Fake Checks? This is for real!

“As economy worsens, fake check scams spread” – An alarmist statement? Indeed, but it will do you good to keep reading. In his article on www.msnbc.msn.com, Herb Weisbaum warns people about the prevalence of check and money order scams.

According to Weisbaum, the Consumer Federation of America discovered that “a third of all adult Americans have been approached with fake check scams and at least 1.3 million have fallen for it.” Those are scary numbers and all the more reason to be vigilant.

Scammers use a “creative story” as bait to trick otherwise intelligent people into sending them thousands of dollars. A person might receive an email telling them they have won the lottery or a contest, or that they have received payment for an online work-at-home gig. Once they get their check, they are asked to cash it, keep a portion of the funds and wire off the rest, which is usually between $3 – 4000, sometimes more.

Here’s the bad news: If you fall for this scam, cash the check and wire off the money – the money is gone for good! The bank may only figure out that the check is counterfeit way after you have sent the wire; these checks often look very convincing. And you will be responsible for paying back the bank.

AlertPay’s name has often been dragged into this scam as this special brand of con artist uses the names, logos and corporate information of reputable companies to further fool people into sending them money. Many AlertPay members have received checks that look like they are from us, but have been asked to cash the check, keep a percentage and wire the difference to someone usually located overseas. Weeks after sending the money, they find themselves in a lot of trouble with the bank.

In short, if someone asks you to pay to claim your paycheck, lottery winnings or contest prize - don’t do it! If you receive a check that you were not expecting – don’t do anything with it! If you receive a check for more than you were expecting and are instructed to send the difference off to someone else - don’t do it! Finally, if you receive an AlertPay check even if you have not withdrawn money from your AlertPay account – do not cash it! Contact us before you do anything.

Please view the original article for more information: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30968506/.

You can also view the following website for more information on counterfeit checks: fakechecks.org.

Downtime is now from 10:30 a.m. to 1:00 p.m.

Attention AlertPay members,

Website downtime today will last until about 1:00 p.m. for the firewall reboot. We apologize for the inconvenience. The site should be available again this afternoon without issue. We will keep you updated.

Thank you once again for your patience.

Downtime between 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. on Friday, May 22

Attention AlertPay members,

AlertPay will experience some downtime on Friday, May 22 between 8:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. for a firewall reboot. The site could be down for as little as a few minutes, but if there are any issues, the site could be down for longer. However, everything should run smoothly after 11:00 a.m. This reboot is necessary to the overall security of the AlertPay network.

Thank you for your patience. We understand the importance of your business, which is why we will do everything in our power to get the site up-and-running as soon as we can.

Temporary Maintenance on AlertPay.com Domain

Hello everyone,

An SSL Certificate error is causing the site to redirect incorrectly. We are working the issue and estimate it should be resolved with the next half hour.

Thank you for your patience.

The AlertPay Team

1:00 PM EST EDIT: An issue with the certificate registration is preventing members from logging into their AlertPay account. We hope to have this situation resolved within the next two hours as we are interacting with our vendor at the moment.

4:30 PM EST UPDATE: All access issues relating to the AlertPay.com have been fixed and you should not be experiencing too many more issues. 

Thanks for your patience.

Even more New and Improved Business Tools!

This has been a busy new year at AlertPay. Business and Personal Pro account holders can now enjoy a wider variety of Business Tools to help make running an online business easier than ever before. Aside from a new Multi-Item Checkout feature, we would also like to tell you about two other new and improved features:

Mass Pay – If you have weekly payouts like commissions or referral payments, this is a fast and effective tool for you. With this improved feature, you can view past batch payment details and locate individual payouts without effort. You will also know right away which payments succeeded and which did not so you can send them again. Please visit the Dev forum for more information: Multi-Item Checkout.

IPN Upgrade – Many of our sellers have to contact us when they do not receive an IPN post for a specific transaction and we have to send it again. Since this is an inconvenience for our Business account members, we now send up to nine IPN posts until we get confirmation that their server has received the post. Please visit the Dev forum for more information: https://dev.alertpay.com/en/integration-tools/html-integration/multi-item.html

We hope you take full advantage of these improved features and that they help make running your business a little less stressful.

AlertPay introduces "Multi Item Checkout"!

AlertPay is proud to announce the release of our newest feature: Multi-Item Checkout.

Multi-Item Checkout allows you to further integrate your shopping cart by listing all the items a customer is checking out with. This means that along with processing your payments, the Pay Process page will also account for all the items in the cart when the customer checks out.

This feature also enables Multi-Item buttons for our Advanced Integration users. If you are familiar with HTML, you can easily modify your current buttons to accommodate a Multi-Item button. To see how this is possible, please visit our AlertPay Developer's Forum at https://dev.alertpay.com/en/integration-tools/html-integration/multi-item.html.

This feature will be available next week. Multi-Item Buttons will be available for Standard Integration later on this year.