[ I have written a series of posts about the "pay the storm" bugaboos. I call it "The Stormpuke--Stormpay Story: Getting to the Heart of the Matter in Posts" . You can get it here. This nightmare is ongoing with no end in site. ]
It seemed to be a descent service: Internet payment processor, free auctions, cheap isp, free email, and the option of making pennies by clicking on advertiser links. An all in one convenient service until I started seeing nightmares about them appearing on the paypalsucks.com forum. What got my attention was when someone pointed out that the netiba certification site was owned by the same freaks that run stormpay. And I had wondered why their eye of horus logo on the netiba site bugged the crap out of me.
I have been following the nightmare of storms since then, especially when Yah told me over a couple of years ago that stormpay would ruin a lot lives. The so-called "owner" that is representing stormpay is NOT the real owner. It is a manager overseeing the whole crooked operation. The big problem with all of this is that it won't be easy to take down stormpay, despite the useless "cease and desist order" that the State of Tennessee issued against them.
According to those who have exposed the whole stormpay ring on the paypalsucks.com forum, the address and phone number stormpay is using is fake. The whole stormpay operation is being run overseas, although the exact location can't be pinpointed, but for sure it is not running in the State of Tennessee or anywhere in the United States for that matter. To make matters worse, Stormpay has been suspending accounts left and right, blackmailing website owners to either use stormpay as the sole payment method and services or else and they have been turning over lists of names over to collection agencies and the FTC to even steal more money from people. I've heard from people that have even lost their ebay accounts just for putting stormpay's logo with paypal as to what method of payments are accepted in the seller's auction. You hear the company but yet they can't be seen or found. Sounds like what traitor-in-chief bush bin terrorist does every day of his pathetic lizard life.
For those that can't believe what I am saying about stormpay, I am posting some emails I received from the popular 12dailypro site. As a courtesy to 12dailypro, I am not posting their contact address, as they already have enough headaches. Their nightmare is as detailed as it can be. It has been ongoing since January 28 and there seems to be no peace in sight:
Email#1:
Urgent - Payment Processor Change
There has been a very disturbing development regarding our payment processors that we need to share with all of you.
We discovered Sunday night, that the delay in receiving funds was not simply slow banking. On Sunday night we received a notice from StormPay informing us that they had cancelled all our pending withdrawals and could only pay us by bank wire or check. They also informed us that they would not continue doing business with us if we continued to offer our members the ability to upgrade with EMO. On Monday morning we attempted to arrange our bank wire with Stormpay, hoping to have time to come to some fair resolution that would allow us to maintain both payment processors. StormPay informed us at this time that they would not allow the release of our funds until we removed EMO as a payment option from our site. We were given a 5pm deadline in order to do so. Not doing so would result in StormPay disallowing any further upgrades incoming purchases through them. The only account functions we would have been allowed at that point would have been to refund all funds in our account to the purchaser, which would not have allowed for any earnings or commissions to be paid to these StormPay members.
We held a conference all with StormPay yesterday evening, in an attempt to negotiate some other solution. They informed us that due to the high degree of fraud and chargebacks by some of our members and the associated credit risk for their company that they would not continue to put themselves at that risk as long as we were allowing our members another payment option. They also expressed concern over the potential fraud of members being using both processors as a means to pass money in a fraudulent way. They informed us that as long as we offer any other payment option to our members, they will not do business with us and will not allow us unrestricted access to the funds in our account.
While we are very disturbed by their requests and do not agree with their reasoning, right now we are forced to capitulate, due to the fact that now 75% percent of our membership utilizes StormPay as their payment option. So, as of 10am today, we have removed EMO as an upgrade option with 12daily Pro. At StormPay’s behest, the only payment processor that will be accepted at 12daily Pro is StormPay.
We are extremely disappointed at this turn of events and are going to do everything we can to make this transition smooth. We selected EMO as an option because our their security, their low fees, and the flexibility. LifeClicks wants to continue our relationship with this processor. Because of this and because of our dedication to all of our members who have now created EMO accounts, we will be stepping up the launch of our new program, which will accept EMO, by a few weeks. We hope to have the site launched and available within the next couple of days. Stay tuned for more information on this.
Email#2:
We have done some additional research and as you may have noticed, we have come to some decisions regarding our current issues with Stormpay.
