Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

Lots of companies monitor HN for negative posts and respond to them but few do it as well as Stripe.

While some companies just put out the OPs fire, Stripe seems to do better.

I have a rare trust that they’re genuine and will actually follow through with improvements to prevent the same issue from happening to others.

So payment using their privacy card would look a little like this.

Merchant --> Privacy Card --> Users Real Card --> Users Bank

Where the step between Privacy Card and Real Card doesn't involve a checkout process and transaction authorisation. In bank speak they're just presenting transactions to the users bank, without first getting a transaction authorisation.

These details are important because presented transactions can't be stopped (that's what authorisation is for), they immediately move money from the users bank to the merchant, regardless of available funds or user consent, they can only be reversed via chargeback. These types of payments are called unauthorised payments, and due to the inability of bank to prevent, you're never really meant to use them, and the receiving bank has very strong rights during the chargeback process.

As a payments processor on the other side of the card network you don't want to be dealing with unauthorised payments. They're trivial to dispute, you're almost certainly breaking the card networks rules, and when they go wrong (which they 100% will), they're extremely expensive and time consuming to deal with.

Additionally in the EU, the introduction of Strong Customer Authentication basically makes these types of transaction completely illegal, and as a customer if such a transaction happened on your account you would have a right to full refund in the event of dispute, and your bank would be forced to provide it even if you had published your full card details online. You're bank would of course then go after the merchant via the card network, and then payment processors like Stripe get caught in the middle, and potentially find themselves liable for money they can no longer reclaim from the merchant, because they've already paid out the money and the dispute only happened 3 or 4 months later.

It was absolutely scary the amounts of fraud I dealt with running a dropshipping shop a decade ago.

Every bad fraud order that I dropshipped ate the entire profits from a dozen legit orders, and card fraud was attempted on approximately 25% of orders we received.

After a few years I shut the site down as it was just barely making a profit as the fraud costs escalated and I felt I was wasting my time screening every order with my own (imperfect) hand-rolled fuzzy logic fraud detection algorithms and manual investigation of every single order.

I false-rejected a lot of legit customers in the final year, vowing to stamp out the scammers I drove some customers away... it's hard to be perfect when card fraud is easy to achieve.

Actually what the final straw was for me, that made me delete the server, was not the regular identity fraud stolen-card scumbags, but the pathological liars who you could validate as 100% legitimate, but after they received and signed for the goods, would call their bank and lodge a chargeback to get a full refund, because he banks ALWAYS take the customers side and ALWAYS charged me an extra $35 penalty for every dispute I lost (which was every single one, despite sending pages of strong proof showing the customer was a baldfaced lying thief)