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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

#471

Post by trollied »

anigbrowl wrote: post #411
yaythefuture wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that my real HN account is my actual name. It'd be like 2 clicks to figure out what my business is.

Totally understandable, but what kind of business is it? If you just keep saying 'it's a business' but refuse to provide any further details then people are gonna make assumptions, eg adult entertainment. Nobody's asking what your specific business model is. Also consider that if the situation continues your pissed-off downstream customers will ID you sooner or later.

He's ignoring the "what type of business" questions. I'm getting downvoted. I don't care. He's ignoring it for a reason still.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#472

Post by trollied »

yaythefuture wrote: post #468
jlbbellefeuille wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You need to explain what happened, and what sector you operate in. Doing this support stuff on HN as a last resort & getting on the front page is crap in the first place, not feeding back is even worse.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#473

Post by yamtaddle »

pas wrote: post #427
vlod wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

yes. the paypal horror stories were very common and frequent ~10 years ago. that's how Braintree, Stripe, etc. got started.

Nb PayPal has owned BrainTree since 2013.

You probably already knew that, but for the benefit of anyone reading this who didn't.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#474

Post by hnburnsy »

abigail95 wrote: post #327
elliekelly wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Those laws certainly feel like guilty until proven innocent or in many cases, guilty no chance to prove innocence.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#475

Post by thewebcount »

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?

Yes, absolutely. Some banks offer "sweep accounts" that do this automatically. If they have to come to you to claw back some money, they're more likely to tell you why.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#476

Post by whiplash451 »

brk wrote: post #158
vertis wrote: 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.

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…

Being direct, accessible and reactive at scale when you’re processing billions of dollars of transactions simply is not possible.

Stripe and other companies are doing their best, but they are in an arms race with more and more elaborate fraudsters. At planet scale.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#477

Post by naasking »

vkou wrote: post #459
naasking wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Government hasn't made entry to this space hard, the banks that Stripe partners with have. Because they don't want to deal with high-risk transactions. They are the gatekeepers here, and Stripe has to bend over backwards to make them happy. They'd much rather burn individual customers, than jeopardize their entire business.

Certain banking regulations make those transactions "high risk".

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#478

Post by ansible »

imperfect_blue wrote: post #469
londons_explore wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, exactly. I would think that reversing charges raises a flag with whatever payment processor or bank that sees it.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#479

Post by yamtaddle »

mtmail wrote: post #286
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.

Stripe advises against that (I'm not saying it makes sense) "Do not use real card details. Testing in live mode using real payment method details is prohibited by the Stripe Services Agreement. Use your test API keys and the card numbers below." https://stripe.com/docs/testing

It's bullshit. Anyone with experience testing things in this area is 100% gonna try a real card at least after any major changes (and certainly before a launch of a new product). You aren't actually sure it's right (and so, with something so entirely connected to revenue, can't go the fuck to sleep) until a real charge has gone through.

They probably mainly just don't want people running shitloads of automated-test charges and issuing refunds for all of them. It may technically be against the TOS but there's no way they actually care if you run the occasional real-credentials test, especially if you don't refund it.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#480

Post by imperfect_blue »

ansible wrote: post #478
imperfect_blue wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, exactly. I would think that reversing charges raises a flag with whatever payment processor or bank that sees it.

There's no need to reverse it even, just go through your standard expense claims procedure or product refund procedure.
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