We did everything we could to meet and live up to StormPay's blackmail attempts on Monday. We removed EMO, a payment processor with who we have a very solid relationship. At StormPay's demand, we completely eliminated all choice for our members of payment processors and put our business in a very difficult postition. After all of that, it seems that we have been betrayed.
The existence of 12daily Pro has profited StormPay over the course of the months, perhaps more than any other of their clients or users combined. They seem to now have a problem with autosurf; we find it curious that they didn't have a problem with taking our money. We have learned that StormPay has suspended many other autosurfs as well witin the past couple of days. It appears they may also be sending out libelous answers to members questions about why we were suspended.
We want to let you know that we have decided to become proactive in this matter, after a full day has passed with no explanation from them of why our account has been suspended. Our attorney has submitted a letter to their attorney via email explaining our postion and requesting a response. Barring a legitimate explanation by Stormpay within a timely manner, we will be filing immediate legal action to recover all our funds by legal force if necessary so we can meet our responsibilities to all of our StormPay members in a timely fashion. We will update you on the progress of this matter. We promise to fight them to the death for money that rightfully belongs to you and us.
In the meantime, since our account has been locked, we cannot at this time make any StormPay payments. We also have been denied by StormPay the withdrawal of funds that we earmarked for the funding of our EMO account. So, this evening we will have to weigh a lot of factors in determining how we will structure a recovery plan for our Stormpay funds as well as determine an ammenable and fair payment schedule for all members with currently pending withdrawals.
We will have some answers for you on this by midday tomorrow.
In the meantime, we have enabled EMO upgrades again, staff will be focusing on support tickets and the launch of the new program hopefully later tomorrow.
We need you all to understand that this is a very difficult situation which we never could have predicted. There will be a lot of change and uncertainty in the coming days. But know we are doing all we can to insure that StormPay does not bring this program down nor take advantage of members that we have spent months caring for.
We completely understand that you are all concerned as we are as well. We ask for your support and patience at this time. Rest assured we are here working our butts off for you. You can help by not creating more work by staff with support tickets about these issues. We will update the membership as a whole as developments arise in the member news area, so please check it often for new postings.
We will not let anyone destroy this program that our staff and all of you have worked so hard to build.
NOW is the time when we PROVE we are pros!
Email#3:
You have received a message from 12 Daily Pro:
We wanted to take this time to update everyone on the status of the program and the recent happenings. We know you are all anxious for information. We have spent the entire day trying to forumlate the best strategy for how we deal with the current issues facing the 12daily Pro family.
1. StormPay did finally respond to our attorney's request for information. They informed him that the reason they have suspended our account was at the behest of their bank. This is completely different than the reason they released to the StormPay members, being that they were concerned about autosurf business models.
2. StormPay also made additional false statements in their email to users. The email claimed that we refused to provide information on our business model. This is false. Mr. McConnell of StormPay fully understood our business model from the day we began processing transactions with them, in May of 2005. In fact, Mr. Connell just this past Monday asked if he could fly down to meet us and explain why we should choose StormPay as our only payment processor. And as we posted in a member news item a a couple of days ago, Mr. McConnell blatantly attempted to blackmail us by threatening to freeze our account if we did not remove our other payment processor within 45 minutes.
3. We have also become aware of some very disturbing news about Stormpay, including the fact that they have a very negative rating with the Tennessee Better Buiness Bureau, with dozens of claims against them. They company was also issued a cease and desist order by the State of Tennessee for financial related misdeeds. StormPay has also begun randomly seizing funds from user accounts, and are currently not honoring some users withdrawal requests. We believe that this is for the same reason they refused to release our funds, because they do not have the funds.
4. In a conversation we had with Stormpay and their attorney this past Monday, Mr. McConnell revealed to us that Stormpay acts as a 'lender', which is not what they state in their terms of service. He went on to explain that they money in users accounts in not completely backed by real funds. When I inquired where all of our funds were, he changed the subject.
5. At this point, it seems that StormPay may have begun to randomly refund some members money. Unfortunately this puts us in a very difficult situation. As they have blocked us completely from access to our account, we have no way of knowing who is receiving refunds and who is still owed. They are creating a situation by where we cannot accurately determine which pending withdrawals need to be cancelled because they have already received refunds from StormPay. In essence they are creating a situation by where they are spending our company money at their own discretion and not providing us with the information we need to meet our obligations to all our members. If indeed our account is frozen, StormPay should not have access to spend those funds until after an investigation is completed.
