Bradley O. Cebeci

Brad is an experienced commercial litigator who has focused his practice on payments law and ecommerce for 20+ years.

Brad routinely represents high risk merchants in high stakes disputes with acquiring banks and their third party agents – through informal advocacy (where possible) and aggressive litigation (where necessary) – to address improper billing, deficient reporting, early termination fee assessments, and excessive reserves withholding, as well as outright fraud and theft; and has recovered tens of millions of dollars in wrongly seized merchant funds for his clients. Brad has also helped countless merchants to get off MATCH; and handled numerous six and seven figure residual disputes for sales agents against ISOs, and ISOs against banks. In addition, Brad has extensive experience counseling acquirers, payfacs, gateways, ISOs, independent software vendors, sales agents, and merchants regarding card brand and regulatory compliance issues.

Brad also represents individuals and entities in a wide range of complex business matters outside the payments space, including partnership disputes and dissolutions, shareholder derivative actions, unfair competition claims, and intellectual property disputes involving trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets.

Online marketers turn to Brad to protect their brands and enforce their marks, ensure their compliance with consumer protection laws, pursue indemnity against rogue affiliates, resolve their affiliate marketing disputes, and defend them against private plaintiff TCPA claims, and regulatory investigations and civil enforcement actions by the Federal Trade Commission and state attorneys general.

Brad is a member of the California bar, and is licensed to practice in the state and federal courts of California. He also routinely works with trusted local counsel to represent clients in arbitrations, state court actions and federal district court actions throughout the United States, including Ohio, Texas, Nevada, Washington, Arizona, Illinois, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island. Brad is a fluent Spanish speaker.

Recent Representative Cases

Actively litigating a lawsuit against an ISO on behalf of its former sales agent. We are seeking more than $1.5M in outstanding residuals from the ISO, plus punitive damages of at least twice that amount for the ISO principal’s conduct in conspiring with our client’s merchant to send a fake termination notice that the ISO principal could use as pretext for the ISO to stop paying residuals to our client for the merchant’s continuing processing activity with the ISO.
Actively litigating a lawsuit against an ISO and its acquiring bank for breach of contract and civil theft involving more than $1 MM in our merchant clients’ funds.
Actively litigating a federal court action for trademark infringement, counterfeiting, false advertising and passing off against a marketer of dietary supplements for its unlawful use of our client’s trademarks to market its products via Amazon and Walmart.com.
Actively litigating multiple AAA arbitrations with an ISO and its acquiring bank for breach of contract, conversion and unlawful business practices flowing from the ISO’s improper use of an Early Termination Fee (which we contend is an unenforceable penalty clause) to deplete our merchant clients’ reserves.
Actively litigating several AAA arbitrations with various payment processors over improper reserves handling and overbilling of merchant accounts.
Since 2022, I have successfully obtained writs of attachment resulting in Court orders requiring the acquiring banks to post our merchant clients’ reserve funds into the Court’s registry in several recent California and Nevada state court actions. In each case, this led to a prompt settlement of the action on favorable terms to our merchant clients.
Since 2022, I have successfully recovered millions of dollars in platform and merchant reserves from Stripe on behalf of Stripe Connect Platform and Marketplace clients.
I have successfully obtained the removal of countless merchant clients from MATCH, through working with Mastercard directly, and through informal advocacy efforts with Amex, Stripe, PayPal, Priority and Elavon, among others, whereby they made a formal request to Mastercard to remove the merchants as “added in error.”