eMerchantMiddleman.com
Complaint 166657 Details

I paid $345 to sign up with EMM and $40K for leads to businesses that needed merchant accounts and for EMM to call them on behalf of my company. I need to add about $7K for interest paid to credit card companies and costs of forming an LLC, revising their terrible website,etc.
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In Oct. 2011, eMerchant Middleman of Phoenix cold-called offering bonuses of $550 for each credit card processing terminal placed in a business and 50% of the residuals from processing. I paid $40,000 for eMM to purchase 20,000 leads and call the prospects on my behalf.
I believe that call from EMM MISREPRESENTED what I would have to do: I would do no selling, make no cold calls. The training includes both. If I had known that, I would not have signed up with them.
I believe that this call also MISREPRESENTED the basis of whatever remuneration I would receive. The total that EMM paid me led me to think that several terminals had been placed and that I was being paid for that.
In Oct. 2012, however, my contact person at EMM, Ms. Victoria Wilmy said, “What?!” when I mentioned the $550 bonus. She said that EMM does not give bonuses of $550, because they sell terminals for only $300.
She didn’t say whether EMM leases terminals to these businesses and gives an affiliate a bonus for that. In a separate phone call or email, she said that they prefer to lease the terminals, because they can more easily be serviced or replaced.
Ms. Wilmy’s predecessor as training director used the figure of $550 when he talked in training calls about hiring people to generate leads for us. Bill Stark (phony name Mike __ used at EMM), one of my first contacts at EMM, also used the $550 figure, although he often referred to the bonus as $500. Now I hear that the bonus is much less or perhaps doesn’t exist. Either way, I consider that FRAUD and MISREPRESENTATION for offering a bonus that didn’t/doesn’t exist or changing the terms without telling us. Concerning residuals, EMM has never sent me one financial statement about my account. This is not a nitpicking complaint. Credit card companies should not be able to say, “Did your contract say you’d get financial statements about your account?” Without such a statement, I have no way of knowing what income I have received has come from 1) placing terminals, 2) residuals, or 3) the money I paid for leads. Is EMM keeping earnings for itself that should come to me?
I complained to Bill Stark that I didn’t seem to be getting any residual income. I thought that the amount EMM had paid me meant that some terminals had been placed and I should be getting residuals from those businesses. Stark said that once a business has an account, it has to do $300 worth of business before affiliates begin to receive residuals. That fits other information I have about this industry.
I never got a clear statement whether I was receiving residual income, but Stark did say that the last payment of $300 was for a “referral.” “Referral” was not a category that I remembered. I wonder whether “referral” is a category behind which EMM hides residuals that I should receive.
Brian Davis told me that the conversion rate would probably be a minimum of 2%, but should turn out to be 4%. That would be 400 to 800 accounts.
He told me to form an LLC. After that eMM would help me get a line of credit to which I could transfer the unsecured debt that I took on to work with them. He said that they would work very hard to find the company that would give a credit line with the highest limits and lowest rates for the longest time.
He asked for the EIN#, bank account #, and Articles of Organization. When I gave that to Davis, he said “45 days.” I didn’t ask what “45 days” meant. I took it to mean that’s when I’d have the line of credit.
I think “45 days” refers to a period of time that is part of the process of securing a credit line for a business. It’s too much to spell out here.
Therefore, I consider Davis’s “45 days” to MISREPRESENT the process of securing a credit line. The process that I’m going through is the process to which Stark referred me. It takes 6 mo to a year. Because Davis did not talk to me after the “45 days” conversation, I had no way of knowing what he meant.
My wife was very unhappy with me for buying leads from EMM and she insisted that I dispute the charges. I initiated the disputes, then decided to believe the representations. I told eMM I'd like to continue with them. They made me sign forms saying that I had had "buyer's remorse" (their language, not mine).
In forming the LLC, I used a company that Davis recommended. About a week after I started working with that company, its owner called. He said that he would no longer do business with eMM: He had heard some things that suggested that the company was not being honest.
Until I got the EIN#, etc. Mr. Davis answered my phone calls and voice messages. As soon as I got that info to him, he stopped answering my calls. I called repeatedly, asking for the steps for establishing business credit and the process for transferring my unsecured debt to the business line of credit.
I did not hear from him again until Jan. or Feb. of 2012, after I wrote an email telling "Bill Stark," that it seemed as if eMM was reneging on its promise to help me get a line of credit for my business. In several conversations Stark asked me whether I had sent all the information that Brian or whoever was doing that job (by that time that was not clear) needed to get going on the line of credit. I told Stark that I had given Brian all the information that he had asked for in October: EIN#, bank acct #, Articles of Organization of LLC.
Finally, on 2 Feb, Stark sent an email with the following request for information that I was supposed to send:
From : [email protected]
Subject : Credit Line Info
To : [email protected]
Fri, Feb 03, 2012 09:27 PM
The following is the information needed for the credit line.
Please supply the required information and return at your earliest convenience.
- Tax ID
- All Forms for your LLC
- Date LLC was established
- Balance and limit up to date of all lines of credit.
- All appropriate members SSN #'s
- W9 form with tax ID

