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Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

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321–330 of 705 posts

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#321
post #87

The worst part about these type of cases is not being able to get a straight answer. There is a whole subset of big tech that has taken the "you must be a fraudster therefore we can't unfuck the situation" approach to customer support. It's an arms race with fraudsters that eventually sucks in legitimate businesses.

I hate seeing comments like this because Stripe’s hands are tied here. Anytime a bank or payment processor has frozen or shut down an account and you’re getting stonewalled it’s almost guaranteed to be an AML related issue and it’s against the law for them to tip a customer off that their account is being or might be investigated for suspicious activity. This isn’t Stripe deciding that you’re a fraudster and so you’r…

I don't think that's accurate.

I do some payments that are ridiculously suspect but legal.

I have never been completely blackholed and given robot responses, any time a problem comes up.

Stripe is lower margin than other banks/payment providers, so they don't look very hard.

They have a very strong incentive to throw away troublesome customers, which they do.

I don't think it's right to say Stripe's "hands are tied".

They could spend more to identify false positives, but they don't.

If I used Stripe for all of my transactions I would be blocked. I know this because I have 100% confirmed this from an inside source at Stripe and at a countries central bank.

Yet somehow I have and continue to maintain accounts with other banks without breaking the law.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#322
post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It certainly sounds like it’s some sort of e-pimp business based on what we know so far.

Source for that? OP is usign a throwaway account and hasn’t said anything about the business.

That's most of it; having clients that have their own sub-stripe accounts that are triggering fraud detection and not mentioning the business.

It's not much to go on but it's all we have.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate seeing comments like this because Stripe’s hands are tied here. Anytime a bank or payment processor has frozen or shut down an account and you’re getting stonewalled it’s almost guaranteed to be an AML related issue and it’s against the law for them to tip a customer off that their account is being or might be investigated for suspicious activity. This isn’t Stripe deciding that you’re a fraudster and so you’r…

> it’s against the law for them to tip a customer off that their account is being or might be investigated for suspicious activity What law do you think forbids this? In my experience running global payments through multiple rails, on an OFAC/risk ping you typically get a request for enhanced due diligence, which normally looks to the payee like “send me a picture of your drivers license”. The most common result is t…

The Bank Secrecy Act. And I don’t “think” it. I know it.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#325
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'm not sure if suing is a reasonable way to go - suing would work if there's a legal right to continued service or "answers" but IMHO there is not, technically for such B2B deals Stripe has the legal right to say "you haven't broken any explicit restriction or terms of service, but we simply decided to terminate the contract because we didn't like your business" or "we threw a bunch of dice and arbitrarily chose to".

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A payment system like that would run face first into Know Your Customer (KYC) laws and bet shut down. Great, then let's change those laws.

Good luck, not going to happen. Democratic systems won't change these laws because there is no popular support for change - there is a reasonably large 'law-and-order' and 'corruption-as-main-concern' voter demographic who strongly support these laws, and the niche of HN techies and libertarians who'd oppose them is insignificantly small in comparison; and authoritarian systems won't change these laws because their l…

I acknowledge that that is the prevailing sentiment, and the obviously correct conclusion. And yet I can't accept that kind of defeatist thinking. To embrace defeatism on that level is to basically accept that nothing will ever change, and we know that things do, occasionally, change. It's not always clear exactly what it takes to create wide-scale societal change, and yes one could easily spend their whole life engaging in activism and die with nothing to show for it. Yet people do still persist, for their own reasons. And sometimes the good guys do win.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#327
post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, and my experience is outside finance (more spam and fraud prevention). Even if it is government under the hood you have to know what you're accused of. Not American so I doubt the US political system is interested in hearing from me, but I agree that's the only way of solving the deeper AML problems.

> Even if it is government under the hood you have to know what you're accused of. This is exactly why the whole process is suspect. The government farms out the policing of certain financial crimes onto the financial institutions as a prerequisite for operating the business. If the government came along and froze your bank account you’d have a right to ask why and a right to get some answers. But instead the governm…

I'm trying to understand your position here:

You think AML/KYC laws, as they currently exist, are unconstitutional?

edit:

That's a fine position to have, but it's a fringe one, and I don't think you should be offering it as a reason why Stripe does what it does that's generally accepted by everyone else.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#328

Used to work for a “high risk” payment processor, we inherited tons of accounts that were terminated by Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Here’s one small bit of inside info that may help the newer businesses out there: Most real payment processors (e.g. banks, merchant services companies) “underwrite” a company BEFORE allowing them to process. Underwriting means they look over the business model, financials, etc and make…

>It’s a very unethical practice because it ends up hitting businesses at the worst possible time, when the termination or suspension causes a huge financial hit.

You forgot the part where Paypal get to keep your money when they close your account. And it's not like they only keep it temporarily in case of lawsuits/chargebacks, they just keep it forever. I still can't believe that crap is legal.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#329

According to previous posts* this company sells something related to cannibis. I'd love to know why certain categories are always flagged or silently banned. Cannibis, sex toys, porn, crypto, etc. Payment processors seem to always give these categories the worst service and whenever a company is nuked like this, it's usually one of these categories. Why is that? It almost feels like there's some secret government org…

"whatever is going on due to natural causes" lol

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#330
post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That still does not excuse the total information blackout.
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