Thursday, December 29, 2011

MS Media aka North American Bancard Potential Scam Alert

MS Media aka North American Bancard aka ??

Recently I put my resume up on a number of sites including Linked In and have since been bombarded with a number of questionable business proposals. The most outstanding one is by people claiming to be MS Media aka North American Bancard. First I want to point out that what I have been able to trace so far is that North American Bancard is a legitimate company but has recently been hijacked by some very clever scam artists. I'm going to detail all the information here and I want to point out that the CEO, Mike D Menzel also from the legal department by the way, (Yeah, sure why not), has threatened to sue me if I write this article. I'm sending him a link now that this is posted.

Here is the deal, someone named Skyler Weitzel, aka Jason Troup contacted me via a phone call, his phone number is 303-219-6399 and was pitching me about selling merchant card services. The claim that this person made was that MS Media was contracted by Wells Fargo Bank as Wells Fargo Bank's only contractor and provider of of merchant credit card services. He claimed that Wells Fargo was not handling their own merchant accounts. I sent him a screen shot photo of the Wells Fargo Bank's merchant services credit card processing systems and the tune changed to that the contract was that MS Media aka North American Bancard had an exclusive contract from Wells Fargo Bank on the nation's lowest rates.

(Let me interject that the potential scam here is that they try to collect a $500.00 fee for training, 1,000 leads and back end support. I offered them a 24 hour 2 new accounts in exchange for the $500.00 fee. Nope, they needed the $500.00 fee. So then I offered them a 24 hour 2 new accounts plus 4 days to add 5 more new accounts in exchange for the fee. Nope, they tried to get me to pay at least $250.00 up front).

When I explained to him that I had a friend at Wells Fargo Bank and wanted to verify the claim that MS Media aka North American Bancard was making, the conversation got real ugly real fast. (Not a good sign). He hung up on me after calling me a few choice words. Thinking that this may be a legitimate company yet, someone higher up in the company would surely want to know about how rude one of their sales people was to me. I sent an email to the company complaining about this guy and that if I were to do a story on this, it would not look good for them.

Then I received the voice mail message, (CLICK HERE to download the actual message from the CEO) threatening me with a lawsuit if I actually post a story on this. He then called me a second time and threatened me yet again saying that it would cost me at least $20,000.00 to defend myself against his lawsuit and that he would take me for everything. I told him to go ahead. I'm saying it here as well, go ahead. I have filed complaints with the Virginia Corporation Commission, the FTC, and the USA Better Business Bureau. Then I contacted Wells Fargo Bank's national headquarters. Gee, to my surprise they never heard of MS Media or North American Bancard. Neither was listed as a partner, a 3rd party vendor or any type of corporate relationship.

I went back to the site for MS Media. The first page is still the same but they have changed the look of their secondary pages that look stolen from a legitimate site. (It's easy to do, you just have to bounce a web page and copy the code, then re post it on your hosting site). The site no longer matches up. These guys are running ads over on Sales Gravy and I have contacted a friend over there to report a potential fraud from these guys.
Here is a list of email addresses and names as well as phone numbers from these guys. I am also sending this info to the FBI next. I am 90% convinced that this is a scam. Not 100% convinced as I do not have all the details yet. On my last check, I called one of their phone numbers late at night and got a generic answering service.

info@mymsmedia.com
sweitzel817@gmail.com Skyler Weitez aka Jason Troud
mikedmenzel@gmail.com (CEO and Legal Department)
James@multi-merchant.com James Shepard phone 814-515-9526 and 814-217-6795

Now even though that Mike, the CEO also from the legal department said that he was from the legal department and also the CEO??????, He also told me that I would be hearing from his attorney, Warren Domanque. A cross reference of attorney's throughout the nation did not yield one result for any attorney with that name. Another surprise. Now take a look at the above email addresses, do these look like email addresses that professionals would use in business? The Info at mymsmedia is very generic, so again, no it does not.

Other phone numbers for this group;

303-219-6392
303-219-6366
303-570-0478 Skyler Weitz Cell Phone

Again, I am 90% convinced that this is a scam, there is still a 10% chance that maybe it isn't, so I am continuing my research and following up on all the complaints to get to the bottom of all of this. I do not want to see people being burned on well crafted scams, so I will report on anything that really stinks. This one sure smells nasty too.

2 comments:

  1. My name is James Shepherd, my relationship with MS Media was that I licensed my training to them to sell the training program that I provide at http://www.ccsalestraining.com I no longer have any relationship with MS Media and they are no longer offering my training resources as part of their training package. During my experience with MS Media, I did not believe that they were scamming potential agents but, rather providing training and print resources to help them start their processing business, however, we simply were not a good fit and I decided not to provide my training as part of their package, feel free to email me with any questions (see above)

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  2. Thank you James. I am more than happy to publish this statement from you. Even though you feel that MS Media was not out to scam anyone, their presentation was far less than honest at every level and far less than professional. Everything I checked out that they told me did not add up.

    Their site proved they had no clue as to what they were doing. Your name came up in a very weird way and I have no issues with clearing you on this matter. Thank you for taking the time to respond to this post and I apologize for the delay in setting the record straight on your behalf as I have been extremely busy with multiple new projects.

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