This is not the way to launch a business venture. Sailorcurt, Bonnie and a bunch of other folks are hopping mad at GPal. I made some donations to the Calguns Foundation earlier this year through GPal; after learning about this issue from Bonnie and reading the above links I became alarmed and fired off a query to the Foundation president to see whether or not they received the funds. My GPal account says the transactions were completed, so ???. More when I find it out.
FWIW, I know from my own business clients that underwriting standards for setting up ACH “merchant accounts” have been tightened to a ridiculous level over the past year, as part of the overall tightening of business credit. Lots of businesses got surprised by this and lost their longstanding accounts. Lisa Wolf of Elite Ammunition mentioned in one of the threads in the GPal forum at Calguns.net that the problem started when GPal changed its name from GunPal. I’m guessing something as simple as that name change might have been sufficient for a merchant account underwriter to temporarily kill the account? I dunno if that’s what happened, though.
One thing that I’m noticing is a lot of complaints that GPal hasn’t told everybody what caused this problem. From my perspective as in-house attorney for a number of companies, you shouldn’t expect them to do so. If the problem was caused by either a bad-apple employee or an outside entity (such as a gun-fearing bank or a tightwad underwriter) I’d think GPal is going to be suing the responsible parties and is being strongly advised by its attorney NOT to say anything related to pending litigation. That causes problems for public relations to be sure, but legally it’s very important. Again, I’m not sure that’s what’s happening here, but I don’t see folks considering this possibility either as the reason for GPal’s silence.
I’m not affiliated with GPal, but sure hope GPal gets everybody paid ASAP as this issue is really tarnishing the Calguns reputation, even if undeservedly so. I’ve been hired in the past to repair a poor customer service division and the damage it caused, and cleaning that up can be a real nightmare even if you’ve fixed whatever the underlying problem may have been. Oleg’s indicating that the board members are stepping up to help hire tech-support and customer-service staff, so that’s a good sign.
UPDATE: Oleg resigned from the board. He did mention some interesting documents that are related to litigation that he thinks will be public soon, which would indicate a court filing’s coming up. Reading court filings can be fascinating….
If you read GPal’s releases (now mostly all deleted) you’ll see that they have been releasing info on the supposed cause of their problems. First they weren’t having problems, then the name changed caused a small problem that only effected a few users. Then their bank (Commercia I think they said) “screwed” them and somehow messed up their internal accounting. Then they changed banks and the NEW bank also “screwed” them. Then they started using TD to print checks but that darn check printer kept jamming and causing “printer issues.” Then they decided that checks were too expensive and went back to trying to manually process ACH transfers. They’ve been very open with what they insist are the source of their problems. If there was truly litigation going on behind the scenes you would think that they would play a little closer to the vest as to the culprit?
Here’s my theory: Some combination of incompetent, lying management (Ben Cannon), crap software and/or running out of money. They were issuing partial payments on outstanding debts for awhile. They may still be doing that. Their CEO has been running around to every forum he can find treating his own customers like they’re the problem.
Regardless of the problems, the real problem with GPal is it’s management and until that problem is rectified the company’s sunk. GPal never updated its website to lower customer’s expectations regarding how long transfers and support requests take. They still say something like 48 hours. That’s wrong.
And, yes, this whole affair makes Calguns and the CGF look horrible. They are all intertwined with GPal in some way and the admin at Calguns, Paul, has been doing his fair share to help limit the GPal complaints to a minimum.
There’s a good thread on Cast Boolits that’s worth a look.
Yeah, I linked the castboolits thread above as “some other folks” and it’s still going. Happily CGF has finally awakened on this; Brett Thomas at least has been posting there in his position as a CGF Director.
I’m an “Honorary Director” of CGF, but that’s about as meaningful a role as Oleg’s “Advisory Board Member” to GPal seems to have been — I don’t even get invited to CGF board meetings, for example — so I’ve kept silent for the most part except for this post here at RNS.