For those who were following the developments of the VolPay story in a previous thread, which started to get quite absurd with "split personality" contributors before it was locked by the moderators, here is what has happened since then:

- I continue to be owed exactly the same amount as I was when the thread was locked, ie. there have been no further payouts from VolPay for over a month. I have received a variety of promises regarding conference calls to discuss the accounts situation, partial settlements, full settlements and so forth, but nothing ever materializes. We are talking about an amount in excess of $25000 on top of the 10% rolling reserve which should be refunded 180 days after account closure.

- Customers have issued chargebacks for amounts that VolPay were supposed to refund them long before upon my own request, and I have been blamed for these chargebacks by VolPay, who of course also charge me a fee for them.

- I am now informed that "at some point" the accounts person needs to speak to Tyler Jones (who runs VolPay, for those who have not been following the story) to sort this out, which shows how non-chalantly VolPay are taking this. These people work in the same office in Crawley, UK, and yet it seems they need several weeks to schedule in appointments with one another to talk about customer accounts.

- I am receiving weekly statements where there are refunds and chargebacks which I am being penalized for (on top of the previous whopping $5000 fee for "bounced wire transfers" which remains unexplained and highly incredible) and I am receiving no explanation for what these refunds and chargebacks relate to. When I write and ask for explanations, I get no response, or am told to "leave it with them" and they'll get back to me. When I try to them on the telephone, I am also told they'll get back to me, which they obviously never do.

VolPay are now leaving me with few other options other than legal action as they are showing no intent of paying me what is due. Simply because their client is an online pharma website does not mean that VolPay can go beyond the law and commit daylight robbery by withholding large sums on account for no reason or slowly "gnawing away" at the balance on account with what seem to be completely fictitious charges.

VolPay are based in the UK (despite not being a registered UK company according to the Companies House records) and their own T&Cs state that any legal action should be governed by British law, which should make it considerably easier than some of the other "interesting" companies that I have had to recover funds from by legal action in the past.

For any of the website types out there that VolPay supposedly specialize in, it might be worth considering very carefully if you want to trust your hard-earned money with them. Think just how hard it would hit you financially if they let YOUR account run for a few months until the balance was sufficiently large for them to freeze and then you slowly realize over the course of several months that they never intend to give you your money, after you send dozens of emails, make endless phone calls and almost see your business go under as a result of their false promises of balances being paid out!

One very disgruntled ex-VolPay customer,

Adam.

A follow-up, so the 37 people following this thread as of today, can see how the story develops:

Yesterday I finally managed to get in touch with Tyler, and was informed that I can only have my balance 4 (four) weeks after the last sign of activity on the account, and this was called a "cooling-off" period. I am not sure whether anyone out there has heard of this before?

Anyhow, I am cautiously considering this to be good news, as that means I should get my funds in one week exactly. There was a chargeback on my account which I was not made aware of three weeks ago, as I have been locked out of accessing my account with VolPay since mid-September when it was closed. I have now been given access to it again so I can see what is going on. That must also be considered as progress, as it didn't make sense to lock me out of the account in the first place.

Next update in one week: will the funds be paid and will VolPay finally deliver on their promise?... We wait with baited breath.

Very interested to hear any news.

Can you pm me i'd like to talk about this.

Tony

What I mean is that in our business ever second merchant account provider is trying to **** You.

We got fooled by Volpay mostly because the main guy (Tyler) is a real smart charmer and they got a few people on the phone in actually 3 (!!!) places. I.E. Germany, USA , UK.

You didnt know that because You're not there yet so to say.

Russian,

Sounds like you are in the same situation as I am, they have ****ed me over for a very large sum with constant promises and no action.

Maybe we can all team up to recover our money.

Tony

Russian,

I'll send a pm, I'm not at my pc now.

Ok do that
You may as well put Your phone number there, I'll give You a call.

Russian

This is starting to sound as big as you said. If they are committing fraud as you and others suggest, I wish you all the luck in bringing them to task.
The last thing the world needs is another (paysystems etc) rotten egg.

On volpay's main page they say they can offer both 'direct' and '3rd party' processing. Then on the faq page they specifically say 'because you are using our merchant accounts'.

