Interesting email from Ibill
 

Dear iBill Consumer:



The purpose of this e-mail is to inform you of an important billing change. Previously, your credit card has been charged with the descriptor ibillcs.com for your subscription to an Internet website. Going forward, gkbill will now be the new billing agent. During your next billing cycle, your credit card statement will contain a new descriptor, gkard load*gkbill.com. This change will be effective on your next billing cycle. As an added feature of this change, you now have a gkard, VISA Electronic Card, which has been loaded with the appropriate billing amount for your subscription.

No additional changes to your existing subscription have been made and you will not experience any service interruptions.

By switching billing agents, your last rebill may have been slightly delayed. As result of bringing your account up to date, you might see two charges on your next credit card statement to coincide with the delayed and current charge. For information regarding your subscription 1XXXXXXXXXXX, please visit www.ibillcs.com.

Hmmmm interesting indeed I haven't gotten one yet...

i didnt get anything

Email is sent to subscribers ... not webmaster. We are not that important... :1orglaugh

No, let's see how many subs will wake up to either cancel rebilling or chargeback.

Probably US only?

Pay attention to this, it's going to be a big deal.

that makes no sense.

how do you load a prepaid visa card with a charge to a porn site?

Hopefully they don't have too many irons in the fire

Is iBill is adding a transaction layer to the process to bypass regulations? This is how epassporte qualifies to handle adult transactions since everything is handle via a virtual credit card.

CUSTOMER SERVICE CONTACT INFORMATION:
ADDRESS: gkbill, 2200 SW10th Street, Deerfield Beach, Florida 33442
PHONE NUMBER: 877-424-5525
EMAIL: [email protected]
WEB SITE: www.gkbill.com


Same location ( Deerfield Beach) as Ibill ....

Ibill is also mentioned in the terms

Using a 'load' feature bypasses visa issues.
Relative easy these days to get a merchant account for that
purpose.
Transactions are booked as 'cash advance' which is more difficult to chargeback ... if a user complains the chargeback happens on the internal system and thus bypassing visa.

nice, im glad to hear they got the system up and running. They can finally process re-bills!

Maybe now they will pay us our monies!

Yeah this was as a subscriber not a webmaster, still haven't got MY ibill check but it looks like they are billing customers as is the case here.

Lol, registered two weeks ago and just updated today:

# whois gkbill.com

Registrant:
Muscato Corp. (AYOHCAQJZD)
850 Trafalgar Court
Suite 100
Maitland, FL 32751
US

Domain Name: GKBILL.COM

Administrative Contact, Technical Contact:
Muscato Corp. (22096399O) [email protected]
850 Trafalgar Court
Suite 100
Maitland, FL 32751
US
407-551-1300 fax: 407-551-1423

Record expires on 07-Oct-2005.
Record created on 07-Oct-2004.
Database last updated on 26-Oct-2004 14:36:05 EDT.

Domain servers in listed order:

2KSYMWWW.SYMMETREX.COM 64.132.121.5
NS2.SYMMETREX.COM 208.14.238.21

Symmetrex, Inc. is an established transaction processing company with operation centers in Maitland, Florida and Salt Lake City, Utah. The Symmetrex team has multiple decades of leading-edge financial payment technology experience.

The Symmetrex team has delivered financial payment processing solutions to global companies, and has built some of today's largest transaction processing companies. We have compiled that knowledge and experience together to provide the next generation achievement, "i24Bank".


SYMMETREX.COM

The plot thickens ....

The good news on this is that iBill will be able to run domestic Visa rebills with this system. That should mean that USA webmasters can be paid something soon. Having a solution to bill Visa for USA webmasters also means that iBill has better chances of getting short term funding. No one would lend them money since they were not even able to complete a Visa transaction, and even with this system in place it remains to be seen whether they still will be unable to get short term funding. It would appear that without some sort of funding to make up for the 8 figure amount held by First Data, iBill will continue to have to play that game of paying clients with the most current billing receipts. It doesnt take a rocket scientist to figure out that what is owed is far more than what they are now billing since so many clients have bailed out, so without some sort of cash injection getting caught up will be difficult.

The bad news I see with this is that Visa will be less than thrilled to see iBill back dooring the Visa transactions. iBill would respond of course that this is all legitimate and not against the rules, but at the end of the day Visa went through great efforts to establish parameters on how adult transactions are handled in the United States and iBill is playing near the outer boundaries of the rules rather than squarely within. That cant make Visa USA all warm and fuzzy when they think of iBill, which in turn cannot be seen as anything but a bad thing.

Scoreman

I could not have said it more perfectly myself, and we all know what happens when big brother is less than thrilled.


Ron Cadwell
CEO
__________
CCbill.com
Cavecreek.com
DRMnetworks.com

What makes this any different than having subscriber get ePassporte/electron cards and using the preload/micro-pay concept.

As I understood, this model of payment transfer is fine B2B but too cumbersome for B2C.

??

-Dino

gkbill.com sounds like beast billing..

Yes my experience in this is that those who play near the edge are the first to get their asses handed to them. That is not exactly the place I like to be with my monies.

I want to be fair to iBill in that this is still an achievement for them that they have this in place as they are now alot more viable than they were without this, but it would be my hope that this is just a bandaid manuever while they get their actual domestic merchant account in place.

I have to believe that if iBill is able to get their domestic merchant bank situation fixed that they have the needed tools in place to go forward as an IPSP rather than this quasi Paypal that they have made themselves today.

