We’re all dreaming of the day when GISOL will no longer exist, when the smooth-talking ’gentleman’ who so glibly lured us into a reduced price, a sale, or a special offer is reduced to making license plates and the hands that transfered our signatures from the service contract to a fake credit card authorization are making hash marks on the wall of his cell to count the hopefully endless days until he’s released.  But what about getting our money back?  Do we have any recourse?  The answer is  “No one knows one sure way “…yet.   But we do have options.

I must confess to times when I feel overwhelmed.  GISOL has entered my life, and I’m the worse for it.  Like a puppy that cannot be housebroken, or a relative who comes to visit and forgets to leave, only far, far worse, I’m stuck with the sour taste of GISOL in my everyday thoughts.   I feel that it must be exorcised, like a demon, if I’m going to have my life back the way it was.  These people are SICK!  The day I got stricken with GISOL, the salesman said he needed first to create a new web site, since mine had been wiped out when my domain name was sold downstream.  I blindly gave him a name, the first thing that popped into my head, and we proceeded to the Service Contract.  When all was said and done, it took several days for the extent of the screwing I’d received to sink in.  At one point I went to my  web site and tried to open it.  I didn’t even know the password GISOL had created.  I clicked on the Forgotten Password button, and there it was–my new password to my new beginning–the name of the location of a particularly brutal terrorist bombing.   But at first I thought that everything was all a mistake.  I’m sure many of you felt the same…that upon reaching GISOL, it would turn out that the calculations were an error, but made in good faith, and it would be corrected.  Well, as you all know from your own experiences, it  wasn’t a mistake and, like you,  I couldn’t even get through to them.

Yes I did actually, in a sense.  The phone was finally answered by a man who claimed he was the head of security, that I had somehow dialed some deeply secret number, at which he took great offense.  He decided I must be stuck in the elevator of their high-rise business offices (which as some of you know, are in reality a rather small house on a quiet street in suburban Los Angeles).  He told me I must be calling for help from that fictitious elevator, and when I tried to tell him I wasn’t, he then decided that I was suffering from some desperate affliction, probably psychological, and tried to get me to tell him where I lived so he could call my local rescue personnel to come cart me off.   I wonder how many of you met with “the many faces of GISOL ” and how often they tried to make you look inside yourself and see the weakness and confusion they saw?   This, by the way, has a name:  emotional abuse.  It is designed to keep you from concentrating on them by systematically creating doubt and uncertainty in your mind.  Sort it out right now for a moment–how strong an argument can you make when you’re feeling emotionally naked and raw.   If you still have any doubt at all about helping to convict these people, just think how much better you were emotionally (as well as financially, of course) before they invaded the privacy of your life.

The fact is that we need the GISOL people to be convicted and removed from society in order to heal and go on with our lives, and  we need to go after the credit brokers for the lack of responsibility they exhibited in handling our money.   Together.  Both the evil presence that is GISOL and the equally greedy and presumptuous  magnates who acted in bad faith to give them our money.  We need to make sure that the brokers don’t profit on GISOL’s crime any more than GISOL does.  (Just to depress you more than GISOL already has, if you make minimum payments of $25 on $1798.20 every month, at 18.99% interest it will take you 8 1/2 years and cost you $1437.)  We need to be sure we’re not living with this presence for many years to come while we’re paying this illegal charge off.  We need to win before we’re robbed of twice the initial amount, and to make it clear what’s actually being stolen from us is twice the amount we’ve reported to the authorities.  I don’t know what the annals of justice say, but in my mind the credit card companies abetted the original crime, which to me makes them partners, and now we’re actually paying them for stealing from us!  GISOL took our money, but it was the credit brokers who drove the get-away car.  In my mind, they not only acted in a criminal capacity in the GISOL scenario, but they are independently profitting from GISOL’s crime, which I hold to be both illegal and unethical.

Right now, we can either wait for the authorities to advise us about our relationship with GISOL and our chances of recovering our losses, or we can pursue our money on our own.  To do that, we need to go against the credit brokers separately from GISOL.   In a direct line, it was they who actually dispensed our money.    We need to fight them to win our money back.  They can in turn attempt to collect repayment from GISOL if they choose.   This is not something we want to do lightly, though.  To be successful, our approach must be well-researched and well laid out.   We need to learn if there was loophole in law or policy that allowed the brokers to bypass the proof that a crime was, at that very moment, in the process of being committed, permitted them to to ignore our evidence, and granted them the right to actually abet the criminals by completing the fraudulent  transaction.  If there actually is such a law, we may need help from the media to expose this loophole and from our legislators to seal it.  Personally, I doubt that the credit card companies acted on anything more than expediency–to get us off their books and out of their hair.  (And into their profit column, of course!)

In a valid transaction, we have a right under the law to cancel any purchase in a timely manner.  Since GISOL deliberately made themselves unavailable, no cancellation was possible.  It would seem that blocking our access to the protection provided by law should void the transaction and make restitution by the credit card companies automatic.  But this is not a perfect world; in the real world, we must fight every step of the way to get what should rightfully be ours.  That law let us down; it assumes compliance and has no failsafe when it is broken except what we’re now doing.

