Fraud & Chargebacks - might have to close my company.

[medievil2003]

Hi everyone, good afternoon.

 

Apologies if this is the wrong section to post this.

 

Ok, me and my sister have been working hard over the past 1year to get our online shop open, we are a value added reseller and purchase our goods from 2 distributors. We got the shop ready to go live in October this year and ensured that we had all facilities to accept card payments, virtual terminal and online payments through our stores checkout.

 

Everything was going fine for the first month or so until some larger orders came in. These orders were taken over the phone and we carried out all the fraud checks we could do and sagepay (payment gateway) has cleared the name and address of fraud.

 

Now, as the first larger order was £1,600.00 i had borrowed money from a friend to fund the purchase, so we ordered the goods from the distributor and posted them out to the customer. On the day the funds had been sent to our business account from Natwest Streamline, i had paid my friend back leaving the company with the profit.

 

Second order from the same person, taken over the phone, we repeated the process above and all was ok.

 

Third order was from another person, taken over the phone - this time it was slightly higher of £2,500.00, so we took the payment and it went through perfectly, name, address CSV matches aswell as the delivery address - this time we got a phone call from in on the day of delivery and asked if it can be delivered to his "Mums" address, so we agreed and arranged it to be sent there.

 

At this time when all orders had been dispatched we started to get telephone calls from the banks saynig the cardholder does not know any of the transactions....then it hit! Oh no, this is fraud.

 

Now, i am thank ful so far that i have managed to pay my friend back all of the money, Worldpay emptied everything i had in the account bringing me to £0.00 so i argued that with no outcome. Thinking it was over, i had a letter from natwest streamline saying they will deduct £2,500 within 10 days but thi letter arrived only 2 days ago and the money came out of the account today!

 

I'm now in an unarranged overdraft, no funds left to run the company and completely stuck on what to do next!

 

I mentioned to Streamline and my bank that this will cause the business to close down. I also do a lot of computer installation work and are waiting for payments to come into this account to i can pay creditors and subcontractors off, but any money that comes into the account will just deduct from the minus balance.

 

All deliveries have been signed for at the addresses provided and the police have investigated it all and cant find any trace of the fraudsters.

 

One thing popped into mind is to check the couriers policies on delivering goods that require a signature, DPD is one of them and they have said that the delivery address has had 7 previous fraudulant deliveries and had been signed throughout the 7 previous by the same person! they also mentioned the driver did not actually deliver to the door but handed it over to the person waiting outside without asking for ID!

 

My questions to you guys:

 

1. Can i do anything about the charge back being that i can prove that we carried out as many fraud checks as possible?

2. If i close my business account and re-open another one does the bank still chase me for this money?

3. Should DPD be held liable for this? so i can at least try and claim the money back from them?

 

I appreciate any reply.

 

Many thanks.