Please feel free to contact us with any other questions.

Thank you!
EMerchant Middleman
1-888-477-4521
________________________________________

I was furious. Except for the current information on our personal lines of credit, I could have given EMM all that information on 25 October. When Brian finally called in Feb, he said that he had been waiting until my LLC was listed on the Illinois Sec of State’s website, which usually took 6 weeks to two months. It was already up on the website at least by the end of Dec.
I mentioned that sometimes it would be 2 wks before I'd hear back. In his call in Aug, after EMM had let him go, "Stark" told me that he had instructions not to return my calls. Brian said the same thing in a phone call this evening (7 Oct., 2012).
In late January or early February, I grew so fed up with not hearing from Stark that I called and asked to speak to the CEO. I wanted to tell him that I didn‘t like the way EMM was treating me. In one of the calls the receptionist asked whether I was trying to reach Dan Brewster. I said, “I don’t know. I don’t know who the CEO is.” The CEO is Brian McKee. I’m concluding that EMM had a policy of shielding McKee from contact with affiliates or perhaps from contact with unknown outsiders altogether. I have never heard from either Brewster or McKee.
At the time that I started the original disputes in October, Mr. Davis told me that I had already received a commission from my leads. That was just a few days into my relationship with EMM. It seemed suspicious and made me think that eMM was paying me out of the money I had sent them.
Payments: $1,135 in Nov, an unexplained $800 "advance" in Dec, the other $800 in early Feb and another $325, and $300 in March. After that nothing.
EMM should have sent me a 1099 form for the money it paid me in Nov. and Dec. I did not receive one.
In addition to the leads that EMM was purportedly contacting for me, I sent some leads to EMM myself. EMM never told me what happened with them. These were my leads, which I developed myself. I should have heard.
I wrote and asked for my money to be refunded. I received a guarantee: “We, at EMerchant MiddleMan, guarantee the quality of our lead program. If in the next 8 months, you, [here my name appears, but is misspelled], do
not make back 100% of your cost, we will purchase an equal amount of leads, and run your campaign again at no additional fee to you.”
The guarantee looked unprofessional, ad hoc, drafted just in response to my complaint. My name is misspelled. There is no signature, date, or seal.
I told "Stark" that I had not received any reports of activity in my account and that this was no way to treat an investor in his business. Despite his promises and promises from Victoria Wilmy that I would receive complete monthly reports on the financial aspects of my account, I have never received any such reports. I told "Stark" that if his business were a stock brokerage, I'd get a detailed monthly report. I said that the businesses that supposedly got merchant accounts through eMM would be getting monthly statements, but that I wasn't even getting that. I wasn't getting what merchants were getting.
I said that I felt as if I were not a valued partner in this work. He said, "Oh, I wouldn't want you to feel that way."
In May I downloaded the list of leads. I downloaded them again in July, after the "guarantee" would have gone into effect. The lists were identical. I complained that the new list was the same as the previous one.
I called several of the businesses on the list. They had all been in business for several years. There were no new leads among the companies that I called. My list was supposed to consist of new leads. I consider this part of the list to be FRAUDULENT.
I asked Stark's successor, Chris Buckingham, for the original list from last fall. I wanted to see whether it matched identically the list I downloaded and saved in May. He said that wasn't possible because the list got used up in the process of making the calls. I consider the purported loss of the list to be another LIE.
