I was talking to a business here in Minneapolis the other day and heard one of the greater horror stories yet regarding Square. If you are using or are looking for an alternative to square, you gotta here this story.
Avoid Square
When someone hacked Mary’s Square account, they updated her routing number and bank account number to drive her transactions to their account. Mary is quite busy and doesn’t always reconcile her bank and credit card processing. After all she has used Square more and more over the last couple years and to this point has not had a problem. Her account got shut down without notification.
Having your account with Square hacked is a combination of bad luck and poor security on Square’s part. What happened afterward is all on Square. When Mary noticed her deposits hadn’t come she reached out to Square. First, she called the customer service number but she didn’t have a service ticket number. So she went on line, searched through the Square site and learned her only way to connect with customer service at Square was by email.
Mary was miffed, she is missing over 6k and all she can do is send an email and wait. She could not find any way to get a service ticket opened.
Several more emails needed to be sent over the following 30 days before Square opened her account back up. When she was finally able to login, all her transaction data was gone. She has not gotten her money and will have to incur thousands of dollars in legal fees to recover her money from Square.
In the end, Mary’s decision to use Square was based on ease of use and a simple rate structure. The truth is that a simple rate structure does not equate to your overall cost of processing. When things go wrong, and they always do in business, the unintended consequence of a quick decision based on simplicity can have substantial negative results to the bottom line.
When making the decision to accept credit cards for your business, always be sure to get a good referral from a fellow business, trade organization or local bank.
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