High-Risk and Unacceptable Merchants are business, services and products that have a history or very high propensity of a high chargeback ratio based on historical and/or statistical data collected by the payment industry.

Your application for a merchant account is very likely to get denied if your business, service or product is on this list; or you might be required to pay higher setup and/or transactions fees; sometimes a reserve might be required.
(This is not a full list – for informational purposes only)

• Adult Entertainment
• Amusement & Recreation
• Bail
• Car Rental
• Cell Phone Sales
• Check Cashing
• Collection Agency
• Computer Stores/Parts/Systems
• Credit Repair
• Dating
• Detective/Investigative Services
• Downloadable Software
• Escort Services
• Gaming/Betting/Sports Forecasting
• Gun Store
• Home Based Business
• Horoscope/Fortune Telling/Psychic
• Lotteries/Raffles
• Magazine Subscriptions
• Mortgage Broker/Mortgage Reduction
• Pawn Shop
• Precious Metal/Coin/Stamp
• Seminars
• Telemarketing/Phone Solicitations/Call Center
• Time Share Sales
• Travel/Airline/Agency
• Used Car/Auto Sales
• Weight Loss
• … and many more!

Certain companies specialize in servicing high-risk merchant accounts.
Please be advised that we cannot provide any information as to these companies’ statements, legal statuses, fees or operating agreements. We will not make any recommendations or suggestions.

About the author:

Nina Khoury is a computer scientist, software engineer, data and information junkie and online marketer. She taught at various universities for more than six years and worked on projects for Fortune 500 companies including cisco, Intel and HP.