If this statement is true, I consider it to be BREACH OF FIDUCIARY RESPONSIBILITY toward affiliates. Lists belong to us as much as to EMM. My list should have been protected by having a copy made and stored securely. Therefore, Buckingham’s claim that they couldn’t get the list for me amounts, in my opinion, to CONCEALING or DESTROYING EVIDENCE.
Further, Buckingham did not repeat that eMM would honor the guarantee that had been sent to me. He said he would look through the leads and call about 100 of them, record the calls, and find out what happened to the leads. And if the leads were OK, what then?
In telling me this, I claim that he effectively CHANGED THE TERMS of the written guarantee: It went from buying new leads to reviewing what went wrong with the old ones. It seems to me that either Mr. Buckingham is ignorant of the meaning of the guarantee or he is part of a BAIT AND SWITCH scheme on the part of EMM.
The number of leads on the list was 19,499, not 20,000. The number could be lower than 20,000 to make room for new leads for new businesses. That’s why I asked for the October list. If the October list matched the May list identically, I would consider this to be FRAUD and BREACH OF CONTRACT. As I mentioned above, I could not get this list. I told Mr. Buckingham that eMM should either add leads or refund me some of the money that I had been charged for leads. Nothing resulted from that communication of mine.
He told me that I would receive reports about activity in my account. He spoke in impressive detail about all that my report would include. He mentioned that I should have received a CD of the leads last fall. I did not.
Stark said that eMM didn't get the whole set of new business leads all at one time. New businesses open up all the time, so later in a campaign, an older list would be outdated. Businesses could well have already made arrangements for merchant accounts.
When I told Buckingham what Stark had said about ongoing purchase of leads, he said that isn't the way it works. He said that eMM needs to have a mix of new businesses and established businesses that might switch to eMM when they learned about the lower rates that eMM was supposed to provide.
That doesn’t match the original verbal agreement with Davis and Stark. I believe Mr. Buckingham’s doesn’t understand the logic of purchasing leads over time or he was trying to mislead me.
Either way, I don’t want to be involved a company with employees who say this kind of thing to a person who has spent a lot of money with them. Further it was bad human relations for him to contradict something that I had heard repeatedly from others. That’s talking to me as if I don’t know what his predecessors told me.
I told him that I wanted my money back, either as a refund or as "advances" on future deals with merchants. Buckingham told me that the owner of the company was pretty firm about not giving money back and that he wouldn't pass my request on to the owner until he and I had finished talking about the issue. I never heard from him again.
The new contact person was Victoria Wilmy. She said we'd have a monthly phone call and that I'd receive a report of activity in my account, # of calls made, # of reviews completed. I have never received a monthly report.
She did send me a spreadsheet of activity in my account. This spreadsheet could have been about anything. It was not on an official eMM form. There was no signature or indication where the numbers came from. The number of leads did, however, total 20K.
The spreadsheet does not say that it comes from eMM; that the report is audited, accurate, and transparent; or what the categories on which it provides numbers mean. The categories are not mutually exclusive, so that the total of 20,000 somethings does not mean that 20,000 calls were reported.

