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

justuseapp.com

201–210 of 302 posts

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

#201
This reminds me of the false-positive vs false-negative dilemma faced in medical testing. Either you optimize for low cost and convenience, or for catching true-positives or true-negatives. For HIV testing for instance, if someone does test HIV-positive falsely, their changed safer behavior in the short-term wouldn't harm anyone, and follow-up tests could catch that they're actually negative. But if we falsely say someone does not have cancer, when they do, it could grow a lot in the short-term before symptoms arise and another test is given. They may also use a lot of unnecessary care trying to diagnose the issue after that false-negative cancer test.

What's the right solution? It's case by case, down to a mixture of morality and expertise to decide.

Seems these tech algorithms often generate a lot of false-positives wrongfully, or that's what's posted online afterwards. It'd be interesting to dig into the numbers for various platforms, see if they're falsely negative for spam accounts and bad actors. We wouldn't hear posts on HN about spam bots that cut into FB's bottom line, would we?

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

#202
post #111

Buddy, your business is selling "privacy cards" and "virtual cards" which hide the identity of the person making the transaction. It's a massive money laundering red flag, it's not at all surprising that Stripe doesn't want to deal with you.

I “hide my identity” daily when I make transactions, it’s called cash, guess that’s a red flag.

Aren’t cash businesses well known as money laundering opportunities?

Cash transactions above a specific dollar value literally generate reports to the government for investigation.

So, I think, yes, cash transactions tend to generate suspicion among anti-money laundering efforts.

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

#203
post #108

(Stripe cofounder.) Ugh, apologies. Something very clearly went wrong here and we’re already investigating. Zooming out, a few broader comments: * Unlike most services, Stripe can easily lose very large amounts of money on individual accounts, and thousands of people try to do so every day. We are de facto running a big bug bounty/incentive program for evading our fraudulent user detection systems. * Errors like thes…

    Stripe can easily lose very large
    amounts of money on individual accounts
How so?

Is that because Stripe settles the payment on their end (they pay the merchant) before the payment to Stripe is settled?

Can crypto solve this?

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

#204
My bank (Bunq) also has virtual cards and allows to track subscriptions. Pretty nice to have. It doesn't have an easy option to cancel subscriptions though, but I actually don't need that to be honest. Still, nice niche idea.

Interestingly, because you can get these debit cards and IBANs with the subscription, Bunq is often used by money mules and the like, giving Bunq a bad name in the process. Wouldn't surprise me if something similar happened here, even if just as a preventive measure.

I do think its strange Justuseapp.com allows people to get a virtual debit card with an address in USA, even when they're not in USA (their customer). Either way, if you're using this ("financial VPN based in USA") to steer away from US government you're doing it wrong. A proper use case would be to avoid PII getting leaked on all kind of online services.

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

#205

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…

>we live in the 2021 century

I know I've been in lockdown for a while now, but what century is it?

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

#206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking specifically about this type of card: https://justuseapp.com/privacy-card That looks like it definitely allows transactions.

Ah, yes that is sketchy.

Is it? How is it any different from something like Privacy.com?

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, if you’re willing to break the law and risk the consequences, you can get up to all sorts of stuff. Same as anything? Like, “So, if I want to disrupt a competitor, all I have to do is hire thugs to smash all their stuff?” Yeah, that’d do it. Good luck.

I think the point is that this attack vector can be pretty anonymous and absolutely deadly to the target company. This attack is also not protected by insurance, like someone setting fire to your office would be. It’s fair to explore just how vulnerable a company can be to this type of attack from a malicious competitor.

It's a weak point.

You can also pull API keys from most apps and get them banned from advertising networks.

You can hire people to review bomb.

Hire people to make fake news about a competitor go viral.

Someone willing to do illegal things can always hire other people to do illegal things for them "anonymously"

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

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious how many human reviews are triggered after ML flags a problem. If it's nearly 100%, why have the ML step at all?

Because the algorithm only flags like less than 1% of users?

Maybe I wasn't clear. I meant, why have the ML algorithm disable the account automatically if human review happens nearly 100% of the time, rather than simply have ML flag the account for human review, and let them decide whether to disable the account.

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

#209
post #108

(Stripe cofounder.) Ugh, apologies. Something very clearly went wrong here and we’re already investigating. Zooming out, a few broader comments: * Unlike most services, Stripe can easily lose very large amounts of money on individual accounts, and thousands of people try to do so every day. We are de facto running a big bug bounty/incentive program for evading our fraudulent user detection systems. * Errors like thes…

Stripe can easily lose very large amounts of money on individual accounts How so? Is that because Stripe settles the payment on their end (they pay the merchant) before the payment to Stripe is settled? Can crypto solve this?

I don't think crypto would solve this particular issue. Stripe needs the ability to back out of moving money, so there's several settlement periods for different parts of the transaction and ways to appeal transfers retroactively.

I suspect fraudster's are able to wait out this period without detection so they can cash out. If this is the case, then even time locking smart contracts won't help, as the fraudsters just wait out the time period. At that point Stripe would have even less recourse to recover money, as retroactive transfers are not possible at that point.

I could see services such as their debit card offering being abusable too.

They also likely have to worry about things such as predatory recurring payments as those will result in chargebacks which could ultimately fall on Stripe to foot.

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

#210
I know machine learning rules us all now, with blackbox algorithms handing down Brazil-worthy decisions, but I would like to understand how there was not an extremely basic function at the end, as a sanity check, that would SELECT from some table marked MiscreantEvents WHERE Infraction = 'PaymentDispute', totals them up, and then offers that as a comparison against the "Too Many Payment Disputes" that has gotten barfed out of said Byzantine black box? Surely if that number is zero that would be an excellent sanity check.
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