I'm assuming they aren't really providing direct merchant accounts for their clients' company, and instead putting everyone into their 3rd party processing .. am I understanding this correctly?

Look who's talking now.
:-)

ECS Commerce is this another venture of ECS Offshore?
If so , than You guys are no better than Volpay.

2 years ago there was a romanian bank of Yours and I guess You still owe a lot of money to Your customers. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I dont think we need any sympathy from ECS. :-)))

No, there is no association with them and never has been, we're a susidary of the JSSI group corp and have never in our 6 years of providing online services had a complaint filed against us.

I had never even heard of ECS Offshore until you mentioned them but our track record stands for itself, proud and respected.

My concern for your woes was indeed sincere




*editing in - and for clarification we, nor any of our corps have ever had any association with a Romanian bank*

Ok that sounds better than.
Cause the old ECS Offshore folks were terrible ****ers as well.

Russian

Trust me, if someone owed me 100k I'd be the leariest (insert curse word of choice) on the planet lol

no worries and I do wish you well at getting whatever monies are owed you

Thanks mate.

Someone please confirm if ETELEGATE.COM is a Volpay sister company.

If so, i've got a story to tell...

nenadm

Their whois information looks different but that often times is misleading so I dismiss it.
However their contact phone number is 866 offshore which sounds frighteningly similar to the company Russian spoke about earlier.

One thing I did notice is that etelgate registered their domain name in march of 2004 and volpay registered theirs in may of 2004. These companies are barely out of diapers!

These con processors are seemingly getting worse and getting more confident.After the Paysystems fiasco our mailbox was inundated with offers from all over to process our cards.On checking them out we could see that many of them were one of the same companies - they just called themselves say eg., Euro pay but in fact that was only a cloak for another card processor in the USA. One of them,quite a well known one had 4 companies all with fancy new names.
It is so bad for the few good 3PP companies out there, as now everyone thinks they are going to be shafted.

Some of the amounts we hear bandied about that are actually owed to people Worldwide are staggering.These crooks have seemingly gone to town on the trading balances of the UK and European traders,also some Australians.We know that Paypal has hit the wrong headlines in the USA with USA traders, but in the main it is the rest of the World that is being hit,almost as if we are soft targets for these gangsters.

Etelegate is not Volpay.
It's a dude from Carribean. But they were doing something together.

Originally posted by Russian
Etelegate is not Volpay.
It's a dude from Carribean. But they were doing something together.

Hmm, do a search on WHT for etelegate, few months back when i opened an account i asked aroud if anyone knows something about this company, few people pointed out volpay = etelegate ...

You say volpay owes you 100k, why dont you contact bank they had a merchant account with, send proof and demand they put a hold on their funds ?

I already did.

ETelegate is run by a guy called Lukas Haff. It's not a big company.
He's on Carribean somewhere. I dont remember.

I lost track of him about two weeks after he started his company because I did not like the way he works. What he did was nowhere near Volpay **** up but not nice as well.


But they are definetely different people.

However most probably (ok, from what I heard :D) Etelegate was simply processing through Volpay, the rest I dont know. But it's quite easy to guess.

I see ... Etelegate goes through BARDO Bank, France, same as Volpay ?

Volpay is using Royal Bank Group in Germany.
ETelegate is providing gateway intgeration for them. Also enterpayment.de is involved in biz with Volpay.
One of our partners reported he got part of money from Volpay. He is waiting the rest wires. But as he told it had costed him about 30 days everyday email/phone pushing on Volpay.

Please beware of new members offering assistance in this thread :angel:

Admin,

Please don't delete posts, this thread is very important to those who have lost money with Volpay. I don't claim to be able to help but I do want to cooperate with others in the same situation.

This is serious money we are talking here.

Tomy

Anon, honestly, are You absolutely nuts?

Try reading before banning. The volpay company costed people here in this thread hundreds of thousands in a fraud reported to authorities and banks already.

It's kinda weird that You ban me without thinking first.

