PEP Episode 079 — Dual Pricing v Cash Discount: Surcharging Mistakes That Trigger Fines | with Supersonic POS

Ever been told “it’s just a cash discount” only to have a secret shopper’s photos tell a different story? This episode strips the buzzwords down to the brass tacks payments professionals actually live with: the legal and operational differences between dual pricing, cash discounting, and surcharging—and why debit sits in its own lane under Durbin whether your signage acknowledges it or not.

Our guest Mahdi Hussein (Supersonic POS) joins Leo Arzumanyan, Esq., and Jeremy Stock of Global Legal Law Firm, in-studio to connect the dots from family-run C-stores, to building Petro Outlet for cloud price changes and pump-side loyalty, to launching a POS designed to make modern compliance operationally repeatable across everyday merchants.

What really happens when compliance meets the real world

The “cash discount” claim vs. the camera roll: What auditors and secret shoppers actually capture—entry signs, shelf/menu pricing, register signage, and line-level receipts—and why “register-only disclosure” fails.

Debit is not credit: How Durbin and network rules isolate debit from surcharging, common BIN-misclassification pitfalls, and the terminal settings that prevent frontline overrides.

Dual pricing done correctly: Two posted prices everywhere the customer sees a price, consistent with receipts and POS programming—not a fee bolted on at checkout.

Cash discounting done correctly: Posted card price as the standard price; true discount for cash; disclosure where it matters (not just fine print).

MATCH, fraud, and the five-year shadow

Mahdi walks through a hard lesson: a fraudulent merchant account opened in his company’s name triggered a MATCH placement that shut processing down overnight. We unpack:

The paper trail that fixes records (police reports, identity theft affidavits, ISO/acquirer correspondence) and why diligence must be relentless.

How some fraudsters re-file as soon as the five-year term expires, and what monitoring and controls you need to detect and preempt repeat abuse.

Why automated notices and “we’re looking into it” updates don’t undo operational damage when acceptance disappears for weeks.

The new risk stack: compliance risk beside credit risk

State law curveballs vs. network rules: Examples like Minnesota’s higher caps or New York’s two-tier requirements colliding with Visa/Mastercard caps and signage expectations. The default: operate to the strictest overlapping standard.

Fines that stack and escalate: How separate entities with common ownership see assessments multiply; why remediation lag can push penalties from $1,000 to $5,000+ rapidly.

Opaque reporting and “enforcement by screenshot”: How incomplete data invites abuse, and what evidence packets actually de-escalate a case.

POS and program design that actually holds up

BIN-aware configuration: Enforce debit exclusion, hard-cap surcharge percentages by brand, and fail-safe rules that a clerk can’t override.

Receipt and signage automation: Default, non-deletable receipt footers; location-specific sign templates tied to the active pricing model; menu/shelf labels that reflect cash vs. card pricing.

Cost-of-acceptance discipline: Align surcharge/dual pricing amounts to provable acceptance costs; audit monthly so amounts don’t drift out of compliance.

A practical checklist you can deploy this quarter

Choose the model—and codify it: Dual pricing or cash discounting. Document what that means for posted prices, receipts, and refunds. No hybridizing.

Configure the POS, don’t trust the counter: BIN rules for debit, per-brand caps for credit, required receipt disclosures on by default, and price objects that propagate to menus/shelves.

Publish conspicuous disclosures: Entry, shelf/menu, checkout, receipt. Photograph and archive these quarterly.

Audit with the regulator’s eyes: Secret-shop yourself; capture timestamps, payment type, and line-level receipt fields. Fix evidence gaps before a brand or AG finds them.

Train and attest: Staff training with sign-off; merchant attestations covering pricing model, signage locations, debit handling, and receipt content.

Log and defend: Keep a remediation playbook; when a notice arrives, open a ticket, attach photos/receipts/config exports, map allegations to rules, propose fixes with timelines, and confirm completion.

*Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice.  All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.*

Transcript

Mahdi Hussein (00:00):

Is most people don’t understand that cash discount and dual pricing are two different things, and I think almost everyone to this state just throws those two terms. I think most people have learned what surcharging is versus dual pricing. To the degree. To some extent. To some extent, I got more brand awareness, more awareness than industry. I don’t think anyone really understands what dual pricing. That’s a different thing than cash discount because we were doing the two price method and we were big on the debit cards. There’s the Durbin amendment, it’s the thing. People don’t catch that technically debit cards are cash. You read a law, go look up a law. 2008, the DOD Frank Act says cash and debit cards are basically one of the same. And so trying to understand some of those things like, oh, I’m going to cash discount. Great. So you’re going to charge the merchant the fees on, cash on do debit cards. And they’re like, no, we’re going to run this check. Oh, so it’s not debit card anymore.

Jeremy Stock (00:54):

Welcome to the Payments experts podcast experts, a podcast of global legal law firm. We hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome to the Payments Experts podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. We’re really excited. We’ve got an in-studio podcast today. Joining us, one of our associate attorneys, Leo, he works in our transactional department as well as a really special guest, ma Hussein with Supersonic POS Maddi. We’re really stoked you made it down to San Diego and are joining us in studio. Welcome to the podcast.

Mahdi Hussein (01:31):

Thank you.

Leo Arzumanyan (01:32):

Yeah, welcome Mahdi. I think one thing I’d really like to do when we start this podcast is ask how you got into the industry. That’s something that’s always interesting to me. Before I started working here, I never knew about this industry, so I’m always curious how other people got in.

Mahdi Hussein (01:45):

Our story is perhaps one of the more crazy ones of anyone that you hear get into payments, right? So long go for the long story actually. Sure. So we have always owned C stores, gas stations. I mean our whole lives, me and my father, we’ve always been in that business. So I graduated college. I used to work at a government consulting firm in software, so I was doing software, government software consulting for the government. I did the Great Lakes GIS projects, stuff like that. So I did just different government projects.

Leo Arzumanyan (02:15):

Real quick, just to jump in, do you have background in software is? Yeah,

Mahdi Hussein (02:18):

I’m a software engineer. I went to UF and computer science degree. I didn’t, that’s my thing.

Mahdi Hussein (02:22):

So I started off as a software engineer and I was working in software, graduated college at uf and then I came home. My father basically left the country for six months, said right before COVID was like, Hey, can you help me out? Just run the store. And I’m like, I mean I was working from home, I was remote. I said, okay, I’ll help you out. And so during this six months, basically it was like going from never owning a C-store, never running one to okay, now you’re going to run one. And so I learned the C-store business inside and out very quickly

Leo Arzumanyan (02:56):

Just thrown into the fire.

Mahdi Hussein (02:57):

I was like, yeah, just run this store. And then we did that for a few months. Actually I bought my own C-store, eventually did well with that too. And so I was doing that while also working in software. So it was kind of both sides. My father came back and basically he was like, so how was it? And I’m like, horrible. Gas stations have the oldest legacy technology you can match. Everything’s like Windows or Linux space, onsite server. Sounds like

Leo Arzumanyan (03:27):

A headache.

Mahdi Hussein (03:27):

Yeah, two cables going underground and if a cable gets a little finicky or pulled on, the pump goes out. You got to rerun it under the concrete, it’s a mess. So I started with that and I was like, but more than that, if you had two gas stations, you had to change the price at one each one, one by one

Leo Arzumanyan (03:47):

Manually go and change it.

