I have taken on a new contract job that will require me to accept credit card payments online or over the phone. I absolutely -can not- afford to lose this job offer as I have already invested a lot of time and money in attaining it and preparing for it.

The developer I am working with had recommended ProPay as a merchant service because they base most of their instructions on the use of ProPay. I went ahead and made an account there, but when I went to process my first orders I had found that the service had been manually cut off. No direct reasons were given, but I suspect it is because someone went and ran a manual personal credit check on me.

I have a credit score of 600, due to a series of unfortunate events where my family decided to abuse my generosity. Of course, you can not explain this hard-lesson-learned to banks.

This said, does anyone have any suggestions for a merchant account service that I can use that will accept me without a credit check or with a score like mine?

It needs to be newbie-friendly, as I have never had to accept payments before or have an account. It also should allow me to send invoices and allow customers to pay directly online; there should not be a very low cap on the monthly transactions, because I do anticipate a large number of sales. I can pay for any fees, so long as they are not predatory and rediculous.

Are merchant account providers really safe from hackers and other forms of fraud?

pal really is?? Do people trust paypal to conduct business??

I have read the worse of the worse stories about Paypal, Authorize.net and a few other merchant services. Where can I find a low-risk online merchant service with maximum credibility and hopefully one that is local to North Carolina. (if not then which ever)