PayPal may stop accepting credit cards funded due to complains from credit card companies, so beware.
QUOTE
Dear Member, my name is James Ventrillo and I'm the owner of BuildReferrals.com. As some of you have heard, we can no longer process payments thru PayPal. Below is an explanation of why and how this will affect you and BuildReferrals.com. It's quite long so here are the important points if you don't have the time for the detailed explanations below:
On Monday January 28th, PayPal closed our Business account with them and is now holding our money for 90 days.
Januarys payments will be delayed 90 days until our money is released by PayPal.
We are replacing PayPal with our own credit card processing and online checks so 99% of those people who used PayPal can still pay for their Matrix with a credit card or from their checking account just like they did at PayPal.
Payment deadline for Januarys Matrix payments and deadline to join the Matrix before the next 1 Million Members is pushed back to February 15th.
The BuildReferrals Lottery will still be paid but winning numbers will be picked and payout will be pushed back from February 5th to February 15th.
On Monday January 28th, PayPal closed our Business account with them and is now holding our money for 90 days. They also canceled all
BuildReferrals Matrix Subscriptions. We called PayPal immediately and because of the large amount of money in our account, we were able to speak with the people who actually closed our account.
They explained to us that they are having serious problems with Visa and MasterCard. PayPal is getting a lot of charge backs from people who have been scammed by companies on the net using PayPal as their payment method. If they continue to get such high rates of charge backs (people calling their credit card company to stop previous payments thru PayPal), then Visa and MasterCard will pull out and PayPal will no longer be able to process credit cards, which will of course severely damage their business. They are therefore closing lots of accounts around the net (as you may have heard).
We have never had even 1 charge back and only had 4 complaints (all of which were apparently from double billing and promptly refunded) out of hundreds of purchases each day and over 1 year of processing with them.
They said the reason we were not being allowed to continue using their service is because they have classified us as a multi-level marketing company offering a business opportunity. They directed us to their Terms of Service that contained this sentence:
"You also agree not to use your PayPal account to sell securities, business opportunities, franchises, multi-level marketing, or goods with delivery delayed more than 20 days from the date of payment."
Although this has been there for quite some time, they have not been enforcing it. However, as you may have noticed, there are a ton of sites popping up that say you can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for a one time payment using PayPal. These sites are usually just a few pages, all dedicated to telling you how much you can make, with a few lines at the bottom describing what you are actually purchasing.
All you need is $20 a month for hosting, a few pages of text, slap a PayPal button on there and you have an internet "business". These are some of the bad apples spoiling the bunch (not all companies designed like this are bad, we are just repeating the example PayPal gave us).
Although some of these sites may be designed with good intentions, many people join them with great expectations and little concern for the product, and when they don't make the money promised, they call their credit card company and have the payment on their credit card charged back to them indicating the site was a scam. Then Visa and MasterCard ask PayPal why they are processing for scams.
You will see very few smaller companies using their own credit card processing (most use ClickBank or similar canned, expensive, processing companies) since it's very difficult to do. Before you can process credit cards on your site, you need to be a legal business. This means you need to have a business license or be incorporated and have a business bank account under that name.
After that you need to be checked out by Dun and Bradstreet in New York to make sure you and your business are credible. Then you are given a Duns number, which is required by Verisign who does their own investigation. Then you need to be able to install the secure certificate from Verisign on your server to encrypt it, which usually means you need to own your own server, which can be very expensive. When all that is done, you need to apply for a Credit Card Merchant account from Visa and Master card. If you thought getting a credit card was hard, trying getting approved to process them!
We incorporated last May, own 4 servers, have a Duns number and have had our main server secure from Verisign and have been processing credit cards with our own merchant account since last June. As crazy as all this sounds, we thought it was crazier to rely on one company (PayPal) for all our payments. While many smaller companies will be unable to continue without PayPal, BuildReferrals will continue with just a few modifications to our service.
First, obviously we can no longer pay members through PayPal. That leaves us with e-bullion.com. They are like e-gold only more reliable and user friendly in our opinion. They are free to join and you don't need to give them your credit card or bank account info like PayPal. Just fill in your regular info and you have an instant e-bullion account that we can pay you through. We will pay you the same as you were paid through PayPal. You can have e-bullion send your money to you via check, wire transfer or you can choose to use their debit card. The are available anywhere in the world and will be a great payment solution.
