Sue them for lost interest. You should have a strong case in principle, however, in practice, it's most likely not worth it for you (which is the real reason why this is happening). But if you have a lawyer friend who can give a first opinion for free, you could give 'em a call.
Ask HN: Stripe holding funds for 120 days for no reason
21–30 of 124 posts
Re: Ask HN: Stripe holding funds for 120 days for no reason
#22Is there an equivalent to Stripe, from a DX perspective, that allows you to create an actual merchant account instead of being a sub account of Stripe?
Having an actual merchant account, and going through KYB, seems like it’d solve a lot of these problems.
Re: Ask HN: Stripe holding funds for 120 days for no reason
#23We switched to Authorize.net because the business risk at Stripe was just too high. The api isn't near as good, but it works, and we don't worry about random account freezes.
Re: Ask HN: Stripe holding funds for 120 days for no reason
#24Sounds exactly like PayPal. Is there a law of nature that forces payment processors to act like this?
The business of payment processing is actually the business of managing fraud, and everybody tries to lower costs as they grow and age. Unless there’s specific external regulation, there’s a regression towards being awful.
I wonder if providers like this could offer an option to pay some chunk of money that would cover the cost of a thorough background check and human review of all aspects of your business. They would then be able to trust you enough to not freeze anything without future human intervention.
Re: Ask HN: Stripe holding funds for 120 days for no reason
#25HN is not the forum to file customer support tickets. Stripe has great customer support and even live chat support.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=fal... If something is clear, is that Stripe support is not that great and that HN is the last resort for many people.
I have noticed that when people complain about Stripe on Reddit in places like /r/personalfinance, people direct them to HackerNews with instructions to escalate here.
Re: Ask HN: Stripe holding funds for 120 days for no reason
#26Sounds exactly like PayPal. Is there a law of nature that forces payment processors to act like this?
Not a law of nature, but there are laws of man against “Tipping-off” [1].
Add in the fact there are people trying very hard all the time to defraud the payment processor.
So now you can directly measure false negatives in fraud detection, but your false positive rate is harder to figure out. And whatever mechanism you use to recover from false positives can be abused by true fraudsters.
So it becomes a hard problem - but it is a problem which customers of the payment processor are paying them to solve. So it’s definitely reasonable to expect better.
1: I think a reasonable-ish definition of tipping off: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470685280.ch...
Re: Ask HN: Stripe holding funds for 120 days for no reason
#27You're fine with having payments refunded for (presumably) services rendered?
Either it's not a business, but a mere hobby, or there is something to it you're keeping from us.
Probably the former, but it makes me immediately suspicious, even with the recurring and well-documented "situation" with Stripe.
Re: Ask HN: Stripe holding funds for 120 days for no reason
#28Sounds like they could be using your cash as funding.
If they hold a bunch of cash from people it is effectively theirs for that period of time. This could prevent them from needing to raise a funding round if done enough.
Some businesses are literally customer funded like these.
If you want to read more search for "negative cash operating cycle".
Re: Ask HN: Stripe holding funds for 120 days for no reason
#29Next time, transfer hundreds of thousands of drug money when you first open the account
and then your normal sized payments will be well within the expectations of size and volume so the payment processor won't flag your account
Re: Ask HN: Stripe holding funds for 120 days for no reason
#30Sounds like they could be using your cash as funding. If they hold a bunch of cash from people it is effectively theirs for that period of time. This could prevent them from needing to raise a funding round if done enough. Some businesses are literally customer funded like these. If you want to read more search for "negative cash operating cycle".
> hold a bunch of cash from people it is effectively theirs
In the U.S., I don’t think money transmitters are allowed to do this. (They can keep the interest earned on it.)
Financing from deposits is more a crypto thing.