Mahdi Hussein (03:49):

So even actually most gas stations today, people don’t know that you go in, it’s a little relay system where the big guy calls the little guy and says, Hey, change the price. They change it at the register. They don’t use a central system. Most gas just today. I mean that’s what we got into. So we, through all that, opened a software. I basically kind of quit my job joined, started a software company, which was petre. I was our original you my shirt, it says Supersonic po os. It says Powered by Petal because we started off as a gas station software called Petal. Took all my money, bought these licenses to integrate into existing gas station systems. So we were just integrating into Verifone, Gilbar, those gas stations. So we still do that. So we are a certified Gilbarco and back office partner. We’re still a certified loyalty partner. So we have our own loyalty front end host that we built. And basically to this day we still do it is you have a gas station. We can basically do the whole paint the pump like loyalty, the loyalty at the pump, put your phone number in, earn exon points. We do that.

Mahdi Hussein (04:53):

Okay, cool. Beyond that, we built the whole back office system. You get basically cloud enabled and modernized. The gas station, you can go onto your phone, change the price once, go to all the stores basically like that. So we cloud enabled and modernized it. Fast forward, we went to market of that 2018, I want to say 2019 when we got our first 200 stores off our network people we knew we had a real problem. We’re solving just gas stations. And from there what we saw was a lot of those gas station guys came to us and said, Hey, I like your software. I like using this cloud app and everything,

Leo Arzumanyan (05:33):

This modern software,

Mahdi Hussein (05:34):

Which is nice.

Mahdi Hussein (05:35):

Can I use this? I also own a food store. I also own a liquor store. I also own a smoke, whatever. They own a different business, especially in our industry. The same guy’s got different ventures and they’re all very similar convenience to retail to call that segment. So we’ve owned nothing but C store and food store and we kind of service that. We grew into that. So we launched our own po OS because the problem was people were coming to us saying, Hey, we want to use you. Okay, we’ll go buy a $15,000 air phone. And they were like, I’m good on that. I’m like, okay. So we built a po OS that was $1,500. It was like integrate to Clover was like the alternative. We’re like,

Leo Arzumanyan (06:14):

Yeah.

Mahdi Hussein (06:15):

So we built a POS and I was very anti POS building at the time and I was very anti getting the payments. To me, it was a commodity business. It was something that was very hard to penetrate.

Leo Arzumanyan (06:25):

Did you already, just to jump in, did you already know a little bit about payments? Not at all at this point, no.

Mahdi Hussein (06:29):

So that’s why the long story where it ties into another long story and it’s just kind of like a collision of two things and that’s what happened. So that’s our journey as a company Petro.

Mahdi Hussein (06:42):

And where payments came in was, so we were at our gas station using a first data merchant account through North and we were process, we had an agent come in. He basically gave us an interchange five and five, a really aggressively priced account, and we were doing 30 K volume on initially this even a small, so it was a small account. And we were like, dang, that’s a really good rate. We saw our rates went down 200 bucks. We we’re happy and fast forward the time we’re launching the POS, we bought another store and we were trying to expand that and we go to open another mid and we opened the other mid midday, all our terminal stopped working. We’re like, what just happened? And so we call, our agent number didn’t dial, like dial tone. We call again, it redirects to some other dude I didn’t know. And I’m like, who’s this? He’s like, yeah, I’m his boss. I can’t be talking to you right now. They closed your account. I’m like, what do you mean? They closed their account for what? Oh, I can’t be telling you. You should know why you’re on this list, man. It’s called the match list. I’m like, what? I’m going, what? We didn’t know anything on payment. That’s the sad experience for most of these owners. They don’t know. Yeah, what is Match? What is

Jeremy Stock (08:07):

That 100%?

Mahdi Hussein (08:09):

I’ve never heard of this thing. And you’re like, I’m suddenly on this list. And my stuff stopped working and that was my dive into payments while we were just talking about the POSI was very anti, the POS was just like, do we integrate to Clover or whatever? This dive into payments happened where we’re like, Hey, let’s get off the match. So we went and we learned what an acquirer is, what IO is, learn

Leo Arzumanyan (08:36):

Sponsor Bank is everything.