Even if iBill rights this ship, iBill has alot of key relationships that are now in the toilet that will take alot more to rebuild than getting a new merchant account and gift baskets.

Am I the only one who assumed that our sale revenues were held in trust on behalf the merchant (us) from which *only* reserves and commissions were transferred to iBill's coffers?

Any small business owner knows the game of using tomorrows sales for yesterdays expenses, but in the financial sector this approach can border on 'kiting' which is illegal.

I just want my fucking $10k :(

I am still waiting for my 10K from Globill.:Graucho

Jesus. I'm glad they're working on a solution, but I think this one is gonna be a fucken nightmare. Double charges on a statement are always gonna be bad, even if they weren't charged the month before.

Personally, I would flip if I got an email from some company I had a subscription with telling me I had automatically been signed up for "a gkard, VISA Electronic Card, which has been loaded with the appropriate billing amount for your subscription", as some sort of "added feature". Just the words "added feature" would have me on the phone to VISA making sure everything was stopped.

They will be using a bank in Antigua, to issue the Virtual Visa cards. The bank is Global Bank Of Commerce Ltd, website : http://www.globalbank.ag

It actualy is the same bank IKOBO is using to issue their electron card and process their cc's from their customers.

What ibill wants is that they will treat the card loads as cash advances, way difficult to chargeback....also if members complain, ibill will credit back their Virtual card, bypassing most of the visa system. This method is called "on-us".

The advantages are that they can actualy issue thousends of virtual cards and run them on their merchant, to ballance the VISA chargeback ratio !

It's about the same trick Paycom does with epassporte in the back end, but they call it Gift Card and they give it away for free. It's just to increase transaction volume with good (no chargeback cards) so the chargeback ratio will look good in the end...

Yah it is a clever way to balance the transaction numbers but it seems unlikely that it is an appropriate method to handle all transactions.

The big big question one has after seeing this is does Ibill actually have a pending USA processing arrangement with Merrick such as CCBill has?

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That post was a flash of fucking brilliance and wins the daily FoFB Award. The author of this post has earned $20 from FLASHCA$H and our eternal gratitude for making time spent on the boards more worth while. THANK YOU!

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i didnt think ibills problems were chargeback related..

and if they had everything in place for billing just a few days away..why mass email all the subscribers?

sounds awfully screwy

ill stay with epoch and ccbill..

Yep and the trickle down could effect how Visa does business online and effect CCbill and other processors in a very negative manner. Visa will not make a guideline just for Ibill if they dont like what they are doing. They will make a policy change that could/would effect the entire industry.

Glad to see Ron speak up in this thread.. Im sure he as a strong interest in the finaly outcome of all this.

That's a very clever and interesting, albeit sketchy, solution.

But have they advised their webmasters of this? How could they implement something like this and not inform their webmasters.

Personally, I think this is a huge step in screwing the consumers. As it's been said, cash advance transactions are extremely tough to chargeback. That fact alone is going to cause problems.

There's also the fact that cash advance transactions accrue interest immediately, bypassing the grace days alloted to regular purchases. Say your customer is getting billed for a $39.95 subscription and his credit card has 21 grace days and a 18.5% interest rate. He's going to see a $0.42 cash advance interest fee.

Couple the descriptor change, the interest charge and the possibility of a $1 or $2 cash advance fee, and Visa is going to be getting a lot of calls from a lot of unhappy customers demanding interest fee reversals, cash advance fee reversals and fraud claims concerning unrecognized charges from "gkard load*gkbill.com".

We all know that not everyone reads their email. This email from iBill will go unnoticed by most consumers. That leads to a scenario where tons of customers will cancel their card, claiming "gkard load*gkbill.com" is a fraudulent charge. You can't rebill a card closed for fraud. Therefore, you've lost a customer.

Combine the interest reversals, fee credits and fraud claims, and Visa will take notice and investigate further. And they won't be happy.

GKard.


Its gonna go boom.

:glugglug

The not so good kind of Boom.

Damn what a way to start the day.

Reading that email - Ibill signed up the rebilling clients for a load card without their permission then charged their cards twice with a new descriptor. Im pretty sure when surfer signed up for "xyzpornsite" they didnt agree to Ibill reusing their info for another billing system or company name. Just like said above, people dont read all emails, and the ones that do may dismiss it as one of those scam emails like the ones from Citibank or Suntrust. Others may remember signing up for a paysite a few months back and then cancel. That website even looks a little suspect, I doubt people will embrace this.

This looks like a disaster in the making. This could really piss visa off once those calls start pouring in. :mad:

Damn right. And the calls will pour in. The entire GKBill website mentions iBill once, at the bottom of their terms and conditions. Something about GKCard fees not being charged to iBill clients.

I used to work for Visa and after a week's worth of calls regarding this, I'd have referred this straight up to upper management if I hadn't seen this thread beforehand.

I see nothing but more headaches for iBill and it's clients in the near future.

Sounds like bad news to me, thats just something Visa USA is just going to LOVE!!!!




NOT!

if you havnt already ditched ibill you need help

Dear iBill,

I would like my money, please and thank you.

Love and Kisses,
Amber


no vegas for me, ya fuckers!

bump.

Thanks for the letter . i apprecited it.

This stinks bad folks..

Ibill is using its customers ( webmasters ) to finance this whole ball of wax.

If all webmasters arent paid within 48 hours, call your attorney generals office and visa and have these fucks arrested for theft.


Sorry duobill , but wtf do you expect when you steal money from people.. your not paying my bandwidth bill " I AM "