Will post again.
Royal Bank of Germany - wrong info. I think there is no such acquirer in Germany as well.

http://www.ipayservices.com/ can be part of Volpay ?

ipayservices domain created in august 2004

another infant

Clarity needed here: How many people exactly are caught up in all of this? Are you talking on the scale of the Paysystems fiasco? This seems mighty strange to suddenly see another repeat performance of the Paysystems Saga. Strange -- inasmuch as it hasn't been mentioned on this forum to the extent that the PS one has.

It is sometimes very hard to discern fact from fiction when it comes to offshore processing. It is often a landmine of problems and it is exceedingly difficult to find an honest company who will operate their business in a reliable and trustworthy manner.

At this point, I am not sure what to make of VOLPAY - either positive or negative.

I do believe that eTelegate and VOLPAY are two separate companies. Tyler from VOLPAY indicated that VOLPAY was using the eTelegate "payment gateway" service but that the two businesses were separate.

So I'm basing my statement here only on what I've been told by Tyler and a brief conversation with Lukas from eTelegate.

The only other facts that I'm aware of is that, per VOLPAY's communication to me, they had opted to no longer accept any Web hosting merchants or merchants from the Middle East, and they did not want to work with any accounts processing under $50,000/month (USD) in volume.

I have heard other things as well from various folks but nothing that I can independently confirm one way or the other so I do not feel comfortable posting any publicly.

I hope that if there are any issues present, they are worked out per whatever agreements exist between VOLPAY and its merchants and if there are any questions - I'd suggest contacting Tyler or another representative at VOLPAY directly to try to work it all out.

CDG,

Things have moved on from there and everyone who uses Volpay seems to be in the same boat: Little or no money paid to them and constant amateur excuses for the delays.

Not acceptable.

Tony

Volpay if you are following this forum as I suspect you are,why don't you speak to us here and clear all of this up.
We have all come to the same conclusion more or less to a man(and woman) on Paysystems and Philip Fayer's behaviour in this forum and it is exceedingly far from good,indeed as a business Paysystems is dead in the water.
If Volpay doesn't want to end up with a reputation like Paysystems then speak to us if you have nothing to hide.

To 123x - we aren't part of Volpay
To multitaskerVic - the domain creation date means nothing. You can do stable business with a recently created domain name and run rogue business with an old created domain. Make opinion by work results!
Just remember IBill. Not infant, but in big troubles now across US and EU branches. Or Paysystems.

Tony_T

You are absolutely right saying "constant amateur excuses for the delays".

All of us are waiting Volpay comments here.

For everybody's information, who may not have followed the previous thread concerning the missing VolPay payments, here is a link to it:

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=308274&highlight=volpay

VolPay did in fact post a message, but it was revealed by the moderator that another user who had vocally been defending VolPay in the thread was using the same IP address as 'VolPay', which resulted in the account closure of both of them. It was suspected that VolPay had been assuming other user names to give impartial information about their services.

To CDG, I would say this: we have make so many phone calls and sent so many emails DIRECTLY to VolPay concerning these missing funds that we have lost count. We are not simply posting on these forums without having tried very hard indeed to solve the situaiton DIRECTLY with VolPay. We simply do not get a response 95% of the time, and when we do, it usually does not answer our questions, or just buys VolPay more time. It is frustrating indeed.

But as I said earlier, we are due to get our full settlement by the end of this week if what Tyler from VolPay's latest promise holds true (i.e. payment after 30 days from latest account activity), so I will let you know at the end of the week what has transpired.

Originally posted by multitaskerVic
ipayservices domain created in august 2004

another infant

I 100% sure this is Volpay under a new name ipayservices.

To 123x - it is your choice to think so!
I don't have time to prove another.

Well, in that case we have a lot to thank the moderators for;)

Sad that some are caught out by these cloaked newbie posts and promises,but thanks to WHT team many of us obviously have been saved from another disastrous card processor.

As we said earlier the list of **dirty business dealers** online just goes on and on, and yes,they will not stop at any trick in the book to rob the honest man or woman trading off the Net.