Of 20k leads, eMM had established no accounts for me. Two percent of 20k would be 400 accounts, but only 23 businesses were said to have made it through to the final decision about, but their applications had all been declined. So either this business is completely inept or it is scamming people like me.
The economy should not be a factor in the failure to get any accounts for me. When the EMM recruiter called this economy was not doing well, but Davis said that the expectations were 2%. He did not say to expect less than 2% because this economy is not doing well.
He led me to expect a 6-figure income from this and lavished advice about saving 20% of my profits for investment in new leads going forward. So did Stark.
At the end of May, EMM was being attacked by other businesses that were calling affiliates and claiming they were our new coaches from EMM. I received several of these calls myself. One of them had what I consider a Nigerian accent. These callers, both foreign and US, quoted the amount of money I had paid EMM, knew that EMM was not earning me anything, and said that I needed a better website for people to apply to EMM through my account and better SEO. My conclusion: EMM VIOLATED ITS FIDUCIARY RESPONSIBILITY TO protect affiliates’ confidential information properly.
As a brief aside, but very important point, a number of people in the SEO business called telling me that I have a terrible website from EMM and that it doesn’t have any SEO promotion. These people were not among those who were attacking EMM. From the beginning, I told Stark that the site was terrible.
The website is what marketing calls a “one-step” sales site. It asks for complete information from the potential client all at once, as if there would never be another chance. Marketing experts say the more boxes to fill out, the less likely a visitor will remain on he website. This site will needlessly put off some business people who are not now interested in getting a review of their merchant account statements, but who may be later. This is a site only for people who are “ready to buy now.”
It should be a “two-step” site. Before the buying step, this particular site should gather leads so that the company could follow up with business people who don’t request a review of their merchant accounts immediately. If a business person was interested in “buying now” the site could offer that opportunity on another page that asked for complete information.
Back to the attacks. EMM emailed many or all affiliates, telling us how to respond to these attacks.
I’m writing a book about “horror stories” that business people have lived through with merchant account providers. For example, merchant account providers have had a business’s bank account frozen, if the business does “too much business.” Actions like this can actually destroy a business.
In Aug, I used EMM's list to email affiliates asking whether they had heard such stories in talking with business owners. Two people replied.
Their replies did not tell me horror stories of business people concerning merchant accounts. They told their own horror stories about EMM and how it was treating them. One affiliate sent an email that she had paid EMM some money that she couldn’t afford for leads and had received no income from EMM.
The other was from an EMM affiliate with whom I have talked. She says that she has received one check from EMM. She doesn’t know what it’s for. She describes intense verbal jousting with Dan Brewster, apparently one of the executives, about getting her money back from EMM.
In Jan/Feb, 2012, a former employee of EMM called to say that no calls were being made on my leads. He said that EMM started honestly enough, but that once upper management realized that they could bring in lots of money by “selling leads,” they got greedy and focused on that part of the business. In Aug, 2012, Bill Stark, now a former employee called saying that EMM was not making calls on my behalf. In Oct, 2012, Brian Davis, a third former employee called saying what Stark said. EMM was now being attacked by former insiders.
Ms. Wilmy assures me that EMM is actively making calls on behalf of my LLC. In a tone of reproach she asked what I was doing listening to former employees instead of EMM.
Messages like those of other affiliates and of the former employees mirror my own experience with EMM. They lead me to believe that I’ve been and am being scammed.
In addition, when “Stark” and Davis called after EMM let them go, they were calling to ask for money, so that I could have their inside information to use to get my money back from EMM. Both of them contributed to my problems with EMM and to my financial problems (actually, Brian helped create my financial problems, because before he reloaded my credit cards, I was never in debt). Now they wanted to sell me their inside information about actions that had hurt me and other affiliates. I include this to give an idea of the kind of employee EMM had working with affiliates like me at a time crucial for me.

Summary: I believe I have been defrauded by eMM and I should get my money back, plus the interest charges that I've been paying on the debt, plus other costs, such as forming an LLC.

DISPOSTIONS: 20000

ANSWERING MACHINE: 1162

BUSY: 448

BAD NUMBER: 208

CALL BACK: 2952

DISCONNECTED: 392

NOT INTERESTED: 876

CORPORATE: 838

DO NOT CALL: 2654

FAX: 982

PITCHED: 38


APPOINTMENT SET: 3108

QUOTE: 618

COST ANALYSIS: 424

ACCEPTED QUOTE: 667

STARTED APPLICATION: 433

COMPLETED APPLICATION: 277

UNDERWRITING: 46

APPROVED: 0

DECLINED: 23

INSTALLED: 0

FUNDED: 0

REFERRAL: 0 (Buckingham told me that I had been paid the $300 for a referral.)