Mahdi Hussein (08:38):

I’m Googling, this stuff’s the iso, what’s what’s the match? So many terms. And I’m like, who’s the choir? Who is my sponsor? And so I thought, okay, because North wouldn’t tell us, they can’t tell you. A lot of times you’re on Match. They can’t tell you much beyond, oh, you’re on Match.

Mahdi Hussein (08:55):

And I’m like, all I knew was Wells Fargo. That doesn’t tell me too much. I mean now I look back at it, I have an id what that means, but back then you’re like, you wouldn’t know that Wells Fargo means first aid. A lot of times you wouldn’t know that. So we start, okay, we sent a letter to MasterCard. MasterCard basically told us back in 2018, go tick rocks. They just were kind of deferring us, right? They didn’t know how to address it because they were so housh about it, trying to contact your acquirer. We don’t know this acquirer, right? This is something we eventually keep digging through the weeds, sending letters out, going through counsel. We figured out that a fraudulent corporation was opened completely. Of course we never heard of because we got a lead. We heard that. We actually found the DBA eventually 10 denials later, found out the DBA, this is the actual corp name was a freight construction corp. His social, my father’s social. I’m like, oh shoot. And so we went and then we went, we found the mid the iso. We sent a letter to them. It was like a Fiserv ISO underneath them. They had no clue about the fraud that they had a fraud agent bringing them this fraud.

Mahdi Hussein (10:07):

And it was who’s opening fake accounts and do these things. And eventually we got the whole thing such a way we file identity theft report, police report. The proper process

Leo Arzumanyan (10:15):

Turned into the whole thing. Yeah,

Mahdi Hussein (10:16):

Yeah. Turned into this whole thing, which my point was we learned payments because we’re like, it’s just like a trial by fire. What is an iso? What’s an acquire? What’s a sponsor? We figured all that out and fast forward, it was all at the same time of us considering a POS end of 20 19, 20, 20 20. We were like, okay, I guess we’re building a POS and if we’re doing that, we may just get into payments. We now know all this stuff about payments, but wellbeing become an iso. It was kind of like everything led into another. We met people. I eventually became good friends actually with ISO that put us on that.

Jeremy Stock (10:51):

Right.

Mahdi Hussein (10:52):

That’s

Jeremy Stock (10:53):

Wild.

Mahdi Hussein (10:53):

It is a crazy small industry. You don’t know. Everyone knows each other.

Leo Arzumanyan (10:57):

That’s one thing I’ve noticed. That’s really interesting. Everybody knows each other. It’s a lot smaller than I think many people realize,

Jeremy Stock (11:02):

And as it grows, it seems to get smaller, which is so fascinating. Yeah, Mahdi, I got to say, it’s really interesting that your story into payments involves the match list. This law firm, Leo knows we do a lot of match list removal work and we see those, we hear those calls every single day. I’ve never even heard of the match list, but I found out I’m on it.

Leo Arzumanyan (11:23):

Yeah, I’ve been shut off. I don’t know

Mahdi Hussein (11:25):

Why

Jeremy Stock (11:25):

I’ve been terminated. No one’s telling me anything. It’s still going on in 2025, man.

Mahdi Hussein (11:30):

Yeah, no, we had actually had a merchant come to us trying to get a merchant account. Similar situation to us. Obviously we felt bad we were in that boat and we helped them. Actually, no, we actually a couple times had merchants come to us and we’ve helped them get off of Match or recategorize is probably the proper way to say it. We recategorize the code because they’ll come in with it being money laundering. You’re like, whoa. And then they recategorize to what it usually is, identity theft. A lot of times what we find is, and you know can tell right away someone’s like identity theft or not, are you willing to go file a police report if you’re scared of filing a police report? It’s like, okay, some sketch is gone. But that was a big thing and we’ve gotten a few people off now because the fact and gotten approved actual merchant accounts later because of the same exact situation. At least now I will state it’s a positive that there’s that match email. That was not a thing.

