communications. This standard protocol is used in the transmission of sensitive data including, [...]

9Jan2008 | Riley Poole | 8 comments | Continued
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First Data Guns Down Merchants

Effective today, First Data has just terminated all of its firearm merchants selling in non face-to-face transactions. For those of you not familiar with credit card processing, First Data is responsible for more than 60% of payment processing in the United States. They have not only terminated many of these legitimate and established merchants but [...]

8Jan2008 | Riley Poole | 31 comments | Continued
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Merchant Service Providers Encourage Fraud and Chargebacks

So here is how the scam works, once one of the merchant providers hint at a problem with a merchant, they will begin applying restrictions, making unreasonable demands and reducing limits, all in the efforts to distract the end merchant. When the merchant eventually falters, the merchant service provider will hold back several weeks of [...]

8Jan2008 | Riley Poole | 5 comments | Continued
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Yahoo Overbilling Users, Part 1

We now have three separate users claiming that they have been overbilled by Yahoo Personals. While I respect Yahoo for its ability to weather through tough markets, Yahoo’s attempt to recover some of those lost revenues through overbillings is just wrong. To assume that it would be a mistake is one thing but I think [...]

7Jan2008 | Riley Poole | 10 comments | Continued
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Telemarketing Scam Exposed

I read an interesting article today about a young woman named Kim Worman. The theme wasn’t that different than the many stories out in the blogosphere: poor woman gets taken in by some bogus charges on her credit card. Got me to thinking, it’s shocking the number of people unfamiliar with how this overall scam [...]

6Jan2008 | Riley Poole | 7 comments | Continued
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