E-bullion does not have an affiliate program, so you don't need to signup under your sponsor. Just go to http://www.e-bullion.com and signup.
Then login to your BuildReferrals Members Area, click the Account Information picture and enter your e-bullion ID in the appropriate box on your Account page. That's it. Now you're ready to get paid. Except for one small problem.....PayPal has all of our money.
PayPal will not return our sizeable amount of money for 90 days. Since we pay 90% of our Matrix Members thru PayPal, we used PayPal to hold all our money except for money paid to us from Vbucks (our credit card processor) and from some of the BuildReferrals Lottery Advertisers. This means we do not have the $30,000.00 necessary to pay our Matrix Members this month. We do however have enough money to pay for the BuildReferrals Lottery Winners, which we will still do.
So what are we going to do? We are going to do a few things. First, we have several thousand Matrix Members who were supposed to have their subscriptions automatically renew at the end of this month. But because PayPal cancelled all of their subscriptions, they are unable to pay. We need to give them and other Members who want to join the Matrix before the next Million Members come in, some time to use another one of our payment options to get their payments in.
We must therefore extend the deadline to get January's payments in and the deadline to upgrade to the Matrix to get a share of the new 1 Million Members to February 15th. Just to save any confusion, we will also push back picking the winning BuildReferrals Lottery numbers till February 15th as well. To be clear, the winning BuildReferrals Lottery Numbers will NOT be drawn on February 5th, but on February 15th instead. So everything will happen on February 15th. Our winning BuildReferrals Lottery winners will be picked and the new 1 Million Members will be imported.
However, we cannot pay Matrix Members this months earnings until we receive our money from PayPal in 90 days. We really don't make much from BuildReferrals.com. Most of our money is put back into improvements and paying Members. So it's not possible for us to "find" another $30,000.00. So, on February 15th, we will create a special note on your Account Information page which will tell you how much you have earned for the month of January. It will be deducted from your earnings just as if we had paid you and everything will continue as normal. Then in 90 days when PayPal releases our money, we will immediately pay your January earnings in full.
BuildReferrals has been paying on time for over a year now and it kills me to have to put paying Januarys payments off for 90 days.
Unfortunately, we have no choice. You aren't going to lose a single penny. You will be paid the exact amount you are owed, just delayed a bit.
One question you may have is will not having PayPal hurt BuildReferrals or stint the number of Matrix upgrades. The answer is no. Most if not all people who use PayPal have a checking account or credit card or both. We have been in the process of dropping our current credit card processor, Vbucks, due to many connectivity problems. Many people who have tried to upgrade or renew their Matrix Membership have been unable to because of this or they have been declined for no reason. We started the process last week to obtain a new more reliable credit card processor.
We expect to have that online by the end of next week.
If your subscription was canceled by PayPal before your renewal payment was made, or for any other reason you need to make your January Matrix payment, just use our current credit card link on your Account Information page. If you are declined for any reason, just hang on till the end of next week when we replace Vbucks with our new credit card processor and you shouldn't have any problem. Once we make the switch to our new credit card processor, we will have Vbucks cancel all Matrix subscriptions so you can use the new easier, more reliable credit card processor for your future payments.
The new processor will accept credit cards the same as PayPal. We will even be adding American Express, Discover and Diners to the regular Visa and MasterCard. For those members who have a checking account and don't have a credit card, our new processor will have online checks. You can instantly pay from your checking account almost the same way you pay with a credit card! That means 99% of those people who were using PayPal can use our new system with ease. For those few members who did not verify their PayPal account because they don't have a credit card or checking account, they can use one of our other payment methods like e-gold, e-bullion or snail mail.
In the end, all this does is cause us to push things back one week, and postpone Januarys payments for a little while. Otherwise, everything will continue as normal. The Matrix is still growing by hundreds each day and with the new 1 Million Members coming in, we expect it to grow even faster! We expect to be paying out 6 figures each month within the year. And with 2 years of guaranteed growth, the BuildReferrals Matrix is a great $5.00 investment!
I want to apologize for any inconvenience this PayPal problem has caused you. I also want to offer you my word that every penny generated by BuildReferrals not used to maintain or support our program, will be saved in an effort to pay Januarys payments as soon as possible. Although 90 days is a definite pay day, I'd like to see Januarys payments made up next month.
