For you history buffs, January is Merchant911′s eighth anniversary month and I’m still at it. January 2001 was the month that we first went on line. I still have the confirming emails from the hosting folks. The domain and the first year’s hosting service were purchased on December 25, 2000 (apparently I had nothing else to do on Christmas Day) and the month of January was spent ramping up the original site.
I did a lot back then that I don’t do now. I used to beat my head against the wall trying to help everyone. As an example, here’s some text from an email that I wrote to the member list toward the end of that first year..
Every time I hear about a fraudulent transaction … I go over them carefully, looking for common denominators. Whenever e-mail addresses are included, I contact the cardholder victims to let them know their information has been compromised. I also attempt to establish a dialog with them to find out where they did business in an attempt to find out how the information became public.
In the same November email I also wrote…
Some successes we’ve had are:
*Closing down a yahoo group carding list – within hours they moved to SmartGroups and we shut them down there too.
*32 Cardholders notified that their information is public
*6 Shopping cart owners tracked down and notified of security breeches
*Numerous articles published on-line to educate merchants.These, or course, are only a drop in the ocean, but they’re a start.
At that time we had 255 members. Now we have over 3,800 and a fraud database of over 1/4 million records. A lot has changed but I still do all this while holding down a full-time Network Manager job, helping my wife with a brick-and-mortar store and three e-Commerce sites, marketing the course on chargeback prevention, and trying (but usually failing) to have a life.
The only thing that keeps me going with all this is the support that I get from members. Membership is free – a few donate and it pays the bills. A few see something in the Google ads and click to see what the advertisers have to offer – I get a few cents. But the big thing for me is the amazing responses that I get from a question. Just last night I was fighting over a snippit of code for the site, asked a question about it and it resulted in a lot of great answers and someone generously writing the code. In fact, that’s how everything in the member area came about. This happens when anyone asks a question. Answers flow. Merchant911 members are a great bunch of helpful folks and we wouldn’t be where we are if it weren’t for them.
Then there are the non-member blog followers. There are over 2,750 people that have subscribed to our RSS feed. Of course I don’t know how many are still with me but for those that are, a great big thank you!
I just needed to thank everyone for their support.
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- Merchant911 expanding its scope
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