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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

#71

Post by ceejayoz »

burlesona wrote: post #54

It’s disappointing that they didn’t give you a clear explanation, but it seems like the second email is saying their humans looked at your business model, issue US cards to consumers all around the world so they can manage subscription spend - and, implicitly, so they can dispute charges or cut off cards as a way to stop paying a shady subscription service - is high risk and Stripe doesn’t want to do it. I can unders…

> What I don’t understand is why they couldn’t write a clear email explaining their position so you would actually know what’s up.

In some cases, it’s forbidden by law to reveal to someone that they’ve been flagged for money laundering.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/31/1020.320

> No bank, and no director, officer, employee, or agent of any bank, shall disclose a SAR or any information that would reveal the existence of a SAR.

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

#72

Post by grey-area »

InsomniacL wrote: post #51
sudhirj wrote: post #20

If I understand correctly you use Stripe Issuing to give people cards that they can then spend with in a way that you control? How do people recharge their Justuseapp cards? You charge their real card and credit their virtual ones? And if one of the apps being used makes a unauthorised charge do you then raise a dispute on behalf of the customer? I'm not trying to apologise for Stripe, I'm trying to see what's specia…

"You can then use the virtual credit card to signup for free trials on the web and on apps without worry. We approve only free trials and not actual purchases." I assume when you sign up to a free trail, they'll charge your card £0.00 to confirm it's a valid card, then when the trail ends and they try to automatically charge you for a full subscription they'll block the transaction. https://justuseapp.com/free-trial-…

This is not the intended use for stripe issuing at all, and would lead to stripe handling thousands of disputes from companies trying to charge cards with 0 balance after trials end.

I can see why they blocked it.

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

#73

Post by luckylion »

lordlic wrote: post #26
jsiepkes wrote: post #7

I guess stripe wasn't kidding when they said they would disrupt online payments. On a more serious note; How much further is society going to allow this kind of thing? Hiding behind templated e-mails without any explanation. Disrupting people's lives who become collateral damage with no way out.

Why would "society" care whether company A makes money instead of company B? This kind of thing is only remotely concerning to, like, VCs and tech workers hoping to strike it rich in the startup game.

That's a weird take. Society wants stability. Having large companies companies use a random number generator to determine whether they will arbitrarily blacklist (and thereby try to destroy) smaller companies isn't leading to stability.

Yes, society doesn't break down. Just as it doesn't break down if 1% of people were murdered each year. But society won't accept 1% being murdered. And once it's public enough, they'll also not accept that companies do stuff like that. Case in point: banks are tightly regulated exactly because of that, we need to rely on them to handle money efficiently, so we don't want randomness in their processes. Maybe it's time that Stripe & friends get more regulatory oversight as well, since they don't seem to be capable of managing themselves.

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

#74

Post by kiklion »

tiborsaas wrote: post #45
travoc wrote: post #27

These types of problems could be fixed by doing the three things big tech hates: 1. Hire human beings 2. Empower them to fix problems 3. Let your users talk to them

Hiring humans is not as scalable as technology is. You can't just hire 150 more customer support agents _each month_ like you can fire up another Kubernetes cluster. They need training, middle managers, leads, special training, good tooling, office space, adjusted KPI-s, etc. Ideally, good companies will find a balance with AI and human operators that's also sustainable as a business.

> Ideally, good companies will find a balance with AI and human operators that's also sustainable as a business.

This is the crux of it. What do you define as a balance? In this example, Stripe shouldn’t be using ML to actually ban accounts but instead to flag accounts for manual review.

My company distributes advertisements. We need to watch every ad we ever distribute to ensure both its quality and legality. We have and still are investigating ML to improve this process, but because regulations put the cost on us for false negatives, we would use ML only to identify when it knows an ad fails our checks. It would then pulls it from the QC queue before any tech manually reviews it and emails the client informing it was blocked and why it was blocked and a link to a form where they can request a manual review if they think it was a false positive.

Our contracts allow for a fee to be imposed on the client if they challenge a block which is upheld after manual review.

Doing it this way we reduced our tech workload by removing clearly violating ads from QC queue and we give the client a clear and quick way to challenge the results of the ML.

At least, that is the plan here. It’s still in R&D.

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

#75

Post by mtmail »

burlesona wrote: post #58
AussieWog93 wrote: post #23

I went through the same thing. Some ML algorithm at Stripe randomly classified my business (bog standard WooCommerce/WordPress e-Commerce store selling a single product in low volumes) as a risk and I found that the process for escalating it was Kafkaesque and slow. Switched to Pin Payments[1] shortly after that experience and have never looked back. Of course, we live in the 2021 century and algorithms will flag iss…

This product was leaning heavily on Stripe’s issuing API, so I don’t think pin payments is a viable alternative. I’m actually not sure if anybody else is a viable alternative. Is there another service that offers card issuing as an API?

https://privacy.com/card-issuing does

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

#76

Post by chrisandchris »

0des wrote: post #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 fro…

Comment from tyingq:

> 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

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

#77

Post by avnigo »

jeroenhd wrote: post #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 writ…

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

As far as I understand it, a lot of those work like VISA gift cards.

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

#78

Post by jsiepkes »

amelius wrote: post #24
jsiepkes wrote: post #7

I guess stripe wasn't kidding when they said they would disrupt online payments. On a more serious note; How much further is society going to allow this kind of thing? Hiding behind templated e-mails without any explanation. Disrupting people's lives who become collateral damage with no way out.

> On a more serious note; How much further is society going to allow this kind of thing? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman > The typical duties of an ombudsman are to investigate complaints and attempt to resolve them, usually through recommendations (binding or not) or mediation. Ombudsmen sometimes also aim to identify systemic issues leading to poor service or breaches of people's rights. At the national lev…

I don't want to sound too cynical but I don't know of an ombudsman which has binding authority. Here in the Netherlands all ombudsman I know are non-binding.

I personally know of 2 dealings with an Ombudsman in the Netherlands. One involved me personally and another one of a good friend. In both cases the ombudsman advised in our favor. In both cases the reaction on the advice was: "Thanks for the advice, ombudsman, but we are not going to act on it.".

A non-binding ombudsman is in my experience just a paper tiger to make an organization look good and I have never seen a binding one.

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

#79

Post by dexen »

Spare_account wrote: post #59
Zarathu wrote: 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…

>We were fortunate in that we had a backup payment gateway integration "just in case" This seems like the key point here. I'm not a software guy or even a payments guy, I'm a network infrastructure engineer. For anything that we want more than 99% uptime, we put in two of everything, sometimes more. Two separate service providers, ideally coming down different physical paths where practical.

"Treat infrastructure as possible failure points and prepare accordingly" holds just as well for the payment infrastructure. Interesting and fresh perspective, thank you for sharing.

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

#80

Post by soco »

marcinzm wrote: post #61
r_singh wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm afraid the answer to that question is called "lobby".
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