This is just in the news today! A small business owner was being taken advantage by First Data processing. The story explains that Rohan Shetty owns a small hot dog stand in Sussex County, NJ.As a small business owner she can’t afford to be paying lots of money in merchant service fees.She figures out that the rates she was told were not the rates she was getting! Unfortunately this is a common practice for a credit card processor to offer teaser rates and then hike them up very quickly. They usually try to lock you into a contract so you are stuck paying those high fees for years. This is why if nothing else always avoid a contract. Few companies advertise no contracts but some merchant service providers will offer it.