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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

#461

Post by scohesc »

naasking wrote: post #422
brk wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO it is not the "you must be a fraudster" logic as much as "we have enough other customers that we can burn you without much worry of repercussions". As much as I hate government intervention in business, it really seems like there needs to be a way to force companies to actually be direct, accessible, and reactive in cases like this. I went through something similar with Venmo randomly locking my account after I r…

Making competition easier in this space is another way to solve it. If Stripe had 15 competitors all of whom were API compatible so you could switch in 5 minutes, any bad PR would drive customers away in droves. Government has made entry to this space hard which is why there aren't enough competitors, so they're really the source of the problem.

From what I understand, the government introduced legislation sometime in the past 20-30 years (Was it the PATRIOT act? I can't remember) - which I believe put the onus of blame on the credit card processing companies instead of the government when it came to fighting fraud.

I assume the government didn't want to put all the work in of making sure the currency they've societally coerced the world to use isn't being used for fraudulent transactions, they'd rather pawn it off onto the banks because it's easier for the government to not do anything about it.

Now the banks have been shooting anything and everything that has even a semblance of fraud with account locks/funds freezing/etc., because if they don't the government will go after them.

How does this system make any sense to anybody? So frustrating. Let me exchange currency with anybody for any reason at any time.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#462

Post by synchrone »

vlod wrote: post #401
max51 wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Are you saying you should empty your account constantly (nightly?) in case paypal gets shut down your account, for unknown and un-communicated reasons?

There is even a feature called auto-sweeps that can be requested via support to enable automatic daily payouts

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#463

Post by nicce »

irvingprime wrote: post #97
mikece wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Whether or not the TOS can be said to be legally nullified (not being a lawyer, I have no idea) canceling or suspending someone's account without telling them some kind of reason they can do something about is absolutely unethical. It is also very common.

It is very common because it is not benefial for the company to clarify reasons. It includes many risks.

They can be proved to be incorrect, for exmpale if they refer into their own ToS, which is public information and binding. And then some legal expert says that this is not how it goes and it ends up into court, because customer sees risks being lower.

If they made a mistake or there was a software failure, it is bad PR.

If they ban someone for some specific reason but not someone else, there will be drama.

It is very beneficial to just say nothing.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#464

Post by demarq »

apeace wrote: post #198

I had a very similar experience, except it was on our launch day . We hadn't charged a single live customer yet, but we had done plenty of tests using the Stripe testing environment. So we go live with a huge launch event, and we have customers signing up in droves. When they get to the last step -- payment -- they get an error. Logging in to the dashboard I didn't see any indication that there was anything wrong wit…

I'm surprised there is a next time.

I think that's the biggest thing I see on this thread. That Stripe gets the chance of a next time. This validates what Stripe is doing to developers.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#465

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

mindcrime wrote: post #260
jandrese wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A payment system like that would run face first into Know Your Customer (KYC) laws and bet shut down. This isn't a hard problem for technical reasons, it's all political. It's about preventing money laundering and trying to fight crime via financial instruments. But it also means any payment system that doesn't implement these restrictions will almost instantly be overrun by criminals because they are highly motivate…

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.

Why?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#466

Post by hnburnsy »

jtbayly wrote: post #346
sudden_dystopia wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how an auto insurance company I used to work for wrote policies. They didn’t underwrite them until there was a claim and then they would rescind the policy and deny the claim when they found a “material misrepresentation”. They called it underwriting on the back end.

What company!!!??? Please don't just leave all of us hoping we aren't the unlucky guy that is using that company.

Come on give us a hint or maybe just the company mascot?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#467

Post by rglover »

phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #446

Stripe has an office in San Francisco. I definitely don't recommend trying to go inside, but I really wish people would organize protests at these business locations. If hundreds of people protested outside stripe for canceling customers with zero communication, maybe the employees would notice.

While I typically support the "punk rock" approach, this isn't good to suggest. All it takes is one unstable person going cocoa puffs for someone to get hurt or something bad to happen.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#468

Post by yaythefuture »

jlbbellefeuille wrote: post #94
aliqot wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bless Edwin for being here for us, always, time after time, but what a sad state of affairs.

Edwin has saved me before too. Love Edwin.

I'm proud to announce that Edwin officially pulled through for us today. All our accounts have been reactivated.

There are clearly problems at Stripe. But this kind human is not one of them.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#469

Post by imperfect_blue »

londons_explore wrote: post #283
mgkimsal wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Next time I build something with Stripe I'm going to test it in production before launching I'm genuinely curious why you wouldn't have done that anyway? I pretty much always do, precisely so I can experience a full end to end user experience.

Buying your own products inflates revenue figures (and is therefore pretty much prohibited in listed companies). Many investors don't like it either. Sure, you can do it, but you'll have to forever have a note in your accounts package saying 'this revenue isn't actual revenue'. It really upsets those who want the accounts to match up to the cent at the end of the year...

Debit revenue, credit employee expense claims, journal entry: adjustment for test purchases made. Pretty standard, doesn't affect your numbers at all, no need to make any note in your statement (which you wouldn't have to do anyway because it'll never meet the threshold for materiality). Its not some sort of difficult accounting problem.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#470

Post by ecommerceguy »

joecot wrote: post #360
tough wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the best solution here, is add a payments orchestration solution to your stack. There are others, I know of this spanish startup integrating with stripe. In this way,you can have both your bank TPV/ Payments and Stripe working alongside, if any fails just put the other, or the one giving better prices by default, etc https://monei.com/es/features/payments-orchestration/

If someone uses WooCommerce for their store, they have 79 different payment integrations, including Stripe, Paypal, Amazon Payments, along with merchant account gateways like Authorize.net. Some of them are paid extensions but rather cheap considering the use. https://woocommerce.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensi...

If in fact High risk is necessary then NMI is the most common gateway. Be careful they require a rolling reserve and can require multiple buckets capped at a certain amount, commonly 50k / month.

We write a few a high risk accounts per month. As a matter of fact I just had a call center run across my desk a few hours ago.

Exhaust all underwriting options as each processor has a different risk tolerance. For instance this call center is now using NMI and a rolling reserve, I've found another processor (one of the big 5) that will not fall under the High Risk thus saving a boat load not to mention negating the accounting nightmare that comes with rolling reserves and high risk processing.

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