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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

#531

Post by voldacar »

vkou wrote: post #492
naasking wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certain banking regulations make those transactions "high risk".

Some of them are due to government regulations like 'don't launder money' and 'don't process money for illegal activities'. Which are, like, basic operations of society 101 level stuff. Others (adult services) are not due to government regulations, they are there simply there because banks don't want to deal with chargebacks.

The crime of "money laundering" was invented out of nowhere one day. Society predates it by thousands of years.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#532

Post by NetOpWibby »

10g1k wrote: post #529

Western payment processors have proven in recent years that they will cancel/unperson anyone who doesn't fit with their political ideology. This is not the first instance of it happening. And it may not be any actual wrongthink; it may merely be perceived wrongthink or programmatically determined wrongthink. Because of this, I strongly recommend connecting to Asian payment processors. Even Chinese is more reliable th…

Any specific recommendations?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#533

Post by robertwt7 »

in AU, we have something called Financial Ombudsman Service by Australian Financial Complaints Authority (AFCA), I had similar issue with paypal (with a much smaller scale), then support didn't want to help me. I complained to AFCA, scared the shit out of them, then got all my money back.

I assume US has something similar to address issue like this where financial platform is acting like this?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#534

Post by Silhouette »

edwinwee wrote: post #517
iio7 wrote: post #496

So, this is another "drive by" on Hacker News about Stripe, which @edwinwee (from Stripe) reacts to and "saves the day". All the while the rest of us know absolutely nothing about what just happened! What exactly is going on? What is the business model? And why does it require that these cases reach Hacker News before they are solved by @edwinwee!?

I can't proactively share specifics about a business, but in this case, they operate in a regulated space. The banks and card networks we work with require some extra checks due to the prevalance of scams in this space. A reviewer on our team flagged the business, and admittedly, we weren't very clear about what was required in order to continue working with us. After talking with OP today, we re-enabled the business…

I feel that HN needs some kind of "right to reply" feature on these stories now - something like a pinned comment right at the top of the discussion for an official response from the business in question.

It is obviously of interest to many in the community if services they might use or consider using themselves are having problems or letting their customers down. I personally have no problem with leveraging the publicity that social media affords to get a problem resolved if those services haven't got their act together within a reasonable amount of time.

However there is a serious risk of unfair or just plain incorrect reporting when one side gets to set the agenda and the other side either can't respond for legal/regulatory reasons or has their response buried among the other comments. People can be far too quick to reach for the pitchforks in these discussions before knowing all the facts and on sites with voting mechanics there is a danger of mob mentality distorting the subsequent discussion as well.

In this case it looks like Stripe probably did handle some aspects of this situation poorly (bad and people deserve to know it can happen) but are probably also taking steps to avoid screwing up the same way in future (good and people deserve to know that too). Then everyone can form their own opinions and discuss the issues but at least starting from a relatively balanced and well-informed position.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#535

Post by NetOpWibby »

canadiantim wrote: post #214
symfrog wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is one of the reasons that I usually use https://killbill.io/

Have you tried or considered lago? (getlago.com) I haven't heard of killbill, so will definitely look into them. Love that they're open-source as well and seems like they've been at it a long while.

Lago looks beautiful, thanks for sharing!

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#536

Post by rco8786 »

manquer wrote: post #191
rco8786 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is wrong with a job board or a coaching business?

Nothing is wrong. The risk profiles are different. That is only thing the payment processor cares about, same reason why adult services get shunned. Not because they are puritans, it is because of risk of frauds and chargebacks etc are much higher . Coaching is a service unlike Tailwind the software that can varying success and satisfaction levels customers probably do higher chargebacks and stripe's automated system…

Why would this be such a difficult thing to communicate to a customer?

"Hi, we've noticed an increase of frauds/chargebacks on your account so we have taken X action"

That also doesn't really explain why long-standing, established customer accounts were frozen with this particular business.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#537

Post by rabidonrails »

edwinwee wrote: post #517
iio7 wrote: post #496

So, this is another "drive by" on Hacker News about Stripe, which @edwinwee (from Stripe) reacts to and "saves the day". All the while the rest of us know absolutely nothing about what just happened! What exactly is going on? What is the business model? And why does it require that these cases reach Hacker News before they are solved by @edwinwee!?

I can't proactively share specifics about a business, but in this case, they operate in a regulated space. The banks and card networks we work with require some extra checks due to the prevalance of scams in this space. A reviewer on our team flagged the business, and admittedly, we weren't very clear about what was required in order to continue working with us. After talking with OP today, we re-enabled the business…

Hey Edwinwee I can appreciate that you're the guy who always has to stand in front of the HN mob, but the answer you gave here is terrifying because it makes it seem like people in Stripe are acting without any empathy for customers.

For example, OP says they've been reaching out to Stripe and couldn't really get any answers but but somehow you were able to get all of this cleared up within the day.

I get that a "regulated space" complicates things, but why was the client cleared last week and what changed? Why last time was it only shutting down a single client and this time 35% of clients? Is this done on a customer by customer basis or are there other stories out there of customers who were/are affected today by the same issue?

Lastly, when someone (a reviewer?) at Stripe shuts down an account do they notate why the account was shut down and if so, is there a reason this isn't shared (at least with frontline support)?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#538

Post by zht »

whiplash451 wrote: post #476
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…

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.

right a company that makes billions of dollars can't hire more people to staff up their risk/compliance/fraud teams

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#539

Post by rabidonrails »

Silhouette wrote: post #534
edwinwee wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't proactively share specifics about a business, but in this case, they operate in a regulated space. The banks and card networks we work with require some extra checks due to the prevalance of scams in this space. A reviewer on our team flagged the business, and admittedly, we weren't very clear about what was required in order to continue working with us. After talking with OP today, we re-enabled the business…

I feel that HN needs some kind of "right to reply" feature on these stories now - something like a pinned comment right at the top of the discussion for an official response from the business in question. It is obviously of interest to many in the community if services they might use or consider using themselves are having problems or letting their customers down. I personally have no problem with leveraging the publ…

To be fair here, I believe that most people on HN are fans of Stripe (I'll admit that I am) and this isn't going to cause me to write them out of anything. BUT nothing is worse that feeling ignored and we all can empathize with that. Stripe's promise to us in tech was that they were/are different. Patio11 has written some great articles from inside Stripe explaining how the payment systems work. PC and JC show up at conferences and chat with other devs. This is inherently different that what you can expect from the CEO of Paypal or Authorize.net.

Now we're asking that to stay true to that part of the company. Not because we want to see them fail but because we want to see them succeed.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#540

Post by ceejayoz »

encryptluks2 wrote: post #486
ceejayoz wrote: post #434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hair color is something you're born with and is a genetic mutation based off lineage and other factors. I don't think they directly corelate and it wouldn't necessarily even make it to the Supreme Court. Most businesses aren't going to appeal to say that they can discriminate based on hair color nor willingly admit to doing so, nor would they ever likely make the argument that they did it and that it is okay.

The law doesn’t say “things you are born with”, though. That’s a common theme with the specific categories it does name, but only those specific categories are protected.
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