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Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

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181–190 of 197 posts

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#181
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's anecdotal evidence at best and at worst this person is only telling their side of the story

It doesn’t matter that it is anecdotal in plenty of these HN support cases, the fact that this is possible at all is commonly what is atrocious (in other words, this should happen zero times). IE You can’t deflect a nuclear plant meltdown by saying we need to know how long it was running fine beforehand.

You don't even know if he is telling the truth. He didn't even reveal the name of his business, why are you so sure it's true?

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even that isn't right: if the original balance was $100k the loss can never be larger than that. You still have 25K in the bank so the loss is $75k, any other interpretation should not be labelled a loss, at best they are misguided expectations.

The 150k is a "loss" in the same way that the movie industry "lost" $500 million (or whatever it is that they claimed) to piracy: revenue that they think they should have gotten, but didn't.

I agree it's up to interpretation, but in this scenario, the seller has shipped a set number of goods that the customers have paid for. The revenue has been generated but not moved successfully through a service provider to the final destination.

So it's not just an estimate. The money is not imaginary, it has already been collected from the customers.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#183
post #50

I am small business owner and I use stripe since 2015 for a million+ of sales a year. In the last year or two I noticed they have become more and more arrogant. I am talking early/mid 2010’s Facebook / Google arrogant. I understand stripe is a successful company and it’s not easy to infuse a culture with so many people. But I surely hope they can turn this around.

Can you provide examples of what you mean? Ascribing emotional characteristics to companies is always a little weird to me, so it would be helpful if you fleshed this out a bit more.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#185
post #9

Looking forward to seeing how this unfolds as we were considering using Stripe for payments on e-commerce store that ships physical goods. Really hope they resolve this swiftly for the OP.

OP commented again saying the money has gone back to the customers.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#186
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy. If I share accurate info about what and how we sell things, It's very easy for opportunists and competitors to undertake us in this specific project while our processing solution is down temporarily. What I will say though, is that we're not speaking vapes or anything borderline, more like kitchen and household appliances, and so on.

> I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy. It says all. You are most likely a scammer or criminal.

Yep.

Search below for response from 'caitb' who works at Stripe:

> I work at Stripe, and we're already in touch with OP.

> We don’t comment on specific user cases for privacy reasons. As a reminder, facts presented in a public forum can often be misleading or untrue.

Along with:

> We were in touch with OP over email before this post was made.

> We know that confirming we review cases posted here provides an incentive for bad actors to post.

> We wish that weren’t the case–but we do pay attention to both internal case reviews and to any public complaints where users are having a bad day (or, in some cases, profess to be having a bad day).

And the resolution posted by OP below was:

> UPDATE : Stripe has just closed our account without further notice and refunded the whole balance.

So, this story is that Stripe just protected a whole bunch of people paying around $100 for scams worth up to $250k or so.

As an exercise everyone should spend some time on r/tifu, r/ChoosingBeggars, r/antiwork, etc and play spot-the-fakes, particularly when some story that hits the front page of reddit sounds very appealing to your biases.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#187
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy. It says all. You are most likely a scammer or criminal.

Yep. Search below for response from 'caitb' who works at Stripe: > I work at Stripe, and we're already in touch with OP. > We don’t comment on specific user cases for privacy reasons. As a reminder, facts presented in a public forum can often be misleading or untrue. Along with: > We were in touch with OP over email before this post was made. > We know that confirming we review cases posted here provides an incentive…

Indeed. Another angle to consider: there are a 1001 ways in which people scam other people even if they have a website and it all looks legit to you that doesn't mean it isn't a scam or a way to process gambling or porn charges or to launder money. There are so many ways to do this that I know of because I come across them professionally from time to time and then there are untold ways that I don't know of. So without access to all of the information that Stripe has at their disposal it is impossible to know what's going on even if it looks legit. And Stripe is always going to err on the side of caution simply because no matter how big your business and how important it is to you their reputation, merchant account status and legal exposure is worth infinitely more to them.

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 150k is a "loss" in the same way that the movie industry "lost" $500 million (or whatever it is that they claimed) to piracy: revenue that they think they should have gotten, but didn't.

I agree it's up to interpretation, but in this scenario, the seller has shipped a set number of goods that the customers have paid for. The revenue has been generated but not moved successfully through a service provider to the final destination. So it's not just an estimate. The money is not imaginary, it has already been collected from the customers.

It actually got refunded (see title, and update by OP).

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#189
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is true, but we have heard many of these stories that could only be resolved by using HN. How many more stories are there, that we don't here about because the affected people don't know HN? At some point it becomes a pattern.

So there's a pattern because of stories you don't know exist?

[deleted]

Re: Stripe is about to refund €147k worth of payments to my all of my customers

#190

There needs to be a dedicated “YC Portfolio Company Support” section of HN.

The HN-as-customer-support-of-last-resort thing is pretty equal-opportunity, i.e. non-YC companies and YC companies both. e.g. there are tons of these for the inscrutable googolith. The difference is just that we downweight the submissions less when YC startups are involved (because of the principle outlined here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...).

However, there have been so many of these recently that we're tweaking our approach to downweight them more—maybe not quite as much as non-YC-related cases, but more than we used to. That's because we're starting to see a community allergic reaction to the high quantity of these, and that's as close to a hivemind verdict as we get here.

Recent explanations:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34190090 (Dec 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745192 (Nov 2022)

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