Ok, I've been very active on messaging about the Paymonde debacle on GYF and Xbiz and I'll fill you guys in...

About two weeks ago, Paymonde announced that they could not longer bill Mastercards. They offered some lame ass excuse and, when they were caught lying, admitted that their bank was unable to process Mastercards. No problem, they assured webmasters, it will be fixed soon.

At the same time (this was on the 25th October), they mentioned that pay-outs would be delayed. They made their last universal pay-outs a couple of days later and they shut most people up.

Over the last two weeks, they have remained silent about what's happening. They continued to rebill Visas and take new members, but stopped (yes, STOPPED) making payments to their clients (though there are some unsubstantiated reports that they paid a few major clients).

As you can imagine, this set Paymonde's clients off and rightly so. At last count, there were something like 25 threads on GYF and elsewhere, all telling the same sad story about loss of revenue, rebills, etc. Shades of IBILL all over again!!!!

NO-paymonde as they began to be called still made no effort to communicate with its clients. And, of course, they missed several more pay-out dates. Many webmasters began to pull-out of the mess and many more threatened to. Several threatened to do mass cancellations starting today.

Lo and behold, this morning, Paymonde's site disappeared. They pulled the front end and the merchants pages, thereby stopping clients from accessing their accounts and subscriber lists.

Fraud you say? Yeah that and a whole lot more. Dead thievery and a whole bunch of larceny too. At the mo, people are scrambling to pick up the pieces.

For us, we used them as a secondary and so our losses were not horrible (only about 3500 in cash owed and about 120 active rebills). We have written to all past and present members through Paymonde and asked them to rejoin (if they want) through our regular processor (Verotel) and, more importantly, to CHARGEBACK any November or December charges by Paymonde.

I am of the opinion that many other webmasters and site owners are doing pretty much the same thing.

Hard to believe, isn't it, that we can have another major billing company go down after the Ibill debacle, but this is going to keep happening as long as people don't go to jail for these kinds of frauds. I would suggest that you make sure your billing company has in place some kind of system whereby your funds are held securely. As far as I know, only Verotel and Segpay have this kind of system (which I assume is obligatory in the EU).