Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop

I'm posting this as a warning to other small business who might be thinking of using Stripe to process payments. I own a small boxing gym & we signed up with Stripe based on recommendation of someone I know. At first everything was great - easy on-boarding process, clean interface, etc.. We have been working w/ them for 4 months & have several hundred payments without a single chargeback.

Then out of the blue I received this email:

[b]"Our systems recently identified charges that appear to be unauthorized by the customer, meaning that the owner of the card or bank account did not consent to these payments. This unfortunately means that we will no longer be able to accept payments for

Refunds on card payments will be issued in 5–7 business days, although they may take longer to appear on the cardholder's statement. Please refer to your dashboard for a list of the charges to be refunded[1]."[/b]

I have NO idea what payments they could possibly be referring to & support doesn't respond to my numerous messages. They won't tell me which payments are being refunded (dashboard link they provided just sends me to the list of ALL our payments).

Worst of all, when I attempted to process a refund for a customer who had been injured & was unable to continue training, I get an error message stating I am unable to process refunds! Am I supposed to tell my customer that my payment process won't refund his money? FYI - The payment I am attempting to refund HAS NOT been paid out yet - the money is sitting in my stripe account - but they refuse to refund it or even dignify me with a response.

I can't express how disappointed I am in Stripe's total lack of communication and indifference both it's customer's and our customers. Big, BIG mistake I made in choosing them as our payment processor - just warning you guys before you make the same mistake

Do you mind to add a little more timing information? How many hours/days have passed since you got the email and since your first answer to stripe?

So before Stripe goes the way of Paypal, there seems to be something that can be done about this. I'm assuming Stripe has enough funds to hire for customer support, and given that businesses are Stripe's main customers, isn't there a thorough human review that happens before banning a business?

Plenty of customers sign agreements without understanding what charges they will incur, and gyms are notorious for this. But Stripe cannot simply shut down a business without hearing both sides of the story.

If there was a human review in this case, then no amount of HN publicity should revert the decision. If it does, that would expose the review process as being heavily flawed.

I hope this gets addressed. It would really suck if Stripe becomes nothing more than Paypal with a better API.

I once spent 6 months in a hellish loop helping my disabled brother recover his Gmail account after "suspicious activity" (i.e. logging in after not using it for 6 months).

In desperation, I texted a friend who works in Google's marketing dept, and it was resolved in 30 minutes.

All companies, including those selling non-free services like Stripe, should sell expedited customer service (resolution guaranteed within X hours for $Y).