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

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

#151

Post by yamtaddle » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 6:59 PM UTC

csmpltn wrote: post #133

yamtaddle wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 movemen…

I'm genuinely wondering why this isn't something one can do in a situation like this... Filing a report when your money is stolen from you is a very logical step to take. Whether or not the police will "deal with it" is an entirely different manner. Some cases get dropped, and others take years to handle - but what are your other options? To go around writing sob stories on random internet blogs? To beg for the atten…

If you're dealing with a financial institution, odds are they're covered in these cases by anti-fraud laws or provisions in your contract/service-agreement anyway. I expect the cops would roll their eyes and tell you to go away unless you want to risk a false-report charge. They probably see a lot of people trying to file reports against institutions for often-bad reasons and don't have much patience for it. On top of that, they usually don't give a shit even when it's a genuine complaint—the only reason to even go to them is to get (heh, around here, purchase, even) a police report for insurance, if that applies.

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

#152

Post by csmpltn » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 7:01 PM UTC

dylan604 wrote: post #141

csmpltn wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "in what jurisdiction would you file that police report?" If I had to guess? File it in your state and it'll get routed from there. Or how about you literally ask the police this exact question? > "at least get your LEA correct when making non-sense posts like this" I think you're over complicating this, but you sound like you might know better so... The police is a sensible starting point, from which you as a citi…

I think the point is that there is no indication of a crime. Your local police will just laugh. Maybe suggest you talk to a lawyer about possible law suits or maybe a complaint with your state's AG. However, you'll find in your ToS contract that they tell you they can/will suspend your account for suspicion of fraud or other activities. Just because they suck at explaining themselves is not a crime according to the l…

> "I think the point is that there is no indication of a crime."

Inexplicably being denied access to your own funds without being told what's going on or when the issue will be resolved could be an indication of a crime. I'm not saying it is a clear indication, but I'm not denying the possibility either.

There can be any number of hypothetical reasons for the situation being the way it is, and you can't exclude ones which are clearly criminal in nature (say somebody hacked their account and emptied it for funds). You should also draw parallels to other service providers (hospitals, universities, etc).

> "It's so easy to react emotionally to things when they affect your livelihood"

What other choice do you have in such a situation? This person exhausted every option they had, only to eventually get the help they needed by randomly reaching out to internet strangers. If it wasn't for this, who knows how long they would remain locked out of their account without any visibility into what's going on? Meanwhile, their business would be hurting, creating a cascading effect.

Filing a police report in such a situation isn't "reacting emotionally".

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

#153

Post by techsupporter » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 7:04 PM UTC

zopa wrote: post #107

londons_explore wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> If customer service were a priority companies could figure out how to build a trustworthy workforce.

This is 100% accurate, in my experience. You even gave the answer in your first sentence:

> these are low-paid jobs with no agency.

If they weren't low-paid jobs with no agency, a lot of trust and retention would follow, almost like magic. (Of course there would still be people who abuse or mess up the intended system; that's why you have internal business controls and vetting.)

A long time ago, I worked overnight customer support for a very large ISP, via an outsourcing company. On the overnight shift, there was no distinction between technical support and billing because call volumes were so much lower. Also because of being on the overnight shift, we had much greater authority to make account adjustments and fixes because the employees who worked directly for the ISP didn't want to be woken up in the middle of the night to approve requests. All we needed was a second coworker to sign off. Oh, and we got paid a 25% differential for the shift.

People would actively try to move onto the overnight shift. Our group inside the outsourcing company had the lowest turnover rate by far and was helped by one year our overnight shift had zero turnover. Two of my coworkers even declined being promoted to daytime lead so they could stay working overnights.

Yes, the pay was good even though the hours were not so great, but the autonomy was better. We were treated like adults; we didn't even have a technical support script because no one from the ISP had come to officially train us so we weren't "allowed" to use the script in the knowledge repository. We had access to the billing tools that would tell us why an account was in a certain state and so we could actually fix, or at least tell the customer about, problems instead of offering them a "trouble ticket" and a "one-time credit of $15 for your issue."

It was amazing and I'm often sad that our industry has forgotten that humans are the point of all of this.

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

#154

Post by xwdv » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 7:08 PM UTC

DevX101 wrote: post #5

I'm glad your issues were sorted, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that you need to make a social media post to get a customer service issue resolved. This isn't just stripe. I see this with many other companies on social media. I don't post on Twitter, and I'd rather not put my account details for some service I use in a public forum. It's starting to seem like for too many companies, resolving public complaints…

If this is the way things are going, then there should be some kind of influencer types with large clout who can bring up these sort of cases on behalf of an anonymous party.

Imagine having no real social media footprint or even a bad reputation with lots of downvoted posts. How are you supposed to resolve your issues when a company has decided no one would give a shit about you if you complained? You need someone to vouch for you and help you hold their feet to the fire, you need an individual who will tell your story to an audience that is too expensive to disappoint.

