Hello Everyone, My name is Ryan. I am a 23 year old first time business owner living in Los Angeles. My company is a DBA called All Technology of Los Angeles. This is my personal unbiased story on how the comapnies who claim they are here to protect you, really dont. Let me first start by saying this. Do not make judgement on any company because of this story, this is here to clearly state a fault in a system and that possibly it can be corrected to protect others down the line from the same consequences. I'm sitting in my small laundry room/office in my townhouse in North Hollywood, CA. At the time of me writing this its it the final 2 weeks before i'm set to be moving out and i'm dead broke and close to $25,000 in debt. At 23 I have to file bankruptcy. In Los Angeles county if you file for bankruptcy it disqualifies you for about 90% of all property management companies from accepting you. You cannot get financial aid for school tuition or get any type of financial help from the state. Bank accounts are out of the question aswell meaning no direct deposit from work and all other necessities and privelages that you have with owning a debit or credit card. At 23, Filing bankruptcy is a basically a means to an end of moving forward in life. I started my company in June of 2016 without any type of BOE registration or anything. Mainly because my work was word of mouth. I do everything when it comes to tech from Active directory set-up/repair, computer repair, network setups both LAN and WAN for business's, smartphone and Consumer electronics repair, and reverse engineering code development. At the start I was getting maybe 1 - 2 very small jobs a week. Totaling anywhere between $100 - $200 a week in extra cash to pay bills. I also work a 9-5 job making $10 an hour as an account manager for a Smartphone repair parts wholesale warehouse. I work a lot to keep up with the financial costs of living in Los Angeles and i'v been adament about staying despite numerous opportunities to move. Mainly because this is a hub for growth and success in my field. I began to use paypal years prior as a consumer and it had always been a good experience. When I started to repair and refurbish smartphones, business started to pick up alot both locally and online. PayPal is hands down the most trusted source for payments, everyone uses them and it has become somewhat now of a requirement more and more to be able to do ANY transactions online. I began to collect alot of excess surplus parts and devices aswell as business grew. I opened an ebay account and start doing some light selling of my excess parts (i.e. Ear-piece speaker, internal batteries, LCD assemblies, etc..) Through all of June and July my business was on the up & up and I started making close to $1,000 a week! I began being approached by alot of buyers on ebay wishing to do private business outside of the website. I have been around fraud alot being in my industry so I can spot a fake from a mile away, and 90% of them were. One in particular, [Removed personal information], from Azerbaijan was one of the few that contacted me and actually was a legit person! Worked for a legitimate company overseas, whom I had contacted via e-mail to verift his identity and e-mail address. Had a fully verified PayPal account, and been straightforward and responsive to every request for identity verification. I was on-board from there. He started beginning to place large orders for refurbished devices. Because I sold them at a surplus price, He wouldnt see a major effect with his VAT rates at his countries borders. Which was a combination of 30% between Local government and international tax rates. Whe nhe sent his first payment I had contacted paypal to raise my account limits so that I wouldnt get anything frozen, I had heard horror stories in the past. The kind lady told be that his account was verified in his country through PayPal but not the US market. She told me it was because he didnt have any connection to the US it would tag him as un-verified. I asked her if it was still recommended to do business with him and I received a confident "Of Course!" I began to make $300 - $750 per order, PayPal helped becuase I could accept his foreign money and paypal would exchange it. Business expanded and in the beginning of August, I applied for a Resellers permit and Business Tax ID so that I can pay my share for owning a business and becoming a legal and reputable entity. I began to offer to broker deals for clients, because of my connections from my 9-5 I knew lots of suppliers that could give me major discunts on bulk orders. I told clients that because I dont have the funds or safety net to procure $7,500 - $10,000 in product, and I had no means to keep inventory in that amount at my residence that if they wanted to pre-pay me the money I would ensure that the devices were legitimate and working. I also stated that it could sometimes take up to a week to atmost 2 weeks to ship depending on their needs. I always tried to lower their cost so that it would ensure that they saw I was here to help them and not sell them, so sometimes it would take a while to procure but that it would be worth it in the end. I only received atmost 10% margains sometimes as low as 1/2% on these deals. I began requesting a business & merchant account to raise my selling limits. This is where my problems started.... The first problem started with PayPal freezing my asests, I had no chargebacks and 1 dispute on my account from years prior before my business for an eBay returns dispute. PayPal gives for example a $13,000 transaction limit before they freeze funds for 30 - 60 days. I was well within my limits and had started