On Monday January 28th, PayPal closed our Business account with them and is now holding our money for 90 days.
Januarys payments will be delayed 90 days until our money is released by PayPal.
We are replacing PayPal with our own credit card processing and online checks so 99% of those people who used PayPal can still pay for their Matrix with a credit card or from their checking account just like they did at PayPal.
Payment deadline for Januarys Matrix payments and deadline to join the Matrix before the next 1 Million Members is pushed back to February 15th.
The BuildReferrals Lottery will still be paid but winning numbers will be picked and payout will be pushed back from February 5th to February 15th.
On Monday January 28th, PayPal closed our Business account with them and is now holding our money for 90 days. They also canceled all
BuildReferrals Matrix Subscriptions. We called PayPal immediately and because of the large amount of money in our account, we were able to speak with the people who actually closed our account.
They explained to us that they are having serious problems with Visa and MasterCard. PayPal is getting a lot of charge backs from people who have been scammed by companies on the net using PayPal as their payment method. If they continue to get such high rates of charge backs (people calling their credit card company to stop previous payments thru PayPal), then Visa and MasterCard will pull out and PayPal will no longer be able to process credit cards, which will of course severely damage their business. They are therefore closing lots of accounts around the net (as you may have heard).
We have never had even 1 charge back and only had 4 complaints (all of which were apparently from double billing and promptly refunded) out of hundreds of purchases each day and over 1 year of processing with them.
They said the reason we were not being allowed to continue using their service is because they have classified us as a multi-level marketing company offering a business opportunity. They directed us to their Terms of Service that contained this sentence:
"You also agree not to use your PayPal account to sell securities, business opportunities, franchises, multi-level marketing, or goods with delivery delayed more than 20 days from the date of payment."
Although this has been there for quite some time, they have not been enforcing it. However, as you may have noticed, there are a ton of sites popping up that say you can earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for a one time payment using PayPal. These sites are usually just a few pages, all dedicated to telling you how much you can make, with a few lines at the bottom describing what you are actually purchasing.
All you need is $20 a month for hosting, a few pages of text, slap a PayPal button on there and you have an internet "business". These are some of the bad apples spoiling the bunch (not all companies designed like this are bad, we are just repeating the example PayPal gave us).
Although some of these sites may be designed with good intentions, many people join them with great expectations and little concern for the product, and when they don't make the money promised, they call their credit card company and have the payment on their credit card charged back to them indicating the site was a scam. Then Visa and MasterCard ask PayPal why they are processing for scams.
You will see very few smaller companies using their own credit card processing (most use ClickBank or similar canned, expensive, processing companies) since it's very difficult to do. Before you can process credit cards on your site, you need to be a legal business. This means you need to have a business license or be incorporated and have a business bank account under that name.
After that you need to be checked out by Dun and Bradstreet in New York to make sure you and your business are credible. Then you are given a Duns number, which is required by Verisign who does their own investigation. Then you need to be able to install the secure certificate from Verisign on your server to encrypt it, which usually means you need to own your own server, which can be very expensive. When all that is done, you need to apply for a Credit Card Merchant account from Visa and Master card. If you thought getting a credit card was hard, trying getting approved to process them!
We incorporated last May, own 4 servers, have a Duns number and have had our main server secure from Verisign and have been processing credit cards with our own merchant account since last June. As crazy as all this sounds, we thought it was crazier to rely on one company (PayPal) for all our payments. While many smaller companies will be unable to continue without PayPal, BuildReferrals will continue with just a few modifications to our service.
First, obviously we can no longer pay members through PayPal. That leaves us with e-bullion.com. They are like e-gold only more reliable and user friendly in our opinion. They are free to join and you don't need to give them your credit card or bank account info like PayPal. Just fill in your regular info and you have an instant e-bullion account that we can pay you through. We will pay you the same as you were paid through PayPal. You can have e-bullion send your money to you via check, wire transfer or you can choose to use their debit card. The are available anywhere in the world and will be a great payment solution.
E-bullion does not have an affiliate program, so you don't need to signup under your sponsor. Just go to http://www.e-bullion.com and signup.
