Hi Merchants,

We have had a charge back of roughly $3600, and Amex keeps telling us they are reviewing the file.  It goes back to April/06, when a customer claimed his card number was used fraudulently. The sales associate that made the transaction is not with us any longer, but we pieced together the details over time. The card was in presence, Amex admits to having a record of it being swiped in our store, we have the customer signature on the print out, full amex authorization/approval on the transaction, and have documented the business for them. Amex gave the customer the charge back without informing us; I guess basing their decision on the paperwork we submitted. We found out when they started calling asking us to pay the balance owed!  They called 3 times, each time they called we told them we are in the appeals process, each time we had to repeat our version of events, each time they listen to us, and say they will look into it and get back to us. They never do. Finally after 6 months go by, we speak to the supervisor of this department, and she agrees with us that they have not responded well to us, and agrees that we should not have had this chargeback. I figured all along that sooner or later someone at Amex would see the sense of our argument and refund us, I told her this, being as gracious as possible about their screw-up, saying that all businesses make errors, and we're just glad they finally caught this one. This supervisor, Vanessa Franklin by name, assures me that she will get back to me the same day, and she will fax a detailed statement of what she has told me on the phone. Guess what, no fax, no phone call. No surprise really, I'm sorry to say. Amazing how horrible this experience has been, I don't think we have ever had a worse business to business experience. We call Vanessa Franklin; leave messages, she doesn't return our calls.
In the mail today, Amex sends a letter canceling our card service, and demands payment of the balance. Wow, it just keeps getting worse!
Amex seems to protect the identity of their executive staff from the public. I'm thinking that if we can reach some of these higher level people someone somewhere is going to correct this nightmare of incredibly bad service. I can write a lot of letters to various ombudsmen, government officials, and the like when $3600 is involved.
I was wondering if anyone on this forum might have some contact info for some of these management, or maybe some idea about how to go about reaching them? Thanks to the management of this forum for presenting this valuable resource!
Looking around the internet, it seems their are a lot of con artists who are aware of Amex charge back policies. It's no secret, from what I have read, that Amex is not working well with their partners to make business safer from fraud. It could be argued that they encourage this fraud by not  developing tighter processes for dealing with it. We do an awful lot of business, most of it by credit card. We also use credit cards extensively; Amex will never again see one cent of this business, a very substantial number indeed.
I still have trouble believing they are willing to write off this business, and hope that I can reach someone at Amex management who will see reason.