Harbortouch provides pos software and merchant card equipment and processing. Our company uses two credit card terminals as part of the pos software and in early May one of the terminals malfunctioned. The terminal obtains authorization when customers use a credit card for the purchase and they are programmed to “batch” out the transactions at the end of the night which starts the process of getting the money transferred from our customer’s accounts to our business account. This terminal that malfunctioned failed to “batch” out and all the transactions stayed in the software. It was discovered in late June that this was occurring when some of our customers called about the charges “dropping off” of their credit cards. Upon contacting Harbortouch I was informed of the problem with the credit card machine and they advised that they would re-submit for authorizations and process the transactions. I was told there were about 500 transactions in the amount of 42k dollars. Within the next few days, the reality of what they did became apparent. They pulled all transactions not processed, not taking into account any customers that may have made returns after their initial purchase, and ran all the transactions again. This action immediately resulted in our store being bombarded with customer calls and complaints about their accounts being charged. Some of our customers were understanding when it was explained what had happened, however, there were others that started to come in with bank statements showing that not only was their original charge, re-charged but there were some unknown transactions for additional amounts of money pulled from their accounts which matched no transactions in our system. To make matters worse Harbortouch’s parent company and processor) advised they would hold our deposits due to charge-back risk. They advised I am responsible for the risk and I may lose funds from these transactions. So now we are left to refund customers for money that they have not even released to us.
Where Bad Business is Exposed!
