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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

#551

Post by ux-app »

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?

>Are you saying you should empty your account constantly

This doesn't really help. When you link your bank account with PayPal the link is 2 way. I.e. PayPal can, without any input from you, transfer money out of your account. They can even do that if the account is empty. Your bank will almost certainly allow an overdraft on your account and you're still liable for the amount + overdraft fees.

I had some issues with PayPal about a year ago and a senior rep at my bank talked me through these details.

With my bank, it wasn't even possible to turn off the overdraft feature.

Bottom line is, PayPal almost always wins.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#552

Post by jtbayly »

treis wrote: post #488
encryptluks2 wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't be surprised to find it is most insurance companies. The insurance industry as a whole is seriously messed up and congress seems unwilling to do anything about it.

It's half true. There's not really underwriting for auto policies like there is with life or home insurance. You register your rating rules with the state and anyone who qualifies gets a policy. All the risk calculations and pricing are just look up tables and done automatically. Now if you are in line for a large payout the insurance company will definitely review your application to see if you lied. Significant lie…

Thanks! This makes sense of it.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#553

Post by StickyThink »

cwkoss wrote: post #281
droopyEyelids wrote: post #4

It sucks this happened to you, but like with all the PayPal hate stories, I notice you're very careful not to describe what type of business you operate.

The overwhelming majority of stories I hear about paypal fucking over businesses are about benign transactions. I don't think your judgmental paranoia is founded.

I would agree with you, cwkoss, except for this:

https://www.reddit.com/r/paypal/

and

https://www.trustpilot.com/review/paypal.us

and

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-03/paypal-cu.... (which was attempted as a class action lawsuit)

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#554

Post by bigiain »

yamtaddle wrote: post #479
mtmail wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

> especially if you don't refund it.

That's the trick. Let Stripe put the money into your bank account and let them think its a real sale (not a production test), then refund the money out of the bank account back to the person who's card was used instead of refunding or reversing the charge. Stripe don't need to know about that.

(You also owe yourself "due diligence" in knowing that you _can_ refund or reverse charges, so you'll also do that test in production as well, but don't make it one of the first transactions you ever do in prod. I try to stretch that test out until after a 60 day window past the first few dozen real sales have gone through, under the assumption that by then Stripe (or whoever) will have seen a bunch of payments go through and not be challenged when the CC statements arrive, and that'll have sent some "probably not a new fraudulent merchant" signals into their systems.)

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#555

Post by jlokier »

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.

I would still recommend you change your payment backend to direct your customer payments via one or more "backup" processors asap. Perhaps leave Stripe altogether if you prefer, once that's done, or keep Stripe around as the backup.

After all, they have a track record of screwing you over again, after fixing and checking your account. Whatever triggered that could do it again when you least expect it, despite Edwin's good work. Probably the triggers haven't changed as you are still running the same business.

(Like several other commenters, I was thinking of using Stripe as a main payment processor before seeing this article because of their great API, documentation, test mode and ease of setup. They seemed like a good choice, but I had wrongly assumed they were reasonable and reliable and if there were issues they could be resolved; that I didn't need to worry about Stripe being shady themselves. Now I've learned Stripe is like the Paypal of old when it comes to killing a business abruptly with no warning or recourse. That's so severe it cancels out every benefit and feature. With much disappointment I now feel it will be necessary to evaluate other services instead.)

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#556

Post by lmm »

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…

> It almost feels like there's some secret government organization tasked with upholding religious values telling payment processors to fuck with random accounts and swearing them to secrecy. I obviously don't believe that, but it's equivalent to the scale of whatever is going on due to natural causes.

Operation Choke Point pretty much worked like that.

I don't have a problem with the government fucking with the cannibis business given that it's still federally illegal, but the messing with legal businesses needs to stop.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#557

Post by jlokier »

Jiger104 wrote: post #510
tobinfekkes wrote: post #453

We are in the process of moving off of Stripe Connect (with 60+ accounts) for this very reason. It's one big black box. They are a liability, not a service. Very sorry to hear of your situation, but it's because of people sharing stories like this that we've been planning our migration away to a more responsible (and responsive) processor for awhile. It's a ton of work to build new integrations, migrate data, and dis…

Could you share the reasons you decided to move off it?

"it's because of people sharing stories like this that we've been planning our migration away to a more responsible (and responsive) processor"

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#558

Post by jandrese »

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.

If you subscribe to the belief that criminal activity is a drain on society then there is a case for trying to combat it. Then it becomes a question of "do these KYC laws cost more to society than the crimes they prevent?" That is a harder question, but it is hard to overstate the amount of damage to a society rampant corruption and crime can cause and the benefits of allowing anonymous finance are somewhat more nebulous.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#559

Post by bigiain »

elliekelly wrote: post #324
theptip wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

While this is clearly "a thing", I would be a fine bottle of wine that the OP's issue is not one of those things, and is just some dumb algorithmic or overworked fraud prevention contractor problem.

I would bet that 99.9% of the Stripe (and Paypal) horror stories that get posted almost weekly are _not_ federal money laundering or terrorism financing investigations with legal secrecy provisions imposed on the payment processor.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#560

Post by btilly »

donmcronald wrote: post #460
btilly wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that Stripe has identified you as possibly being a fraudster. Any information that they give you about what they suspect and why is information that a real fraudster could use next time to try and evade the detection algorithms. It is like this with virtually any security system. Adding feedback you can use for debugging also makes the system much easier to compromise.

How many fraudsters are maintaining a business relationship for 6 years? 6 years! And the OP doesn't even get a courtesy phone call before termination. That's messed up.

The answer is, "A lot more than you think."

One of the attacks that fraudsters have developed is to buy businesses to use their accounts for fraud. That going out with a fraudulent bang is better than trying to run a marginal business.

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