Further, the credit brokers have a policy which is neither reasonable nor logical.  In the absence of reason, this ramifications of this policy are just plain terrifying.  Once you give out a credit card number to a merchant, you are opening a door into a room with no floor.  Most merchants are strictly honest; the amount they request from the credit broker is the exact amount mutually agreed on.   But nowhere is it stated in the credit brokers’ rule book that the merchant MUST relay the agreed charge, or that they must block the sale if that doesn’t happen.  One would think that given proof that the amount was changed would trigger a modicum of honesty from the bankers.  After all, banking must be just about the world’s “second oldest profession”, and the trust we place in our bankers is obviously a long-established tradition.  We simply hold them on a pedestal, immortalized in suit and necktie, where they are above wrong-doing.  Perhaps the time has come to face reality and shatter that image.  In fact, the policy the credit companies adhere to simply and loosely shows that if a customer voluntarily relinquishes his card number to a merchant, the credit brokers will honor whatever amount the merchant requests.   A few honest credit brokers did reject the fraudulent charge, proving that bankers do have the ability to challenge criminal action, that they have no rule that prevents honesty.  For the most part, the brokers have let us down.

Given these events and attitudes, that leaves us with but one option at this time.  Pursuing the credit brokers in a class action suit, would be a formidable project given how diversified the brokerages are at the consumer level.   There must easily be thousands of Master card brokers, Visa brokers, American Express……  The only way to go after them all is to study the laws they applied during and after the transaction, determine where if anywhere the application of those laws broke down during the process, and apply yhe results equally in each of our individual instances.  The credit brokers are saying that they are above the law, that they are simply doing what they’re supposed to do, move money from one account to another.  They’re saying that the legality of the transfer is not their concern.  One thing they cannot do is plead ignorance; they were made aware in each case that fraud, and very likely forgery, was the basis for the charge.  Nor can they say that any one transaction was just an isolated incident.  Multiple claims have been made; multiple proofs were submitted to back our claims.  Finally, to the best of my knowledge, they cannot claim, as some have tried, that it is neither their duty nor their obligation to report suspected crime to the authorities.  It is the responsibility of any citizen to report a crime.  This transaction was not made in a confessional.

Once we’re sure of what laws may have been broken, what legal or moral obligations to society may have been breached, there is another set of obligations under law which finally are in our favor.  These are grouped together under the Consumer Protection Act.  In fact, it was the Consumer Protection Act which should have protected us when we attempted to cancel our various instances of the falsified charge, fraudulent contract, or forged signature but in that case it was up to GISOL, as the merchant, to abide by the law.  At this point, we the consumers are in a position to apply the law to seek reparation for our losses.

This is done in Small Claims Court.   (For information on Small Claims Court, see http://www.report-gisol.com/2008/09/22/small-claims-court-self-help/).  The credit card companies gave our money away over our protests.  We all followed their claim procedures against GISOL.  Our claims, with sworn and witnesed affadavits, were overturned, or in most cases simply ignored, in favor of faxed copies of forged documents.  A few lucky people were granted a “chargeback”, a credit card refund, but not without personal pain and financial damage.  When your business depends on your web site, losing it, even temporarily, is a heavy blow.  I doubt that there’s one person among us who doesn’t feel that a good deal of blame for the success of the GISOL scam was due to the carelessness, aloofness, and even negligence of the credit brokers.  GISOL depended on that attitude.

Small Claims Court is an individual pursuit, but we’ve come too far to go it alone in hundreds of isolated courthouses around the world.  Let’s plan a course of action to take us through this together.  Frank has already done a lot of research and created a guide for all of us. (See link above.) With  suggestions from those of us who’ve gone that route, and support for each other’s efforts, we don’t have to feel alone.  Certainly the credit brokers will get the message when we all file suit.  We’re not just talking about them failing to protect our money; we’re talking about adding insult to injury by denying us an equal voice.  Every letter from a credit card broker that says we were rejected because of some “policy” about receiving what they required from the merchant is telling us their decision was made before we protested the fraudulent charge.  This isn’t just about recovering our losses; it’s about demanding triple damages in court.  One bee sting can be ignored, but the stings from hundreds of bees are going to be felt.  One lawyer can be sent to argue against one person…even the credit card moguls will notice when they are being sued for triple damages from all directions.

That’s a nice thought.  Hold onto it.  Call it hope, call it what you’re due, but don’t give up.  There are only so many credit brokers in the world and the chances none of them had more than one victim are pretty slim.  Someplace along the line someone was aware of this scam, and victims were refused fair handling of their money even after the proportions of the scam were known.   Someplace along the line at least some of us were brushed off as “another GISOL complaint”.  Was it me?   Was it you?

Remember William Henley’s famous self-assessment?   “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” *   You only need to remember when you apply to Small Claims Court that you are there because you’re right and they’re wrong.   Your belief in what’s right, and the documents you have to prove it, are all the weapons you need.  As the old saying goes. “Speak softly…and carry a big stick!”

REMEMBER:

The tide is turning; the time is coming when we will be heard by the authorities.  We want to meet them with an army of ”masters” who are ready and willing to add their voices.  Remember, every voice is a separate charge, another indictment.  Please contact me at 4one4all [at] gmail [dot] com.    Or respond to the main web site at www.report-gisol.com.  We want to hear from everyone.  If you are a victim and haven’t yet contacted us, if you know someone else who was damaged by GISOL, if you’re working to gather people and find proof on your own, even if you have your own web site, please join us.  If you want your name or email address kept private, tell us…we’ll do that.  For more thoughts about small claims court, email me and identify yourself with your user name from either the main site or Raoul’s site.  I’ll reply privately.