to get my transactions frozen for reviews, sometimes without the ability to reverse or refund money back to customers. I call to try and get a better explanation, although if your a business account and do transactions of $2,500 or more and total well over $13,000 in transactions a month you are to wait in-line on the phone and receive no expedited services unlike how a bank is. After trying a few times (about 2 days and multiple calls) I got ahold of someone in the business support area in the US that could better explain. I was told that they wouldnt not be able to release the funds and that they were sorry that it was frozen. I was told the freezing was due "To an automatic system that PayPal has no control over, and cannot change, edit, or reverse at anytime". My first thought was how could the most trusted processor worldwide leave their clients money up to a automatic system that they cannot control. I was hesient, but had faith it would work itself out. The beginning of the hellfire started when one day in mid-august I received a notification of a chargeback dispute of over $12,000 between my 2 accounts. My heart sank and when I looked into the dispute I saw that Kamran had requested a chargeback for EVERY order he had placed with me. Stating that he had not received any of my packages. I was furious and called Kamran and cursed him out for what he had done, he refused to reverse it saying that his customs is holding his last few orders because of internal government reasons. Now I offered Kamran USPS for shipping on his orders because it was the cheapest option. USPS first-class international is the lowest cost and is a option on eBays platform aswell for selling. It still provided a tracking number and packages were updated all the way to the buyers country before they are transferred to another agency for the final leg. The tracking numbers showed that they were in Jamaica, NY awaiting processing and that a few had made it to his country. Now I had taken pictures of ALL of Kamrans orders for my protection. From the products when I received them, Wrapping them, Boxing them up, Pictures at the post office of all the applied shipping labels, and all documents & reciepts were photographed and saved. Any wise enough person could see that I had done my Due-diligance, more so than anyone else, in the effort to protect me. I contacted PayPal after I submitted all the photos, conversations, tracking information, and paperwork showing I had done my job and the customer knew the risks and verified it was okay. A supervisor from the fraud department took on my case because of the amount of data I had submitted and I sat on hold for well over an hour to get a resolution and the next steps . When he got back in touch with me his first statement was "Wow, you really did your homework. I've never seen this amount of visual photos in any case since I began working a few years ago." I had stated why I took so many, that it was to protect me when I did business internationally. He saw that all the packages were in transit and were legitimate. "Unfortunetly" he said "Becuase its been 20 days since you first sent him a package, and there is no signature on delivery. I have to call it in the buyers favor and reverse all his transactions". It ruined me, I was furious and had never been so angry from a simple statement like that ever in my life. I pleaded to him those transactions had been completed and verified by the buyer and that I dont have funds to cover all the money because I'v used the funds from the verified deliveries to pay rent and bills. He just said "Sorry" and then the phonecall was disconnected. $12,000 was ripped from my account including peding profit and a few thousand from pre-payments from customers. I had no ability to refund or to put $12,000 in my account. Because I could no longer refund my customers, I had them place chargebacks to make sure the money was returned to them. PayPal didnt do so because I didnt have availible funds. I proceeded to call them numerous times to plead my case with no avail and the chargebacks grew to over $20,000. The next week when rent and bills were due I log into my bank account and see that my entire balance of $2,200 for my monthly bills was gone and my account had a -$10.000 balance. I called my bank and they attempted to reverse and block the transaction, which they did successfully. But not in time to pay rent to my landlord and I was late on the payment well over a week and a half while the money was being returned to my account. After my final phone call to paypal to share my thoughts, I was told that I had two final options: I could pay the amount due in full or re-ship all the items again to the customers. Everything from bills, school loan payments, prescriptions for mental health, and rent All was not delayed. My landlord being strict asked me once my lease was up that I had to move out because he felt he could no longer trust me due to what happened. I paid rent and bills and began researching on how I can resolve this matter by other means. Government agency's, Lawyers, Advocates, Local law groups; But noone either responded or denied to help me and would not provide a reason why. I'm now completely busted & brooke. this is where ill end my story. I dont want to be typical and end on a pitty note like most stories do. The facts are in front of you, make your judgement based on your own personal opinion. Be vigilant on who takes care of your money and business. The most trustworthy people, most of the time are the ones you will least expect, and be hurt more by, Best Regards, [Removed personal information]
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