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

  if (transactionInvalid > 5) {
     if (accountPossiblyFraudulent) {
       sendAccountCancellationEmail(accountid))
       stripeBackEnd.closeUserAccount()
     }
  }

Big companies like Stripe need to be reigned in with legislation because they wield the power to destroy businesses and they do it without care.

Where is Stripes ombudsman - a customer advocate - an independent person with CEO level power within Stripe who's primary duty is to customers and is a channel of last resort when your normal support channels have failed? Why don't you have this?

How can you allow Hacker News to be the channel of last resort?

You're running a financial services company and doing it as though it's unimportant to cancel someones ability to invoice.

The lack of protection for your customers is why companies like Stripe need much tougher regulation.

In fact, you as the co-founder of Stripe should NOT be answering here on Hacker News. You should make it a point to NOT personally resolve such issues because if you have to, then you are acknowledging serious failure in your companies systems and serious letdown of your customers. In fact you should be appalled that Stripe so fails it's customers that they must go to social media to solve valid problems. You should simply be able to rely on some lower level person in Stripe finding this and posting a short message saying "please contact our ombudsman", and being assured that your ombudsman will give it due and fair consideration.

So surely this is not the only time Stripe has mistakenly cancelled an account - but this is the one case where the person who's account was cancelled was able to get their issue on the front page of Hacker News. Therefore is can be said that many people have their accounts mistakenly cancelled by Stripe and have no recourse - again where is your ombudsman?

This is serious systemic failure of Stripe. And the worst thing is it is not just Stripe - this is what people have now come to expect from giant companies that are a critical part of business - such as Apple's app store - people now expect that the company might one day send a random email saying, in effect that your business is over. You can't or won't fix it, so the law should.

Stripe founder need to hear this: "sorry" ain't enough.

I think the idea of minimizing harm is a really good one.

I've never done any machine learning type stuff, but, based on my limited understanding, I think there are probably a few issues at play that make things difficult.

I think the feedback loop for an algorithm is likely important. If you're training an algorithm to match fingerprints, you have a few things that work in your favor. First, matching is easier with fewer samples, so you can train the model incrementally with larger and larger data sets. Second, the process of identifying false positives is easy, relatively definitive, and isn't influenced by external factors. If the ML algorithm only has X% confidence you send it to a human who assesses the match and tells the algorithm the answer so it can "learn" for the next situation that's similar.

Contrast that with something like payment processing. First, you need to scale with demand and it's not easy to incrementally train the algorithm. Second, false positives don't have a tight feedback loop. A false positive negatively affects a customer and every case is different. You need to rely on external, subjective data that isn't definitive enough to be useful to an algorithm (IMO).

I think matching fingerprints is a good analogy to illustrate some of the problems, especially when you hear things along the lines of "looked too similar to fraudulent activity." With fingerprints, you could give 10 to an amateur and they could probably match them accurately. Scale that up to 10,000 and you have so many that look similar, but not identical and you need a professional to do the matching.

I think ML is similar. It's better on a small scale than it is on a large scale and just doesn't scale up as well as the sales pitch says (unless it's assessing problems with definitive solutions). The issue here is that tech companies are treating ML like it scales in a linear fashion. Just throw more compute at it and 10x the scale, right? Wrong (IMO).

There was another comment here that said something along the lines of getting to 98% accuracy and deciding not to serve the other 2%. I think that's what's happening everywhere, but rather than explicitly telling customers they're not welcome, companies are simply letting their ML algorithms run to find the equilibrium where they can manage the "not positive" rate.

And that goes back to your idea of minimizing harm. They don't want to. They don't care if they promise you service even though you're borderline in terms of triggering false positives. You're part of the data set for their machine learning algorithm and that means you're viewed as acceptable collateral damage. They'll ruin your life to train their ML algorithm(s).

I'm in Australia and our 4 banks are way too powerful, and some of the worlds most profitable on a percentage basis, with nearly the highest paid executives globally.

In the decade since I deleted that site in despair, there have been several royal commissions / public inquiries into the shocking unfair and outright illegal actions all the 4 banks systematically entrenched, including forging customer signatures, ripping off customers at every opportunity, including siphoning customers money when the bank knew they had died, facilitating money laundering of cash earned from drugs on vast scales, influencing our captured politicians to roll back recently-legislated consumer protection laws the previous govt enacted, to absolve them from any culpability whatsoever by writing larger "liar loans" they knew people would struggle to live with, and these are which still going strongly (approx 1 in 3 recently admitting to this in a follow-up survey).

The AUD$35 per chargeback was an easy profit centre for them a decade ago, and no way would they ever take my side when it was free money for them.

I had a USD bank with them for the ecommerce dropship account. Our average order was around USD$51 with a little over 10% gross profit.

I was the only one losing out. The bank, my dropship supplier, and the card fraudsters all got paid and received their goods.