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

#155

Post by qzw » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

nucleardog wrote: post #113

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #43

Lots of posts here along the lines of "it's not good when you need to resort to social media shaming to get customer support", but I'll take the contrarian view, or at least explain why this dynamic exists. The past 20 years has seen an explosion in Internet services, but a fundamental (often unspoken) quality of these services is that they must keep individualized customer support costs very low in order to be profi…

> I wish there were a better alternative, but I really am at a loss to think what that could be. Figure out what it costs to have whoever is looking at the HN issues look at them and just charge that much for a executive VIP support request. Like, if I’ve got $400k locked up and CS stuck in a loop I’d happily drop $200 to have someone that actually has the power to talk to people and get the ball rolling on fixing st…

I like the idea in general, but any fraudsters would gladly pay quite a lot to have a chance of getting their hands on $400k. They can work out the ROI just as well as a legit customer. So the anti fraud aspect doesn’t ring true to me.

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

#156

Post by csmpltn » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 7:10 PM UTC

yamtaddle wrote: post #151

csmpltn wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm genuinely wondering why this isn't something one can do in a situation like this... Filing a report when your money is stolen from you is a very logical step to take. Whether or not the police will "deal with it" is an entirely different manner. Some cases get dropped, and others take years to handle - but what are your other options? To go around writing sob stories on random internet blogs? To beg for the atten…

If you're dealing with a financial institution, odds are they're covered in these cases by anti-fraud laws or provisions in your contract/service-agreement anyway. I expect the cops would roll their eyes and tell you to go away unless you want to risk a false-report charge. They probably see a lot of people trying to file reports against institutions for often-bad reasons and don't have much patience for it. On top o…

> "I expect the cops would roll their eyes and tell you to go away"

Maybe they will, and maybe they won't - but surely it's a dialogue worth having once you've exhausted all other options? I'd imagine that the specifics truly matter, and depending on the severity of the case you could be allowed to file a report?

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

#157

Post by chihuahua » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 7:14 PM UTC

zackmorris wrote: post #94

I wish there was an online proxy service that acted as a mediator between consumers and vendors. Instead of signing up with Stripe, PayPal, Google, etc directly, we'd sign up with the proxy and pay a small fee (maybe 1/4%) to handle any disputes. That way if/when grievances get ignored, the proxy could do things like withhold payment from the other customers until the situation gets resolved. Ideally, no payment woul…

And what happens when this proxy gets hit with the inevitable torrent of fraud attempts? Either it pretends there is no fraud and gets wiped out. Or it attempts to detect fraud, and responds by freezing accounts etc. Sometimes there are false positives. Now we're back to square 1.

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

#158

Post by redeux » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 7:16 PM UTC

cj wrote: post #111

bread90 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does she sell on her store?

Laser cut wooden signs. She has a big warehouse in florida with commercial grade laser cutting machines (they started on a Glowforge!) The products are all custom, e.g. your family's last name laser cut onto wood.

I’d love some info on how she grew to that size on Etsy. My partner sells some things on Etsy and has had moderate success but nowhere on that level. Did she use Etsy ads, off platform marketing, or some kind of listing optimization for Etsy search to drive that kind of growth?

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

#159

Post by dylan604 » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 7:22 PM UTC

csmpltn wrote: post #152

dylan604 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the point is that there is no indication of a crime. Your local police will just laugh. Maybe suggest you talk to a lawyer about possible law suits or maybe a complaint with your state's AG. However, you'll find in your ToS contract that they tell you they can/will suspend your account for suspicion of fraud or other activities. Just because they suck at explaining themselves is not a crime according to the l…

> "I think the point is that there is no indication of a crime." Inexplicably being denied access to your own funds without being told what's going on or when the issue will be resolved could be an indication of a crime. I'm not saying it is a clear indication, but I'm not denying the possibility either. There can be any number of hypothetical reasons for the situation being the way it is, and you can't exclude ones…

Calling the police is totally an emotional response.

You made a business contract with a company. In that contract, they stipulate that under certain circumstances they will hold your money. What is a problem is the company is completely full of shit in how they handle these situations. They are "protecting themselves" from your account potentially being some sort of fraud. This is all automated with zero to little human involvement which creates potential for lots of false positives. During these cases, the company is 100% at fault for being cheap ass bastards that show zero sympathy towards users.

This is not something for local police to be involved. The disconnect seems to be emotional vs logical.

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

#160

Post by eole666 » Tue, Jan 03, 2023, 7:25 PM UTC

cdeangel wrote: post #126

eole666 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well you're right, if you create it from scratch. I was rather thinking about creating a simple payment handling module centralizing your bank's own pro platform and other things like paypal, apple pay ... etc

Most of those processing fees get paid out to the card issuer. Square has a good breakdown here: https://squareup.com/payments/our-fees You're not getting away from those fees, no matter what backend system you're using to process cards. How do you think credit cards make money on those reward programs?

Yep, but at least you get payment on your bank account directly.. And for Apple pay, PayPal or things like that I imagine if it's done using stripe on top of that, fees of each platform add up with stripe fees ? Or maybe not ?