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Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

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Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#431

Post by [deleted] »

joecot wrote: post #238
orionint wrote: post #121

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…

The difference is between the company having their own merchant account with a bank (which is what most large companies do) using an online payment gateway, and not having one and leveraging the processor's instead (which is what Stripe, Paypal, etc provide). When you apply for a merchant account you get that approval and underwriting, but with a hefty application fee for obvious reasons. If your payment gateway shut…

[deleted]

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#432

Post by projektfu »

Are you facilitating the use of Stripe's API for accounts that are wholly owned by your customers or are you offering the use of your Stripe relationship for managing multiple accounts that you hold in custody for your customers? For the former, I think you shouldn't take responsibility for Stripe's behavior toward your customers, but you should have them set up an additional merchant account somewhere else. For the latter, I can see how that would put someone into a situation that might be both open to abuse and against the TOS.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#433

Post by toss1 »

donmaq wrote: post #338
toss1 wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is the case, that is fine. Then Stripe can FORKING SAY SO UP FRONT. And those businesses can grumble but go elsewhere Implying that you are happy to take on responsibility for infrastructure of someone's business, then unilaterally and without notice or opportunity to cure any issue, is pretty much tantamount to theft. Stripe in this case appears to be accepting money, then failing to provide service, and in…

> I don't like externalizing problems to other parties as a business model You just described the entire gig economy

YES! I have no idea why you are being downvoted on that - while it wasn't in mind while I wrote it, it does indeed apply! All the problems are at placed on the gig worker and the Ubers/AirBnBs/Instacarts of the world provide the software and work to shed as much responsibility as possible onto the drivers/hosts/workers. Apparently, there's a fair number of ppl on here who either do not see that or whose salary depends on them not seeing it.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#434

Post by ceejayoz »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #413
ceejayoz wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No; hair color is not what that legislation covers. It is entirely legal in the United States to discriminate against redheads, or people whose names start with B, or Hacker News users, or people who enjoy skiing.

I do believe that there could be an argument that discrimination on hair color could fall under national origin or color: Under 29 CFR § 1606.1, national origin is defined as but not limited to: An individual's, or his or her ancestor's, place of origin; or because an individual has the physical, cultural or linguistic characteristics of a national origin group.

With the current court, almost certainly not; they're not inclined to expand the definition of "disparate impact" like that.

If a future Court ever decides hair color denotes national origin, fall back to a different example of your choosing; people with tattoos, Mac users, viola players.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#435

Post by thro388 »

mellavora wrote: post #405
phendrenad2 wrote: post #245

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…

re: sex toys, potential felony in texas https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas_obscenity_statute or google "texas six dildoes" https://www.theregister.com/2016/12/13/us_purchase_governmen... and https://onwardtexas.org/trending/is-it-illegal-to-own-more-t... which was posted on HN about 3 months ago and flagged.

You could rape someone with a dildo, it is basically a gun and should be banned as such!

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#436

Post by yuan43 »

> I feel like I'm going crazy over here. These accounts have hundreds of thousands of dollars in them being held hostage by an utterly incompetent team / algorithm that seems to lack any and all empathy for the havoc they wreak on businesses when they pull the rug out from under them with no warning, nor for the impact they have on customers when they all of a sudden lose all ability to make money. And all that for an account that has been using Stripe for nearly 7 years without issue!

When people on HN swear up and down that Bitcoin has zero use cases, I think some may be voluntarily forgetting stuff like this.

Is Bitcoin a perfect fit here? Probably not. Does it eliminate the problem of arbitrary algorithms blocking payments for no discernible reason? Yes.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#437

Post by dotancohen »

klyrs wrote: post #313
elliekelly wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. HN is suspiciously devoid images. To most people on the internet in 2022 that alone makes it wholly uninteresting.

I often wonder how the site survives without sticky autoplay videos popping up halfway down the page and covering 80% of the content...

Surely it's due to the mobile application that HN is always pushing. And the invasive tracking. And the paywall. And the ads, the ads go without saying.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#438

Post by pas »

soared wrote: post #349
phendrenad2 wrote: post #245

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…

In addition to the other comment about cannabis, crypto is financial and comes with many laws and regulations that a payment process would need to be very aware of and follow. Porn is ripe with fraud/theft/bad actors/etc. It’s not a shadow government, it’s common sense.

It is a shadow government but it also makes sense.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#439

Post by toss1 »

bagels wrote: post #372
toss1 wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NO, it does not in this case They can determine up front if it violates the TOS They can notify the customer of the SPECIFIC violation IN DETAIL, and what can be done to cure it, and provide time to do so. They can deny access to the transaction instead of nuking the entire business for some algorithmic flag. The Stripes and PayPals of the world do NONE of this. Instead, they act like they accept almost all businesse…

The type of business matters if we're trying to guess whether they violated the TOS or not. I completely agree with you that how these companies handle these issues is completely wrong, if not fraudulent.

I agree that in general, it matters.

However, by a long series of deliberate actions, Stripe has made it irrelevant to the fact that they are now deliberately, unilaterally, and with zero notice whatsoever shutting down that biz' critical infrastructure.

They could have, and should have as a part of KYC compliance, already figured out what type of business it is. If they failed at that, then fine, give them 60 days notice to find other infrastructure. Stripe is taking its OWN FAILURE to properly vet their customers according to their own standards and dumping the consequences onto the ex-customers. Sorry, but unless we're talking actual provable international criminal/autocratic money-laundering, that's just wrong.

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