6. That said, we are actively trying to determine what legal actions may be at our disposal to try to retrieve our funds so we can issue refunds to all members with any pending withdrawals or active upgrades. In order to insure that as many people can be paid as possible, we will only be paying refunds, not any surf earnings or commissions. At this point with Stormpay holding our funds, we are unable to provide a time schedule for this refunds.
We will continue to update you here as we have more information.
Email#4:
You have received a message from 12 Daily Pro:
We have learned that StormPay has completed its own independent investigation, which we have learned did NOT involve any law enforcement whatsover, only their bank and themselves, and have begun arbitrarily issuing refunds. In addition they are randomly denying claims of individuals at their own discretion and threatening THEM with legal action.
We also learned that they are refunding members who have already received their upgrade payments from 12daily Pro. Thus essentially paying them twice with our money. Then on top of that they have announced they are going to seek to take additional money from us.
Not only are they now holding money paid to us as non-refundable upgrade fees, but they are also holding a great deal of funds that came to us as via other revenue streams having nothing to do with member upgrades including:
Thousands of dollars in referral commissions we earned by promoting their website.
Thousands of dollars we earned in advertising sales
Thousands of dollars we earned from other online sources
Thousands of dollars in referral commissions we earned by promoting NETIBA, owned by StormPay.
Thousands of dollars earned from advertising promotions and for convention registrations.
They are also sitting on much more money that they earned in fees from both our company and all our members, transactions which they are now saying are null based on their own internal investigation.
We also have not been contacted by any law enforcement officials and/or been informed of any investigation by anyone. StormPay has created this lie in order to cover their own trail of blackmail, deceit, and money shifting that made them unable to pay our withdrawal request.
What does this mean? THERE WAS NEVER ANY INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION OF OUR STORMPAY ACCOUNT. STORMPAY LIED TO IS USERS...AGAIN.
StormPay has also lied to all of its users informing them that they just discovered 12daily Pro's business model. However, their own daily records since we began using them in May of 2005, they have a detailed record of payments both received by us from members and sent to members by us. Not only did Stormpay tell us just 5 days ago that we were an excellent client and member, they blackmailed us into forcing us to chose them as our ONLY payment processor, with full knowledge our our business model.
These current actions and this 'fake' investigation are simply a means by which they can cover their own illegal acts and mishandling of their users funds. They have provided us NO PROOF of an external investigation. And no external investigators have contact us.
In addition, Stormpay has locked us from access to our account, so we don't know who is being refunded and whether or not those refunds are legitimate. We also fear that they may be laundering and syphoning funds out of our account to cover their debts to their other users who have never even been members of 12daily Pro.
StormPay President, John McConnell openly admitted to me that they do not have the funds to cover their user accounts in their bank. These actions they are taking are ALL because of this. And now they intend to try to make 12daily Pro and all of you pay for their unlawful shifting both our money and yours.
By the second, StormPay is absconding with money that we need to legitmately refund our members and operate our business. Their actions are making it very unlikely that everyone will get the refunds they are due.
We have been advised that it may be possible to take legal action that will force them to cease and desist in dispursement of our funds until a REAL independent investigation is conducted. Other autosurfs are also in discussion of a class action law-suit against the company, who has a long negative history with the BBB.
Many supportive members on the forum asked us if there is any way you can all help us recover our funds from Stormpay via legal action. Requests were made that we make available the ability for members to donate to a legal fund for this purpose. Over 200 members have already donated. If we are able to pool enough funds for this legal action, we will not have to utilize company funds that are needed to provide refunds as we are able. As it is the staff has been cut to 1, myself, in order to use any and all available funds for refund purposes. Any assistance any member can give for this legal funds would be greatly appreciated.
If we don't take immediate legal action against Stormpay, they will continue arbirtarily taking and spending our money that we need to pay you your refunds.
****end of emails****
I will keep following this never ending nightmare with these "pay the storm freaks", as I'm sure there is more to the story as to WHO the real owner is and why they are allowed to scare money out of people. Those who still have their accounts with stormpay need to close them and block whatever threats they may receive from them.
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