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Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

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Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#101

Post by yamtaddle »

csmpltn wrote: post #38

Why not file a police report for the theft of 400k USD?

I've seen local law enforcement not bother to investigate high-five- to low-six-figures of thefts from break-ins at multiple offices over a couple-week span by a single crew whose van was caught on camera complete with license plates at more than one of the offices. The cops didn't care.

This was not in one of the cities that allegedly isn't prosecuting crimes anymore, and was before any of that or the defund movement or what have you, and I'm in a red state. I suspect the people who complain about that stuff as if it's new and caused by recent action have just never interacted with the police before—I have plenty of other examples of their not caring to do any amount of investigation of crimes against individuals, too, no matter what evidence is already at hand, going back decades. And zero examples of their actually investigating anything.

This kind of nuisance report you're suggesting wouldn't go anywhere.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#102

Post by cjbgkagh »

jimnotgym wrote: post #87
cjbgkagh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small claims court is pretty good if it’s available to you and most disputes probably fit within the limits. These courts deal with corporate malfeasance quite a bit so they’ve likely seen it before. They’ll often penalize the offending company with 2x+ damages and if the company still won’t pay you can get a bailiff to come with you to go impounding assets. They use fire sale prices to offset the debt so it costs th…

In the UK you couldn't claim $400k through small-claims, it is limited to £10k. Is it that high in the US? You also can't get 2x damages, or a fast process!

> if it’s available to you and most disputes probably fit within the limits

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#103

Post by dahfizz »

phphphphp wrote: post #73
jcollins1991 wrote: post #20

I'd really love to get more insight into the Dec 30 -> Jan 3 time frame, since that's where everything meaningful happened... From the outside it's hard to tell WHY the lower level employees are completely incapable of driving a resolution, whether they're underpaid and apathetic, or if management has crippled them from making any decisions on their own. It's amazing that they don't have better processes in place aft…

The cost of fraud far exceeds the cost of losing one customer. The cost of losing dozens of customers costs more than prioritising someone’s issue. I have no insider knowledge of Stripe but I find it entirely plausible that Stripe will forever have cases like this. Serious fraud could cost Stripe hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions, and so there will always be cases that are out of the ordinary and don’t…

> A month turnaround on this is totally reasonable.

But it was only resolved because of a post on HN. I would agree with you if Stripe actually had a way to escalate and resolve issues without making public posts on social media. Without HN's help, this issue would not have been fixed.

I get that stripe doesn't trust whatever subcontractor they use to answer the phones. But that person should be able to say "Yeah, shits fucked, I'll escalate the ticket to someone who can actually help".

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#104

Post by criddell »

jimnotgym wrote: post #87
cjbgkagh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small claims court is pretty good if it’s available to you and most disputes probably fit within the limits. These courts deal with corporate malfeasance quite a bit so they’ve likely seen it before. They’ll often penalize the offending company with 2x+ damages and if the company still won’t pay you can get a bailiff to come with you to go impounding assets. They use fire sale prices to offset the debt so it costs th…

In the UK you couldn't claim $400k through small-claims, it is limited to £10k. Is it that high in the US? You also can't get 2x damages, or a fast process!

Small claims is definitely less than $400k. In Texas the limit is $20k.

It probably doesn't really matter though. Your contact with Stripe probably requires arbitration but that isn't necessarily a bad thing either.

Check out:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31567673

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#105

Post by hex4def6 »

neilv wrote: post #91
cj wrote: post #78

This reminds me of an issue my sister is having with Etsy. She runs an Etsy store with $1-2 million in annual sales, and her store keeps getting taken down by Etsy's automated copyright infringement system -- which keeps getting triggered by someone submitting fraudulent copyright claims and then immediately asking her to pay $5k/month in exchange for the person to stop submitting the infringement claims (in other wo…

If this extortion practice isn't a common curse of Etsy stores with her scale of revenue, I wonder whether it might actually be a competitor (who gets the sales and customers whenever her store is down).

