Contact your state’s money transmitter regulator [1]. If you suspect bad faith, looping in FinCEN may not be a bad idea [2].
[1] https://www.mtraweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Contact-l...
Welcome to HN Stripe Support. How may we direct your call to Edwin @ Stripe?
This is pretty standard, if a card processor thinks there is high probability of chargebacks then they will hold your funds for 3-4 months to make sure they can cover those chargebacks. After the deadline for cardholders to make disputes passes then they release the funds.
It might not be anything you did personally, it might be based on location or business type.
Talking to them is probably the best course of action though the front-line people won't be able to make a decision. I'd lookup their CEO's e-mail and send a short "I'm a small business and my funds are being held 120 days, please help" and that will usually get routed to someone who can make a decision.
We switched to Authorize.net because the business risk at Stripe was just too high. The api isn't near as good, but it works, and we don't worry about random account freezes.
Sounds exactly like PayPal. Is there a law of nature that forces payment processors to act like this?
Companies like Stripe can’t deal with the P999 problems and are ignoring them.
They think their P99 customer service is great but 0.1% of their customers are experiencing a catastrophic level of experience and they simply don’t care. They are ignoring it because it doesn’t show up on any of their metrics or dashboards but it has a catastrophic effect on a small number of customers.
Companies like Stripe need a swat team that deals with these P999 catastrophes, but given their scale it’s probably cost prohibitive, so they just say “Fuck it.”
This should be illegal. It is literally a loan with no interest.
Sue them for lost interest. You should have a strong case in principle, however, in practice, it's most likely not worth it for you (which is the real reason why this is happening). But if you have a lawyer friend who can give a first opinion for free, you could give 'em a call.
Next time, transfer hundreds of thousands of drug money when you first open the account
and then your normal sized payments will be well within the expectations of size and volume so the payment processor won't flag your account
Is there an equivalent to Stripe, from a DX perspective, that allows you to create an actual merchant account instead of being a sub account of Stripe?
Having an actual merchant account, and going through KYB, seems like it’d solve a lot of these problems.
Well, this is one way to reach support.
I have an SaaS service with let twitter user automate their twitter account such as send direct message to new follower, search and retweet /favorite tweets, tweet in schedule, delete all tweets at once , and so on.
I use Stripe as payment method. And Stripe suspended my account 1 week ago. They said they do not allow social media business.
It is a bad experience for me.
That's standard operating procedure for these fintech payment processing companies. To increase the amount of new users and lower 'friction' they're performing underwriting/due-diligence after accounts have processed transactions. Something with your transaction amounts or business is out of the ordinary, or outside of their underwriting terms and triggered the closure.
Sounds like the typical Stripe thing people write about here. Hopefully one of the staff will read this and help you. Seriously stripe would it kill you to not have these incompetent processes in place?
Sorry about this. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com and I can dig in?
Thank you all! I am incredibly grateful to the HN community, I am finally getting in touch with a real person at Stripe who can hopefully rectify this situation.
Sounds like they could be using your cash as funding.
If they hold a bunch of cash from people it is effectively theirs for that period of time. This could prevent them from needing to raise a funding round if done enough.
Some businesses are literally customer funded like these.
If you want to read more search for "negative cash operating cycle".
OP, the Stripe guy said this
> We’ve been investigating this case for the past 24 hours, and it's not straightforward. I can’t share more publicly here, but we’re in touch directly with OP.
Can you lay out your version of the events please and give written permission for the Strip guy to lay out his version as well?
Curious to see how the two line up.
You're fine with having payments refunded for (presumably) services rendered?
Either it's not a business, but a mere hobby, or there is something to it you're keeping from us.
Probably the former, but it makes me immediately suspicious, even with the recurring and well-documented "situation" with Stripe.
HN is not the forum to file customer support tickets. Stripe has great customer support and even live chat support.
I’m the person leading the project to make sure that people have fewer bad experiences with Stripe. I’m not sure what is driving the uptick in posts on the subject to HN in particular (obviously we pay attention to broader online discussion in addition to monitoring our support systems, though we know it creates an incentive for people to publicize their situation).
On the topic of Stripe and these kinds of incidents more broadly, there’s a lot to say, but here are a few pieces of context that are probably relevant:
- We are a giant distributed bounty system for people to find interesting and scalable ways to defraud us.
- We’ve seen significant upticks in certain kinds of fraud over the past couple of months. When businesses default, Stripe takes on the loss. It’s worth noting that certain kinds of fraud, like card testing, can also have significant collateral costs for legitimate Stripe businesses, and our systems and processes are not only to protect Stripe itself.
- We are far from oblivious to the harm that mistakes in our systems can cause. (I interact with a lot of these cases personally.) One of my highest priorities is creating better appeals flows for when we’re wrong.
- We’ve shipped 7 substantial improvements just in the last 10 days that should meaningfully reduce the occurrence of false positives.
- Publicly-described facts of specific cases don’t always match the actual facts. Stripe is sometimes just wrong. (We made some mistakes that I feel bad about in one recent case and we ended up bringing the company’s founders to an all hands last week to make sure we learned as much as possible.) But users do also sometimes publicly misrepresent what’s going on. We’re also restricted by privacy rules to not share specifics in those cases.
- Stripe works with millions of businesses and we see all kinds of “rare” failure modes fairly frequently. (Disputes between staff at a business, business impersonation, businesses that start legitimate and go bad, and so on.)
- I’m working on a post to share some of our broader philosophy + policy changes that I hope to publish before the end of this year. In that, I’m also hoping we can share some relevant metrics. If HNers have any suggestions for things that might be useful to see covered (though obviously certain things can’t be publicly disclosed), feel free to suggest them.
Ultimately, we work hard to be worthy of the trust of businesses across the internet, and my personal mandate (supported by many others, from our cofounders down) is to find effective new ways of making mistakes less likely. “Uniformly good support at scale, in a highly adversarial environment, with very financially-motivated actors” is not easy, but I’m pretty confident that we can make a lot of progress.
It goes without saying we're working on a review of OP situation. I’m happy to take general questions as well. You can also always reach me directly at jhaddock@stripe.com.