So, for some reason I got an ad in the mail (?!) for leadersmerchantservices.com. At first I was annoyed that my mailing address got harvested (I believe it was from inquiring about a merchant account through my bank) but their rates look really good compared to others. I was just wondering if anyone has ever used these guys, or even heard of them (I for one never have).

Cheers

Welcome to the forums shinta!

It seems they are an ISO for JPMorganChase Bank and they are fairly new. My guess is they were once resellers for Cardservice & decided to become an ISO at the beginnning of the year. Even though their website states they are open 365 day a year, make sure that they are. They would be the ones to provide you with customer service. And your processing does not stop at 5p.

Thanks for the welcome and for the reply!
I'm almost tempted to give them a try just because of their 1.39% discount rate, which is the lowest I've seen. Right now the only thing holding me back is uncertaintly about their reputation and the lack of customer reviews/feedback about their service.

Cheers

I verified the information & they were resellers with Cardservice at one point. Then it seems they went out on their own & became an ISO. Their rates are low - which can be a good thing - trying to get a lot of customers. But then you have to wonder, can they support all those customers with rates so low.

A company is in business to make a profit & not lose money. Depending on how much outsourcing they are doing as well (call center, etc) I would think (since they are in Camarillo) their expenses are pretty high.

Here is the truth:

Our company Ohare Wireless Broadband was a customer of LEADERS merchant services.

After being their customer for 3 months they put a HOLD in our account while we were continuing charging our customers.

Next day somebody at the name of Steve called us and said we placed hold on your account because of big transactions, and asked for invoices then we responded, faxed all invoices that we have and also asked is there any dispute He replied that there is no dispute just checking.

Hold was placed for more than 3 weeks and finally they called again said that they will release our money to our account but did not happened they refunded all our customers.

How stupid right they refunded all our customers when we called and asked about our hold issue they did not wanted to talk with us and did not accepted that it was their problem and said they do not guarantee any charges and we told them we will take legal action and they closed our account.


It was like a nightmare, the person that we spoke does not want to give his last name no written information, refused everything.

We end up charging our customers again explaining what was the problem and imagine that you have 300 active customers and you have to explain them and charge them again.

Going with new and cheap companies like LEADERS sometimes is not healty and it can hurt.

Finally I have two words STAY AWAY from Leaders Merchant Services.

Welcome to the forums shadowowb!

Sorry about all the bad luck with that company. Without knowing a lot on what goes on behind the scenes and what your volume was - it is always worth saying again: If you ask for $10,000 a month with an average ticket of $200 but start to process $1,000 tickets - call your processor and inform them. This will hopefully save a lot of heartache.

Leaders should have verified those transactions with your customers though and once they found out those were legitimate transactions, Leaders should have released the money.

We faxed them all the invoices and told them if they want they can call our customers but they said no???

well they are new company and we made a mistake by being their customer we just wanted to inform new business owners not to make a big mistake with this company.

The truth about Leaders Merchant Services IS THEY ARE A BUNCH OF CROOKS. DO NOT USE THEM. In fact, any merchant processing company based in California (especially the Los Angeles area) stay clear from them!

We also got a junk mail post card in the mail from these scam artist. We got approved and were well within our credit card charge and monthly volume limits. We were very suspicious of this company. So we waited for about 2 days and was waiting for funds to hit our bank account 2 days later. And guess what, they didnt bother depositing nothing whatsoever. We had 2 transactions for $50 each and then got a call from their risk management department stating they were putting these funds on hold. We contacted their customer service department and other employees at scam artist central and every one of them stated there was no reason why those funds were placed on hold.

Our suspicions were right, luckily the next day when we were suspicous about these scum bags we switched our site back to our backup processor. These A-HOLES even debited our bank account the very next month for fees for services they didnt provided.

If you go to ripoffreport.com you'll find over 12 pages of complaints from other merchants they've ripped off even until this day.

File a complaint with the Attorney Generals Office in California so they's con artists are immediately investigaated. We are currently filing a law suite against them for fraud. Especially going into our corporate bank account and attempting to steal money for services not rendered.