101–110 of 302 posts
Buddy, your business is selling "privacy cards" and "virtual cards" which hide the identity of the person making the transaction. It's a massive money laundering red flag, it's not at all surprising that Stripe doesn't want to deal with you.
Privacy cards means the cards protect the user's real cards not their identity. If you have ever been hacked or cannot cancel a renegade subscription, you would quickly grasp the need for Privacy cards.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"You can then use the virtual credit card to signup for free trials on the web and on apps without worry. We approve only free trials and not actual purchases." I assume when you sign up to a free trail, they'll charge your card £0.00 to confirm it's a valid card, then when the trail ends and they try to automatically charge you for a full subscription they'll block the transaction. https://justuseapp.com/free-trial-…
This is not the intended use for stripe issuing at all, and would lead to stripe handling thousands of disputes from companies trying to charge cards with 0 balance after trials end. I can see why they blocked it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not entirely sure how you would launder money through this service. From what i can tell no money is actually passed through it. It just generates a temporary credit card which is never billed. It is just used to bypass the "please enter your credit card for this free trial" prompts.
I'm talking specifically about this type of card: https://justuseapp.com/privacy-card That looks like it definitely allows transactions.
well their website banned me from viewing it because I use a VPN, so I can't comment on the justice/injustice of their position. My irony sensor went off though.
This was due to us trying to please Stripe as users on VPN (anonymous IPs) were more likely to be fraudulent according to them
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Like another commenter said, think about your payment processor like another thing which needs redundancy. Have another one prepared - braintree or whatever.
That's my initial assumption. I'm curious if this is common behavior to have two integrations, or if it is prohibited by the TOS.
You might be able to justify a single payment gateway integration if you're MVP in a simple consumer retail business.
If being unable to take orders for two weeks would be a big problem, then make sure you have at least two gateways, and keep them all warm.
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I rather trust cryptography (and its currencies) than be dependent on VISA or similar.
As a consumer, do you trust cryptocurrencies to get you a refund if the seller fails to deliver the product you've ordered?
Edwin from Stripe here. (OP, I've just sent you an email and we can talk more over there—I'm terribly sorry for the trouble.) I can't get into too many specifics about an individual business publicly, but unauthorized charges have high potential to be disputed in the near future—and while Stripe itself doesn't have a dispute threshold, the card networks require businesses to keep disputes low. Although that email in…
So, if I want to disrupt a competitor all I have to do is hire a bunch of darknet identify thieves and you'll shut down their merchant account?
Like, “So, if I want to disrupt a competitor, all I have to do is hire thugs to smash all their stuff?”
Yeah, that’d do it. Good luck.
Ugh, apologies. Something very clearly went wrong here and we’re already investigating.
Zooming out, a few broader comments:
* Unlike most services, Stripe can easily lose very large amounts of money on individual accounts, and thousands of people try to do so every day. We are de facto running a big bug bounty/incentive program for evading our fraudulent user detection systems.
* Errors like these happen, which we hate, and we take every single false rejection that we discover seriously, knowing that there’s another founder at the other end of the line. We try to make it easy to get in touch with the humans at Stripe, me included, to maximize the number that we discover and the speed with which we get to remedy them.
* When these mistaken rejections happen, it’s usually because the business (inadvertently) clusters strongly with behavior that fraudulent users tend to engage in. Seeking to cloak spending and using virtual cards to mask activity is a common fraudulent pattern. Of course, there are very legitimate reasons to want to do this too (as this case demonstrates).
* We actually have an ongoing project to reduce the occurrence of these mistaken rejections by 90% by the end of this year. I think we’ll succeed at it. (They’re already down 50% since earlier this year.)
As someone with a pre-launch SaaS who just signed up for Stripe, reading this has me shook up a little bit. I'm Stripe-integrated for payments, and poised to go through Stripe Atlas soon, or at least I was.. Now I have no idea what to do. I know that OP's story isn't spotless, but what if it's my thing that gets in this situation too? I wish I could say I'm joking but I don't need this right now, I'm ~90 days out fro…
After you have validation of customer buy-in and market acceptance, when you have time and/or funds to spend on your Stripe-alternative feature sprint, setup and integrate a 2nd payment gateway for redundancy.
(as per the commenter above whose biz was banned from Stripe for 7 days by the imperfect non-recourse ban-bot)
Maybe even choose a different gateway that is more cost effective per transaction for a subset of your global customers, and code your system to route customers payments to the preferentially lower-priced gateway for their country.
Then if one gateway bans you, it's not a showstopper and your business is not severely damaged.
Edwin from Stripe here. (OP, I've just sent you an email and we can talk more over there—I'm terribly sorry for the trouble.) I can't get into too many specifics about an individual business publicly, but unauthorized charges have high potential to be disputed in the near future—and while Stripe itself doesn't have a dispute threshold, the card networks require businesses to keep disputes low. Although that email in…