A good lesson to all,and >>well done moderators<<
~~~~~~~~~((((((DRUMROLL)))))~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~.

Amazing, so many rip off artists.......bloody difficult enough running a business without some **** stealing all the money as well.

Tony T, we have had plenty of experience of poor processors, and guess who the last ones were? Yes, you got it in one ,the dreaded word>>>>>

:angry: ////////////////////~~PAYSYSTEMS~~////////////////////:angry:

They haven't even contacted us about our money they are holding.

We have been so sick of all these rip offs over the last 5 years, that we deliberately decided, from now on to have the very best processor we could afford, and that was Barclays.We are more than happy with them, they have been truly excellent.

We almost feel that we are like vigilantes now guarding all newbies from these online crooks.We know that there are some decent and good 3PP's in the USA,but we think that UK vendors who use our past experience to their advantage would be far better off staying with a UK processor.It may seem daunting to go for a merchant account, but it is really the very best thing they could do if they seriously want to make a living working on the Internet as we do/have done now for nearly 5 years.Pity about all the hassle we endured on the way.

The VolPay story continues... I have been reading some forum messages regarding VolPay and I am actually surprised anyone is still recommending them on here based on the absolutely disgraceful way they are treating customers.

We continue to be owed between US$25000 and 30000, with the fluctuating exchange rate (plus over US$10000 in rolling reserve PLUS a bogus $6000 fee we were charged for a "bounced wire transfer"?!) since our last post on this topic a month ago, and have probably been given every possible and impossible excuse in the book for why a simple wire transfer of monies legitimately owed to us cannot be carried out. It is really quite incredible.

They may not be a UK registered company unless Tyler Jones (the proprietor) is running his gig as a self-employed person or a small partnership, but their own T&C documents bind them to UK law, where despite the perception that VolPay seem to have, daylight robbery is still a criminal offence. If they are hoping that some of their customers they have done this to are not going to contact the authorities because of the line of products they deal with (adult / pharma, etc.), they are wrong. We do online pharma which is absolutely legal in the country our company is registered in, and as they provided a third party processing account, that can as easily be construed as 'aiding and abetting' if they are going to take that line with customers.

After taking further UK legal advice, we are now pursuing this with the German bank that supplies their merchant account as well as local debt collection agents. It is completely unacceptable, and we are given NO valid reason why this is taking so long.

Whats the situation now?

Yeah, what is the status now?

To everyone who has been following this thread and is asking for updates:

A month has passed and no payment has been made as yet. We were promised a payment of half the amount briefly after our last message, and duely waited for a week for this to come through. When it became clear that it had not been sent, we chased for it, and were promised another smaller amount ASAP. This did not transpire either, so we were then promised around a fifth of the amount from VolPay's own account (apparently). We are now waiting for this, but do not have any confirmation of when the other four fifths will be paid.

We have held back on contacting VolPay's bank on the advice of the debt collection agency we have been in discussions with. However, as it is now FOUR months since the payment became due, the debt collection agency will be taking all these steps for us. We had hoped it would not come to this as debt collectors obviously do not work for free and it is yet another slice gone from our money (VolPay have had both their due percentages and then some, with unjustified fees!). There seem to be few other ways of dealing with it at this stage, but we will attempt a last phone call tomorrow to see. (We can guess the answer: someone will find out & call you back / nobody knows / person who might know is working from home / bank can't be contacted / thought payment really was sent already / it's beyond our control / computer says 'no' / etc !)

We will let you know if / when payments do come through and which answer from the above we were given this time. We guess we shouldn't hope to be paid interest on this large amount that has been withheld for so long?!

And would you believe it - two weeks later and still nothing! No half, third, fifth or however tiny amount has been wired to us, and no news / confirmations / or even vague promises on the rest of the amount either.

We are now however having the rare experience of phone calls being (occasionally) returned and the odd email coming through with reasons for other calls not being returned. Is something about to happen? It's like watching paint dry while we suffer increasing financial penalties for the 25 - 30.000 Euros that have been missing from our accounts since mid September, courtesy of VolPay International.

Ask customers to make chargebacks. I don't think VolPay will pay you. One of our clients was paid 70% only. The rest 30% will be chargebacked. Their CEO is Walid El Houri.

Be care though with aksing customers to make chargebacks. VolPay can come back and report you to TMF possibly. And this could have detrimental effects on you ever getting a merchant account