Jeremy Stock (12:24):

Game changer.

Mahdi Hussein (12:25):

Game changer. That was not a thing.

Jeremy Stock (12:26):

We used to spend weeks and months just trying to track down the basic information. Who put you on the match list? Now you get it in a single day.

Leo Arzumanyan (12:34):

That almost makes you think there needs to be a dual price surcharge email now too. The other thing we’re dealing with is checking out someone to give us guidance from Visa, MasterCard on that issue.

Mahdi Hussein (12:44):

Well, and they all tie together. So I’ll finish that match thing, which was for us even, it actually still haunts us years later. So the match thing was five years, right? Match is five years and it’s been five years since the fraud. So we got off of Match. But those fraudsters watch, and I didn’t realize this, but five years later, the identity was gone. They looked and found the, and they refiled den, wow, that’s a new, and they did all of it. They washed the court for five years. As soon as they saw it fell off, they went and they did it. But now they did it for Square and they do it for Intuit. They do it for different, different, okay, so they’re making a real made, let’s go through a pay fac, right? And they literally wash this and five years later will refile the fraud.

Leo Arzumanyan (13:24):

I wonder if that’s some sort of auto trigger, like software monitoring. As soon as someone gets off,

Mahdi Hussein (13:28):

It

Jeremy Stock (13:28):

Makes you wonder, right? I wouldn’t be surprised.

Mahdi Hussein (13:31):

I mean, only thing to do is they’re like, dang, I screwed this guy in 2017. Just put out my calendar 20, 22 years later.

Leo Arzumanyan (13:37):

Get back. Yeah, that’s crazy.

Mahdi Hussein (13:39):

But it happened to us. It my point matches. It’ll haunt you forever.

Jeremy Stock (13:44):

Honestly. It is comprehensive. I’ll tell you, Mahdi, I talk to people every single day who they’re on the verge of losing their business because a lot of merchants, you can’t process for 30 days. That’s it.

Leo Arzumanyan (13:56):

You’re done. Especially if it’s a mom and pop shop, you’re screwed.

Jeremy Stock (13:59):

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Leo Arzumanyan (14:01):

It’s interesting how your story kind of has all this, a collision course of events where it just led you to where you are today. Now you guys are the successful company. I have a question. If your dad didn’t go out of town for that long period of time

Mahdi Hussein (14:11):

And

Leo Arzumanyan (14:12):

Didn’t have you go in the store, would you be here today?

Mahdi Hussein (14:13):

No, not at all. I’d probably be working as

Leo Arzumanyan (14:15):

A software engineer. Yeah. So it’s interesting how life works

Mahdi Hussein (14:19):

Out is that’s

Jeremy Stock (14:19):

Really incredible.

Leo Arzumanyan (14:20):

Well, now that we know that, I guess I’d be curious to ask you are, let me backtrack. Something that we’ve been talking a lot about lately is the compliance when it comes to dual pricing, surcharging, cash scanning, this whole umbrella of terms and processes that Visa and MasterCard are requiring the merchants comply with, but then they’re banging out fine after fine. Not really explaining the reasoning behind the fine. Not giving merchants a chance to cure these issues before they just get hit. And as we were talking off camera, they get hit with a thousand dollars fine, but then it goes to five 25,000. It really increases substantially. So what I want to ask you is what are you seeing with your customers when it comes to all this? When comes to these issues that we’re seeing?

