[ 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. ]
Some of the emails I have received about the stormpuke nightmare really break my heart. Especially from those who have had thriving businesses until stormpay started doing chargebacks against them, closed their accounts and forced them to file for bankruptcy. The two letters I am posting below is just some sediments of how others feel about stormpuke:
**** Letter 1 ****
I sell "emergency survival flashlights" - the ones which you just shake to charge, no batteries needed. StormThief today gave the money paid by my customer for two of these tools (just happens to be the very first ones I sold - go figure) back to his account. This action by GirskyTheft Inc. leaves my account now $23 deeper into negative numbers and my customer gets his merchandise for free.
Since this isn't a "free" country (and hasn't been for many many years), if I were to say what I would like to say here I would no doubt be getting a trip to someplace like Guantanamo at taxpayer expense.
I am NOT going to terminate my "account" at StormThievery Inc. because I want to be able to tell them where to go and what to do when they arrive there after they threaten me with "collections" for the money they have stolen from me. Then I will "terminate" my "account"...with prejudice!
**** end of Letter 1 ****
**** Letter 2 ****
Dear Valued Customer,
We have been using Stormpay for months without a problem.
As of Feb. 21st we have become another victim in a long line of people who are unable to get their money from Stormpay.
In the past, when customers made payments to us, we would transfer the money from our Stormpay account into our bank account. That money would show up in about a week in our bank account.
As of Feb 3rd, all the withdrawals we initiated have not been showing up in our bank account. So, on Feb 20th, when the delays became apparent to us, we contacted Stormpay and asked why it was taking so long to get the money from payments we received transferred to our account. They replied that they were behind from their DDOS attacks and were in the process of catching up.
The next day, Feb 22nd, they entered 13 chargebacks - essentially from all of the payments we received through Stormpay from Jan 30 to Feb 1st. This was almost $9000 worth of claimed "chargebacks" from different customers all over the world and some even repeat customers.
Of course we contacted them and asked why this was happening on payments that were 3 weeks old and orders that had ALREADY shipped. It seemed way too long to us to be a chargeback and we knew the customers we shipped to were satisfied. Stormpay claims they had trouble processing their payments - never let us know, and then took the money from more recent customers (like yourself) and removed it from our account by cancelling some of our withdrawals and from any balance we had from new payments like yours.
I am very sorry to say we have been trying to get some resolution to this for our customers but it does not look good. Especially after a number of the reports we have found of many other merchants having the same problems. It has come to our attention that Stormpay has also tried to withdraw money from our bank account - which we never authorized. We are working with our bank to file a Federal complaint against them.
So we are very sorry for the trouble and inconvenience this has caused you. XXXXXX and myself encourage you to contact your credit card company and dispute the charge as you should be protected by your credit card company 100% in online transactions.
We are also doing all we can in trying to resolve this with Stormpay and have filed a complaint with their local BBB and will be in contact with their local authorities to try to get further action. I have included the response we received from the BBB below. We of course have stopped accepting Stormpay payments and have removed that option from our website.
**** end of Letter 2 ****
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