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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

#591

Post by Psychlist »

krisoft wrote: post #388
apeace wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The funny part is, I thought that if I did a bunch of real transactions and then reversed them all, that our account might get flagged! That's in addition to explaining to our investors that we ended our launch day at -$1,000 due to all the chargeback fees because some dumb developer doesn't know what a testing environment is. And in addition to the fact that Stripe recommends against you testing in that way. I did g…

> charging a real card, and if it works, reversing it Why would you reverse it? If you can’t afford to consume one unit of whatever you are selling are you really in a good place to be in that business? I guess there can be rare exceptions where the business sell only a handfull of high ticket items. But then again probably Fincantieri does not let you put your bespoke mega yacht on a card through a web transaction.

And this is exactly what I told a friend of my to do when he installed a public car charger. Before he told anyone it was live, charge his car using his normal customer account. Turned out he couldn't create one because his phone was already in as a supplier.

After some eye-rolling he agreed to buy a burner phone, add a prepay SIM, and whaddayano the bloody charger did not work. Two months later it works, for most people, who have recent cars that are not Teslas. Sigh. "welcome to our product, you're a beta tester. Maybe an alpha tester. We hope it works!".

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#592

Post by matiasfernandez »

elliekelly wrote: post #239
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.

I hate seeing comments like this because Stripe’s hands are tied here. Anytime a bank or payment processor has frozen or shut down an account and you’re getting stonewalled it’s almost guaranteed to be an AML related issue and it’s against the law for them to tip a customer off that their account is being or might be investigated for suspicious activity. This isn’t Stripe deciding that you’re a fraudster and so you’r…

>almost guaranteed

The issue most people in this thread are talking about exists in the almost. If it was always guaranteed, then there would not be so much evidence to the contrary.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#593

Post by tobinfekkes »

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?

When a client is processing millions of dollars per year, it's too risky to be in a situation where they have:

All authority in decisions No obligation of support

Either give me authority in transaction risk management to determine what's fraud or not.

Or answer the phone when I call to get support on what decisions have been made in my account.

They want their cake and eat it too. So I'll get pie somewhere else.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#594

Post by Cederfjard »

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…

> Western payment processors have proven in recent years that they will cancel/unperson anyone who doesn't fit with their political ideology.

Do you have any examples of this?

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#595

Post by matiasfernandez »

honeybadgerdc wrote: post #585
senko wrote: post #56

This is bad. There are more and more Stripe horror stories like this, and from an outsider perspective it looks awfully like PayPal behaved back in the day (probably still does but I'd never touch it again as a merchant). I have positive experiences with using Stripe in my last startup and we're currently building Stripe integration on another, which will process about 50% of our revenue (the other payment method bei…

Shopify has treated me in this exact same way. No customer service.. no response.

That's because Shopify Payments is just a front for Stripe. We've seen both sides at our company and they behave exactly the same.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#596

Post by Cederfjard »

elicash wrote: post #116
ianhawes wrote: post #40

I will take the OP's story at face value, but I think a common theme in these sort of posts is the "Stripe not happy with my business model" angle which typically does not actually include any details about the business model. For example, a few weeks ago the founder of Tailwind tweeted [0] about how Stripe had shut down their account when they were set to launch the Tailwind Job Board, despite many other job boards…

> Any rational person could see the issue with Stripe not approving of that business. Genuinely can't tell what you're suggesting the business model problem is with Tailwind Jobs? According to the CEO at Stripe, the issue with the Tailwind example you listed was "a major uptick in attempted fraud over the first half of this year that necessitated making our systems stricter. But have an idea for a structural fix here…

> Genuinely can't tell what you're suggesting the business model problem is with Tailwind Jobs?

They're saying the opposite. Paraphrased, "any rational person could see that Tailwind Jobs is a legit business and that it's wrong for Stripe to shut them down".

"The issue" in the sentence you quoted is referring to Stripe's behavior, not Tailwind Job's business model.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#597

Post by tobinfekkes »

disqard wrote: post #523
demarq wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"What is water?"

I just played that video at an outdoor movie night. It gives me the feels every time. Great video!

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#598

Post by phpthrowaway99 »

rglover wrote: post #545
phpthrowaway99 wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you feel this way about all protests? Or just ones based around protecting people's incomes?

This isn't about protecting people's incomes, it's about bad customer service. Just you saying that makes me say it's a bad idea because that framing in itself is emotionally charged which increases the odds that protest could turn into violence/physical intimidation. That's not terribly wise when there are alternative options for payment processors available.

It's pretty rare for "bad customer service" to cost people tens of thousands in lost revenue and pretty severe reputation loss for their business. I've had some bad customer service before, but it never set me back months or years of progress before.

So while I agree this is basically an issue of bad customer service, it is at the most egregious level. If your mortgage company started foreclosing on your home incorrectly, or the title company said "new phone who dis?" when you tried to sell your home, it wouldn't just be called "bad customer service". These are life altering issues. And these companies just don't care. A little public shaming of the people walking into work of a company like that could do some good.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#599

Post by matiasfernandez »

rabidonrails wrote: post #537
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…

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 "reg…

>somehow you were able to get all of this cleared up within the day

Exactly. This is why the whole "their hands are tied" excuse is so frustrating to me.

Re: Stripe has decided to nuke my entire business

#600

Post by tobinfekkes »

ceejayoz wrote: post #353
systemvoltage wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Firearms, explosives and dangerous materials > Guns, gunpowders, ammunitions, weapons, fireworks and other explosives. Peptides, research chemicals, and other toxic, flammable and radioactive materials Why does the payment processor get to dictate whether I can run a defense ordnance company or run a scientific chemical supplies store? Some of this stuff needs to be challenged in the court or regulated so that paym…

> Why does the fucking payment processor get to dictate whether I can run a defense ordnance company or run a scientific chemical supplies store? Because they have the legal right to do so? They could ban companies run by redheads, if they like. As long as they're not discriminating based on very specific sets of criteria established by law, they get to choose who they do business with. The government requiring priva…

As a red head, this made me chuckle. Thank you.
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