Mahdi Hussein (15:10):

So Supersonic p os, we kind of rebranded from Petro. We’ve gotten more into the POS and that’s really what we do now is we’re a p os company. We, back in 2018, we were doing all this. Our big thing was dual pricing. So actually that’s when you guys became our council was since you, okay, hey, here’s the two price. And we were very big on, let’s show here back in 2018, cash price, card price at the line level

Mahdi Hussein (15:37):

On our PO Os and at the total. And more than that, again, there’s levels that people don’t put into. What I’ve seen over the years and dual pricing’s evolved a lot around the program itself. It used to just be like, Hey, let’s just put a cash adjustment at the end or non-cash adjustment or whatever and call it a dual. It’s not or cash discount. And I think a huge thing is even just most people don’t understand that cash discount and dual pricing are two different things. And I think almost everyone to this state throws those two terms. I think most people have learned what surcharging is versus dual pricing. To the degree to some extent. Extent. To some extent. I would not got more brand aware, more awareness in industry. I don’t think anyone really understands what dual pricing. That’s a different thing than cash discount because we were doing the two price method and we were big on the debit cards. There’s the Durbin amendment, it’s the thing people like don’t cash that technically debit cards are cash. You read a law, go look up a law of 2008. The DOD Frank Act says cash and debit cards are basically one the same.

Mahdi Hussein (16:42):

And so trying to understand some of those things like, oh, well, I’m going to cash discount. Great. So you’re going to charge the merchant the fees on cash on debit cards. And they’re like, no, we’re going to run this check. Oh, so it’s not debit card anymore. That bin range is the debit card bin range. And it’s like they don’t kind of catch those aspects. And we’ve obviously, we’ve seen Visa audits come through and we’ve seen these fines get passed down that are how Visa comes about. These a lot of times is, and they’re thorough. We had an audit and it came picture by picture. Each receipt, they went in once of cash or a debit card, once of a credit card, and then they went and took a picture of the storefront, the signage.

Leo Arzumanyan (17:23):

These were secret shoppers just for our listeners, right?

Mahdi Hussein (17:24):

Secret shop. Yeah, they secret shop. And they’re thorough. If they have that thorough record a lot of times of this is what we’re like, no, we got you. And it’s not like a lot of times they’re not just coming and saying, oh, we think we have you. It’s usually like, no, we secret shop. We have seven pictures and they’re waiting for you to say no. So they can hit you with that. Oh, so you remedied it, okay, you’re going to five now and you’re going to one to five jump. Because before it used to be a warning. And then five right now, I think actually I’m going to be the crazy person that says this. I think it’s a positive that they start the one versus the warning just because a lot of merchants will see the warning. It’s kind of like a speeding ticket.

Leo Arzumanyan (18:08):

Yeah. Kind of ignore like, oh, brush.

Mahdi Hussein (18:09):

Yeah, ignore it. And the next day later they get a five.

Leo Arzumanyan (18:11):

Five. Yeah,

Mahdi Hussein (18:12):

That’s a

Leo Arzumanyan (18:12):

Good point.

Mahdi Hussein (18:13):

At least the one, it’s an opportunity to open a dialogue

Leo Arzumanyan (18:16):

Between

Mahdi Hussein (18:16):

The ISO and the merchant. Like, Hey, you got hit one, it’s going to be five, and then they’re doing this. It’s not like, don’t think you’re going to get around

Leo Arzumanyan (18:23):

This. No, it’s going to be a five. Show us what you’re doing. Let us tell you how

Mahdi Hussein (18:27):

To fix it. And it opens that dialogue. So I’m the crazy person that says the one is Okay. That’s

Leo Arzumanyan (18:32):

A good argument. I get that. I haven’t heard anyone say that, but absolutely it makes sense.

Mahdi Hussein (18:37):

But it is definitely been something that they’ve been heavy on, and I think it’s absolutely something that it’s problem if not doing it

Leo Arzumanyan (18:44):

Right. Is this one of the number one issues you’re seeing in modern day payments industry or is there anything

Mahdi Hussein (18:51):

Else that you’re seeing? I think it’s the biggest risk vector for anybody looking to take on. So I also think I’m a little different in the sense that most people look at risk when they go, I’m going to transition from retail to wholesaler or whatever, and they think, okay, my risk is a 5,000 average ticket. And I’m like, well, the risk, that’s credit risk. But then there’s regulational risk, and then there’s also this new risk, which is network compliance risk. You don’t know if it’s a one, if it’s the same owner versus same address. And I’ve seen both situations get carried over on fines. A guy will come in with, he’ll have a perfectly compliant store, or not compliant. Let’s say they’re the first owner, then come in and say he gets a fine for one K, then he sells it to completely different dude, different corporation, different owner. The second owner comes in and says, well, it’s a different owner, and Visa comes back and UPS the fine to five, and it’s like, well, this is a different owner.

