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Stormpay, one of the larger online payment processors, recently froze many of their merchant and members accounts starting on 2/9/2006. Stormpay also raided the balances of many of the account holders and literally took money without explaining why. So many online businesses and Stormpay account owners were completely take by surprise with this latest move by the company. Now that literally millions of dollars were taken by Stormpay, there are thousands of people asking 'Where is my money?'

Many of us consider payment processors like Paypal and Stormpay to be safe places to keep our money so we can conduct online transactions easily. But when a company like Stormpay, who is owned by a lawyer, decides to rewrite their TOS (Terms of Service) and basically give themselves complete authority to take peoples money without having to explain why, that's when we need to be worried. One of their TOS changes now grants Stormpay authorization to just go into peoples' bank accounts and take whatever funds they claim are owed them for who knows what. This caused a huge rush of bank account owners around the globe to close their bank accounts that Stormpay had access to.

Thousands of people from all over the world have lost a lot of their money when Stormpay froze accounts and zeroed out all their balances. Stormpay claims the reason they did this was to clamp down on the paid autosurf industry because many of them are considered scams. Obviously Stormpay didn't have any problem taking money from these advertisers in the first place, or being involved with companies that scammed millions of dollars from investors, but now Stormpay has a change of heart and decided to take all this money for themselves. They claim to be refunding money to people but I personally don't know of a single person who received a refund. I know all my claims were denied and I lost thousands of dollars of my money thanks to Stormpay.

The BBB and FBI and other agencies are now looking into what Stormpay and some of the paid autosurf programs have been up to. The Wall Street Journal posted an article about this very story on 2/10/2006 so it's starting to get national attention.

If Stormpay gets away with this, there are going to be thousands of people from all over the world who will be out millions of dollars. Since Stormpay is owned by a lawyer, and no doubt consulted with other lawyers before they pulled this bogus move, you can be sure they tried to cover their tracks to make sure they didn't get caught. I just hope agencies like the FBI get to the bottom of this so if other payment processors try the same thing, they will soon regret their choices.

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