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Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

justuseapp.com

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Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#61
post #34

How are we a "high risk" merchant when our business is not different from Truebill.com (subscription tracking) and Ramp Inc (spend management) a company Stripe recently invested in? The cynical me says there is your answer right there. You are a bit to close to something Stripe invested in, or at least close enough to something they will offer as a service soon.

That's a ridiculous reason for blocking their account though. Is everyone learning from the best (cough Amazon)?

>Is everyone learning from the best (cough Amazon)?

You mean learning from the 5th highest market cap company? Isn't that sort of expected? The question you should ask if why the government doesn't step in since companies will do what they can to optimize stock price.

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#62
post #37

I have a hunch their main concern is this kind of marketing on your site: "Access the American market Our credit card comes with a U.S. billing address, so you can unlock features restricted to the U.S or Western markets especially if you don't live there." https://justuseapp.com/free-trial-card

The free trial cards were not offered with Stripe. They were offered with Flutterwave. It was launched in March. We started with Stripe in June.

That might not matter.

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#64
post #17

I really feel for the author. We had once decided to participate in Stripe's Identity Verification beta. After submitting the form to request participation, Stripe's system locked our account pending verification. We were fortunate in that we had a backup payment gateway integration "just in case", because otherwise we would have been completely unable to accept any payments at all for a full week. That week was stil…

That is a scary trust violation... Good for you that you went the extra mile in advance and not in hindsight.

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#65

Looking at what service they actually offer, I can easily see why Stripe would not want to do business with them. They offer private credit card services, which seems like it could easily be a magnet for people trying to launder stolen credit cards and the like. Just because they have not yet been hit with this, does not mean they are not at risk of becoming a target if they get a bit more known. Stripe doesn't want…

We preempted this by using Stripe radar along with our own tools. The fact we had only one charge-back in 3 months which we won, speaks to the efficiency of our protection mechanisms.

Finally, all bigger software shops face this issue so we are not unique.

1. https://kinsta.com/blog/credit-card-fraud-stripe/

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#66
Offtopic but I'm amazed you can legally hand out free (virtual) credit cards like these without anything close to a banking license.

The sales pitch, to pay for services anonymously, would make it trivial to use this service for money laundering. I hope the website is lying about how private those transactions really are.

I'm also a little sketched out by the fact the business resides in Wyoming while the person writing the blog says that Stripe wasn't available "in my country". The company has two directors, both of which are a vague "Cloud Peak Law" company which owns a bunch of unrelated LLCs, but no reference to any foreign owners. That's not very confidence inspiring either, in my opinion. I can find a similarly named company from Nigeria but there's no clear connection between the two.

Edit: the company's Cloud Peak Law P.C. "director" is a service used by a Wyoming company set up specifically to allow anonymous registration of a business, set up there specifically because anonymous businesses are allowed by the state. I wouldn't be surprised if one of this law company's other clients used their anonymous-business-as-a-service for something sketchy, causing Stripe to go up the chain and mark the entire Cloud Peak Law "person" as unreliable and disputed. After all, going by the public record, the company is actually run by this law company, not the person writing this blog post. That may be why Stripe is able to claim a dispute that doesn't exist in their own management system. I don't know if that's the reason, of course, because there's little transparency from other side here.

I don't think Stripe should be lying about the nonexistent disputes, but if I were to design a money laundering detection algorithm, this kind of stuff is exactly what I would watch out for. I'm guessing Stripe's machine learning triggered on this company and that they just picked a random TOS bullet point to end the contract by knowing that you won't be able to sue them for it anyway.

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#68
As someone with a pre-launch SaaS who just signed up for Stripe, reading this has me shook up a little bit. I'm Stripe-integrated for payments, and poised to go through Stripe Atlas soon, or at least I was.. Now I have no idea what to do. I know that OP's story isn't spotless, but what if it's my thing that gets in this situation too?

I wish I could say I'm joking but I don't need this right now, I'm ~90 days out from launch, I should be tweaking final touches, not building just-in-case backup integrations with other processors.

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We literally don't have the resources to do so at this point.

Who wants to bet there was an engineer who pointed out all of the risks way earlier at the company and whose concerns were promptly dismissed....

Whether or not this is the case here, this statement resonates with me on a few uncomfortable levels.

Re: Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

#70

How are we a "high risk" merchant when our business is not different from Truebill.com (subscription tracking) and Ramp Inc (spend management) a company Stripe recently invested in? The cynical me says there is your answer right there. You are a bit to close to something Stripe invested in, or at least close enough to something they will offer as a service soon.

Or, alternatively, the business (issuing virtual credit cards to consumers, seemingly worldwide) is pretty different from truebill.com (subscription tracking, yes, but doesn't issue cards, AFAICT) or Ramp (issues corporate cards instead of consumer cards, where I would assume there's a bit more due diligence).

https://justuseapp.com/free-trial-card claims that one of their main selling points is

> Access the American market

> Our credit card comes with a U.S. billing address, so you can unlock features restricted to the U.S or Western markets especially if you don't live there.

Isn't this just straight up fraud?

Admittedly I'm not familiar with any of the services mentioned, so correction is welcome.

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