My Akbank POS Terminal Access Blocked
Hello, in 2014, while I was a small business owner, I became a Vodafone dealer and was authorized to process Vodafone bill payments and prepaid package transactions at my store. At that time, Vodafone only had an agreement with Akbank, so all of us dealers opened commercial accounts with Akbank and got POS terminals. We loaded Vodafone dealership software onto these terminals to process bill payments. However, the machine only worked with cards; we couldn't accept cash payments for bills.
When I asked Vodafone headquarters about this, they said, "You pay with your debit card, and take cash from customers." My fellow dealers and I processed transactions using our debit cards to pay bills and accepted cash from customers. I never experienced any issues or warnings. I left the business in 2016.
In 2022, I opened a new business and use a cash register, but my POS terminal applications are being rejected. Beko is telling me, "You must have a POS with your cash register, or we'll shut it down." When I spoke with Akbank, they said they won't give me a POS because I "leaked information abroad."
Now, because Vodafone is a foreign company, I've been blacklisted since June 26, 2014, and no bank will give me a POS terminal. However, I have and actively use both commercial and personal credit cards. If the bank had called and warned me back then, saying, "Look, you've been processing transactions this way," I wouldn't have done it. In fact, none of us would have. We were only paying customer bills with money we had earned and had in our own accounts. Honestly, nothing seemed wrong to us at the time.
