Restaurant charged over and over and over?
A South Florida restaurant uses a company to process customers credit card payments Then the owners discovered a costly payment obstacle Hoping to cook up a approach they called Help Me Howard with Patrick Fraser Ten years ago Lisa and her partner retired from their jobs But then the two Lisas decided to open a restaurant Lisa Cusanelli Now I work harder than I ve ever worked in my whole entire life And I get paid way less than I ever got paid before Their Fresh Box Cafe is in Fort Lauderdale where they are the cooks the managers the owners and they love it Lisa Cusanelli We do breakfast and lunch primarily Hard work in the daytime and lately frustration in the evenings as Lisa fights a company that s vital to their business Lisa Cusanelli So when I looked at it I just thought that seems like an awful lot of money ' Lisa was digging into First Input the company that supplies the machine and a merchant ID number for Lisa to process her customers credit card payments They then charge Lisa for doing that Lisa Cusanelli First Input they pull it right out of my bank account First Figures installed the machine and provided the merchant ID number in when the cafe opened In First Figures put in a new machine with a new ID number did the same in and that s when Lisa discovered the difficulty Lisa Cusanelli They were still charging me on the old MID numbers merchant ID numbers since Now paying for three machines and three ID numbers even though they only have one machine and should have only had one merchant ID number Lisa Cusanelli They re killing us with all these charges If you look at Lisa s bank declaration you would have to really dig to find the correct charges from the incorrect ones Lisa Cusanelli Because the bank statements all say the same thing They just say first at a merchant and then it says an ACH withdrawal Lisa contacted First Material and got nowhere Lisa Cusanelli Nobody could give me an answer about what this charge was for what this charge was for The Lisa s believe she has been overbilled thousands of dollars but can t get a dime back Lisa Cusanelli This is a multi-billion dollar company and I m just a small fish Well Lisa and Lisa have too much on their plates to let this drive them crazy But what do you do in a incident like this Howard Howard Of program legally you don t have to pay two or three times but here is the difficulty the billing process is extremely complicated hard to follow and it s hard to figure out how much Lisa has overpaid It would take a lawsuit and a forensic accountant to get to the bottom of it For Lisa it s not worth doing that because you don t know how much you will get back So I contacted First Evidence and their parent company Fiserv A spokesperson wrote They will be happy to assist this merchant with the issues Lisa Cusanelli I tried for months five or six months to get any kind of response from them Once I spoke with Patrick I got a phone call and they explained they were going to make me whole again The company returned to Lisa She individuals she is owed more but there is no simple way to prove it and she is now only being charged for one account instead of three Lisa Cusanelli I am so glad it s over I am gonna miss you guys though But we will stop by Fresh Box Cafe once in a while to eat and see the Lisas Lisa Cusanelli So glad I called Patrick he is one in a million seriously and I really appreciate everything he s done for us Thank you Lisa We get to meet such nice people we are lucky You may be thinking Why doesn t Lisa fire the processing company She has a contract with them and can t But she vows that when the contract expires they are cooked A concern got you boiling over Tired of it simmering in your life Sandwich a call to us in your busy day and hopefully we won t have a half-baked method for you With this Help Me Howard I m Patrick Fraser News CONTACT HELP ME HOWARD Email helpmehoward wsvn comReporter Patrick Fraser at pfraser wsvn comMiami-Dade - -WSVNBroward - -WSVN
