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Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

news.ycombinator.com

61–70 of 705 posts

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#61
That sounds a lot like the stories I heard about Paypal, and their fraud detection team. There was an article interviewing someone about it. Back in the day, Paypal had to build tools to detect fraud because no one else was doing it at scale, at the time. I recall something about investigators outside of Paypal started to use those tools as well. I would not be surprised if Stripe had to create similar tools for themselves as well. Without transparency, it's hard to say what the false positive rates are, or what has changed in internal processes or in the regulatory landscape that might have triggered something different.

Stripe abstracts away a lot of the complexities involved in the payment and banking world, but there's a ton of infrastructure there related to detecting fraud and money laundering. Unfortunately, the lack of transparency makes what might be a leaky abstraction look like a Kafkaesque bureaucratic nightmare.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#62
post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your sentence caught me off guard, maybe I am reading it wrong. Do you mean email as a payment system, or do you mean email as an example of a decentralized system?

The latter - a system that is like e-mail (decentralized) but allows people to send money to each other. We have many such systems being developed, but you get downvoted on HN for promoting them, since people assume you are a scammer, a criminal, etc.

Ironically, email is becoming increasingly centralized. See this story from just a few days go

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32715437

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#63

Stories like this are why ultimately all payments will transition to crypto based and self custody. Having your livelihood at the whim of an algorithm is not only not cool. It is not sustainable. None of the legacy payment rails can be trusted to run without interruption. This includes Stripe, paypal and even the expected FedNOW service being introduced next year.

Agreed, the no intermediary for a payment is a beautiful use case.

However I acknowledge the issue with volatility (to be solved!).

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#64

Quoted post unavailable.

Worth noting that he's using Stripe Connect, which is more complicated than just a regular "payment pathway". Having a second provider for that is decent advice, but it's not as simple as your pretty flippant comment would suggest.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#65

It sucks this happened to you, but like with all the PayPal hate stories, I notice you're very careful not to describe what type of business you operate.

Assuming it's legal, should it matter?

Yes, it matters deeply, because some product categories are so rife with fraud (or are positioned so prominently in the fraud value chain, from carders to cashers) that they can't be served cost-effectively by conventional payment processors.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#66

I work at Stripe. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and I can dig into this?

You’re a nice guy to try and solve OP’s problem. But OP’s problem isn’t really the problem. The problem is that OP’s problem is reposted here weekly by someone new and they have to pray that you or someone else use backchannels to solve their hellish issue. There’s a meta-problem. Can you just dig into that problem instead? Then you won’t have to dig into these sub-problems once a week.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#67
post #2

At what point does it make sense to sue these companies to compel them to answer these questions? I know, that's expensive... but I'm willing to contribute to a legal fund to make payment processors answer questions.

I second this! Also, a lobbying effort should be funded, to compel these companies by law to provide detailed feedback.

[deleted]

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#68
post #2

At what point does it make sense to sue these companies to compel them to answer these questions? I know, that's expensive... but I'm willing to contribute to a legal fund to make payment processors answer questions.

Hint: at this point. Right here. Right now.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#69
I also noticed the suspiciously absent description of OP's business model. That said, though Stripe has never wronged my business, our dependence on them is such a large liability that it obviously has to be treated as such in our business planning. Our integration with Stripe is kept light and somewhat abstract, and we're able to replace it without putting a ton of work into overhauling our billing system. Naturally, this rules out the full use of Stripe's offerings, but the risk/reward trade-off is overwhelmingly in favor of a light integration. I would strongly advise a similar approach for anyone else integrating with any payment processor.

Side note: the cryptocurrency shills in this thread are pathetic.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#70
post #17
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It does matter if it actually violates the TOS, or could be vaguely interpreted to do so I guess?

And how many times does a company claim you have violated TOS and then refuse to tell you how you violated the TOS? To act in this manner nullifies the TOS in my opinion.

It definitely sucks for the merchant companies ending up on the pointy end of the TOS. But you also need to consider the payment company side of things. They face a relentless tide of fraud and shady merchants. If they are too transparent about exactly how they detect a problem, that makes it much easier for the criminals, scam artists, and dodgy merchants to get around TOS enforcement.

The real culprits here are the people trying to violate the TOS, plus everybody's desire for cheap services and easy onboarding. The historical alternative was very expensive setup (e.g., spend a few years building a relationship with your local bank branch manager and establishing a financial track record). Making it easy to get started means that most problems will show up down the road, and the lower merchant costs means less money to pay for smart people to carefully untangle the truly dodgy from accounts that just look that way.

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