They placed all of money on hold for made up reasons.
I highly advise anyone NOT to use pipeline data processing, charge.com or secure pay for payment processing.
They took almost $2,000 from me and made up reasons for placing the money on hold. BEWARE!!!!!!!!!!!!

Which company took the money? It seems like this is three different companies you are listing.

Yes Wilshire...

Please be more specific as to the name of the offending company... people need to know.

pipeline data did the same to us.

all the above companies are run by the same parent company.

AVOID!!

WOW thank god i read this,they autoapproved me for selling herbs and i cant get approved anywhere! lol horrible!

Pipeline Data is one of the Processors that I setup Merchant Accounts for. There are never "made up" reasons for holding a merchant's funds. I think it is important to note that the person that created this thread only posted once, which is a sign that this was one disgruntled merchant that went on a personal campaign because they were upset that their funds were held.

When funds are held it is to protect the Processor, the Cardholder, AND the Merchant. It is more prone to happen to you within the first month of you running transactions with ANY processor. All a Processor wants is for you (the Merchant) to cooperate with the audit.

In an audit you will typically be asked to send in some form of documentation to support that the sale is legitimate. They will also take measures to verify the sale. Following completion the funds are either released to you, or you are advised that the Processor is electing to not accept liability on the transaction, and that you should request another form of payment.

There is a lot of credit card fraud, and the Processor is doing what it can to prevent a fraudulent transaction from going through. Besides fraud, sometimes an audit takes place because information was not properly completed on the Merchant Application that was submitted to the Processor (through no fault of the Merchant). To put this in perspective, a sales representative would prefer to get your application submitted and approved as quickly as possible because the field of service providers is crowded. It is easier to get a Retail merchant approved, as opposed to an Internet merchant. It is also easier to get lower average ticket and monthly volumes approved. I have seen cases where an application was approved with a $300.00 average ticket, but the merchant was actually running $2,000 sales. Since you are going over what you were approved for it is going to trigger an audit. These are also usually resolved quickly with cooperation.

Most merchants are "good" merchants, but there are enough bad apples out there that necessitate audits. What I have not shared are some of the things that the "bad" merchants do The best way to avoid or reduce the likelihood of an audit is to make sure that what is on the application is truly accurate. Also, if things change at your business you want to notify the processor. For example, if you were approved for a fast food restaurant, do not use the same merchant account for the automobile repair shop that you opened nine months later.

If anyone would like me to go into further detail just let me know. FYI - since I have relationships with processors other than Pipeline, the negative feedback itself doesn't really bother me. I have other options. This is more to let merchants know more about funds being held.