Then login to your BuildReferrals Members Area, click the Account Information picture and enter your e-bullion ID in the appropriate box on your Account page. That's it. Now you're ready to get paid. Except for one small problem.....PayPal has all of our money.
PayPal will not return our sizeable amount of money for 90 days. Since we pay 90% of our Matrix Members thru PayPal, we used PayPal to hold all our money except for money paid to us from Vbucks (our credit card processor) and from some of the BuildReferrals Lottery Advertisers. This means we do not have the $30,000.00 necessary to pay our Matrix Members this month. We do however have enough money to pay for the BuildReferrals Lottery Winners, which we will still do.
So what are we going to do? We are going to do a few things. First, we have several thousand Matrix Members who were supposed to have their subscriptions automatically renew at the end of this month. But because PayPal cancelled all of their subscriptions, they are unable to pay. We need to give them and other Members who want to join the Matrix before the next Million Members come in, some time to use another one of our payment options to get their payments in.
We must therefore extend the deadline to get January's payments in and the deadline to upgrade to the Matrix to get a share of the new 1 Million Members to February 15th. Just to save any confusion, we will also push back picking the winning BuildReferrals Lottery numbers till February 15th as well. To be clear, the winning BuildReferrals Lottery Numbers will NOT be drawn on February 5th, but on February 15th instead. So everything will happen on February 15th. Our winning BuildReferrals Lottery winners will be picked and the new 1 Million Members will be imported.
However, we cannot pay Matrix Members this months earnings until we receive our money from PayPal in 90 days. We really don't make much from BuildReferrals.com. Most of our money is put back into improvements and paying Members. So it's not possible for us to "find" another $30,000.00. So, on February 15th, we will create a special note on your Account Information page which will tell you how much you have earned for the month of January. It will be deducted from your earnings just as if we had paid you and everything will continue as normal. Then in 90 days when PayPal releases our money, we will immediately pay your January earnings in full.
BuildReferrals has been paying on time for over a year now and it kills me to have to put paying Januarys payments off for 90 days.
Unfortunately, we have no choice. You aren't going to lose a single penny. You will be paid the exact amount you are owed, just delayed a bit.
One question you may have is will not having PayPal hurt BuildReferrals or stint the number of Matrix upgrades. The answer is no. Most if not all people who use PayPal have a checking account or credit card or both. We have been in the process of dropping our current credit card processor, Vbucks, due to many connectivity problems. Many people who have tried to upgrade or renew their Matrix Membership have been unable to because of this or they have been declined for no reason. We started the process last week to obtain a new more reliable credit card processor.
We expect to have that online by the end of next week.
If your subscription was canceled by PayPal before your renewal payment was made, or for any other reason you need to make your January Matrix payment, just use our current credit card link on your Account Information page. If you are declined for any reason, just hang on till the end of next week when we replace Vbucks with our new credit card processor and you shouldn't have any problem. Once we make the switch to our new credit card processor, we will have Vbucks cancel all Matrix subscriptions so you can use the new easier, more reliable credit card processor for your future payments.
The new processor will accept credit cards the same as PayPal. We will even be adding American Express, Discover and Diners to the regular Visa and MasterCard. For those members who have a checking account and don't have a credit card, our new processor will have online checks. You can instantly pay from your checking account almost the same way you pay with a credit card! That means 99% of those people who were using PayPal can use our new system with ease. For those few members who did not verify their PayPal account because they don't have a credit card or checking account, they can use one of our other payment methods like e-gold, e-bullion or snail mail.
In the end, all this does is cause us to push things back one week, and postpone Januarys payments for a little while. Otherwise, everything will continue as normal. The Matrix is still growing by hundreds each day and with the new 1 Million Members coming in, we expect it to grow even faster! We expect to be paying out 6 figures each month within the year. And with 2 years of guaranteed growth, the BuildReferrals Matrix is a great $5.00 investment!
I want to apologize for any inconvenience this PayPal problem has caused you. I also want to offer you my word that every penny generated by BuildReferrals not used to maintain or support our program, will be saved in an effort to pay Januarys payments as soon as possible. Although 90 days is a definite pay day, I'd like to see Januarys payments made up next month.
[ 01-31-2002: Message edited by: FamilyAffair ]
[ 01-31-2002: Message edited by: lgwong ]