Leo Arzumanyan (19:51):

Yeah. You see, that’s ridiculous. Jeremy, we’ve never heard this one.

Mahdi Hussein (19:53):

No,

Leo Arzumanyan (19:54):

We talked in our last episode about one owner, multiple different businesses. Even then, I think that’s ridiculous that they get fined. They’re all separate entities, separate businesses. You should not, if you get hit with one K at one business, if your other business is non-compliant, they shouldn’t get hit with 5K after that. Right. That’s kind of,

Mahdi Hussein (20:10):

I mean, I don’t know if it’s legal or not, but I will say I think the biggest thing, it’s something that it’s hard for the store to deal with. Try going to an acquirer and telling them we want to contest this fine, and then trying to open a dialogue with actually opening it with Visa and the line of communication somewhere is a little broken.

Leo Arzumanyan (20:33):

We tried it go too far recently.

Mahdi Hussein (20:37):

It’s like, who the point the finger’s at? Is it different? Whatever. But I think there’s definitely an issue. A merchant gets hit with a fine and trying to find where that issue is hard,

Leo Arzumanyan (20:49):

And I’ve brought this up so many times. Like I said, I deal with this on a weekly basis. Clients call us every week and I’m usually the front of the line answering their questions. There’s such a big issue because you have to deal with the card brand rules, but then you have to deal with state rules, and a lot of states are now getting involved in passing their own laws. Yeah, New York a

Mahdi Hussein (21:08):

Lot. It’s the first.

Leo Arzumanyan (21:09):

Yeah. And then I love to throw this out as an example. Minnesota for surcharge caps, they allow up to 5%. Well, if you follow Minnesota’s law, you’re violating Visas 3% and MasterCard’s 4%.

Mahdi Hussein (21:21):

But then you get into, see, there’s so many nuances to that exact thing that we’ve seen like, okay, there’s a state level jurisdictional law, which will say, okay, this is surcharging, but the state law might be written to say surcharging dual price and are almost the same. Whereas obviously the car brands have this, I don’t want to say very rigid, but this fairly rigid, somewhat rigid kind of concept that at least established, it’s been established now we’ve seen it enough fines go out in the market that we know, okay, this is what surcharging is. This is what dual price, we know what these things are. Right? When you look at the state level ones, it’s hard. Okay. New York calls basically dual pricing surcharge. The law is written as surcharge, but what’s crazy to me is the concept of the whole cost of acceptance thing, which is no one also is looking at that. That’s been a huge, because I think we see, a lot of times we’ll go in and talk to a C-store and try to explain to them what they’re doing. It’s not compliant. I’ve seen it in a lot of states where an owners say, I’m doing the 50 cent under $5 thing,

Mahdi Hussein (22:26):

That’s violation of surcharge rules, or the, I’m going to charge 3% and then I’m going to pocket it the difference. And I’m like, I’m, that’s also not compliant. It’s above your cost of acceptance. They’re like, oh no, so why should I give it to you? What they’ll say, why am I paying an ISO to do this? They think to them, it’s like there’s no value of compliance, and there’s just that concept of what is this? Right.

Jeremy Stock (22:49):

Thank you for listening to this episode of the Payments Experts podcast, a podcast of global legal law firm. Visit us online today at global legal law firm.com. Matters discussed are all opinions and do not constitute legal advice. All events or likeness to real people and events is a coincidence.