That seems unlikely. The legal risk you put yourself in doing that would be easy higher than any gains you could hope to make.

This is likely some callcenter-adjacent scam. They're probably doing this to hundreds of shops, and occasionally get one cave in and pay.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#106

Post by bread90 »

cj wrote: post #78

This reminds me of an issue my sister is having with Etsy. She runs an Etsy store with $1-2 million in annual sales, and her store keeps getting taken down by Etsy's automated copyright infringement system -- which keeps getting triggered by someone submitting fraudulent copyright claims and then immediately asking her to pay $5k/month in exchange for the person to stop submitting the infringement claims (in other wo…

What does she sell on her store?

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#107

Post by zopa »

londons_explore wrote: post #75
ryandrake wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I had to fight a company's customer support over them owing money to me (admittedly a couple of orders of magnitude less than OP), it was a mix of "It's someone else's fault, call them" and "Computer says no". Customer support is friendly, cheerful, and are trained to at least act sad that customer is having trouble. Lots of "I'm sorry that you are having trouble but I can't..." Most companies' customer sup…

Remember that most companies don't really trust their support employees to behave honestly. There are often thousands of them, and the turnover is high, and the opportunity for an employee to credit $1000 to their mates account and then not show up to work again is rather high. I think that's why support employees aren't given very many controls to override the way the system works...

Sure, but these are low-paid jobs with no agency. Of course turnover is high. If customer service were a priority companies could figure out how to build a trustworthy workforce.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#108

Post by eeemmmooo »

smca wrote: post #89

Evan, thanks for taking the time to write this up. I helped resolve your particular issue on NYE and I’m acutely aware of how painful it’s been. I broadly agree with a lot of your statements. The lack of clear communication and the repetitive requests for information during the review process isn’t good. We’re working on striking the right balance between giving good users relevant information without giving bad acto…

Thanks for your help. Especially on New Years Eve. My goal was always to try to find someone at Stripe that could help me get through the automated process churn and you were very helpful in that. It was not to slam Stripe overall because you all have been very good to us for years. Which is also why I’m trying to be as fair as I can be to both sides and also why I didn’t just jump to lawyer calling levels etc. I knew eventually Stripe would do the right thing. Just figuring out how to make that happen was the hard part.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#109

Post by teraflop »

butlerm wrote: post #100
Trias11 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Customer support is a liability and every large company will allocate absolutely minimal possible resources to any liability. This of course can backfire via social media into negative reputation and some repeated bad behaviors can landslide into class action. But large companies are willing to accept such risk and will continue such pattern.

$400,000 in withheld funds is not the sort of thing you should just place on the back burner and ignore while your client fumes. It is business malpractice, the sort of thing you could get sued over and be penalized heavily for, if not merely lose your customers and blacken your reputation everywhere. Businesses that do not resolve problems like this in less than twenty four hours deserve to go out of business.

The great thing about holding $400,000 of your customer's money is that that's $400,000 they can't spend on suing you.

Re: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

#110

Post by jmacd »

phphphphp wrote: post #83
jmacd wrote: post #70

I used to work at one of the big customer service platform vendors. We had some really, really, useful ranking capabilities that would prioritize certain customers based on the data held in a CRM. It was a bit of a pet project of mine. The idea was to calculate weights for customer importance (this can be account size, potential future opportunity size, social media following, tenure, etc) and severity of the problem…

That’s quite common functionality nowadays but generally if you’re dealing with valuable enterprise relationships that would benefit from tickets ranking higher, you have points of contact available to the client (whether that’s an account manager or similar) outside of impersonal tickets. I’m sure if you’re a valuable enough stripe client, they’ll have account managers. The problem for Stripe is that we see big numb…

I agree on all that. (We had 'Executive Sponsors' and 'Red Accounts' where I was, and they were hugely expensive to manage once they 'went Red').

The issue would be catching things early and managing them cost effectively before they blow up in the public sphere.

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