Alpine Payment Systems

As the National Sales Manager, I would like to extend my help to both of your businesses as well as any business that read this from today forward.

Alexandra, I see that you stated you have had issues with the equipment you are leasing as well as have issues receiving the contract signed with our company. Please contact me at the number below at your convenience and allow me to help resolve this issue for you. I will do my best to rectify this situation for you.

Annie, I am not aware of any fraudulent business practices within our company to date. If you have an issue with the process we took to earn your credit card processing, I would ask that you contact us to discuss the issue and allow us the opportunity to make right what you feel has been done wrong to your company.

To both of you, I apologize for the delay in response. Our company does not receive notification from posts such as this. To all future posters, I would strongly recommend contacting us directly to have these among any other issues resolved. My direct line is 877-217-0707. I look forward to assisting you both as well as any future posters.

I signed up for Alpine Payment Systems in January for a new business I opened. They brought me in a very low rate of 1% for most cards with some exceptions such as AMX and business cards. However, they would not allow me to buy a machine. They made me sign a contract for $69 a month for 4 years for a machine that only costs $300 to buy. Shortly after I signed up, they started increasing the rates. With every bill a rate increase would be included blaming the increase on the credit card companies. They also added an additional yearly fee for PCI complaince which I never agreed to and have increased my yearly fee from $59 to $79. Those are just the problems with the fees. There are several other problems.

The machine that I am paying significantly more money for than I should, has broken now three times. All three times were due to programming errors. All three times, it happened to be on a weekend, so I was put through to an outside technical support. They told me that the errors I was receiving was due to an improper programming and could be caused by nothing else.

The first two times, they swapped out the machine for me which took them a week and caused me to loose thousands of dollars worth of business as they do not allow you to use manual credit card receipts and want you to call them in. We are in a fast-paced sales environment where the customers are not willing to wait until we call the card in. Both times, they tried to say it was our fault because we dropped it or tampered with it in some way which we did not. This third time, they told us we had to send the machine back in again for them program the machine to fix the errors. Two days later, I received a call from "Ashley" telling me that the machine was fixed and would be sent out the next day. The following day I receive a call from "Jared" saying that the machine showed that it had been tampered with and that we would need to pay $200 to get a new machine. Jared refused to allow me to talk to a supervisor although I have a feeling that he is actually Robert, the owner, using a fake name.

They use fraudulent claims to bring people into the business. I asked them several times for a copy of my contract and they will not give it to me because they know that they have increased the fees. They took advantage of the fact that my partner is from outside the country and does not speak English perfectly and can be confused by tricky wording.

They have sent me back my broken machine and are refusing to do anything to rectify the situation except to say that I can cancel my contract with them which will cost me $700. But I will still have to keep my contract for the machine even though it has been ruined by their programming errors.

Alpine Payment Systems is for something that the FTC has ruled and acted on with other credit card processors and fined $26 million, in one instance, whose fradulent business practices are EXACTLY what Aline Payment Systems is still practicing, and is getting away with.