I started a Stripe account (even incorporated through them) for a basic graphic design and web design service business.
I process a few charges and even though I didn't get a single chargeback or dispute, Stripe decided to deactivate my account and said they would refund all the charges that were processed.
Which would have been fine with me. They said they would refund on Oct 17, but that date came and past. So I kept emailing.
Now they're saying they're holding all the funds for 120 days because of "elevated risk".
Which is insane because they have already withdrawn all the funds, meaning their risk would be zero if they refunded everyone.
I am beyond hurt and confused as I did need this money for my daughter. These decisions have real impacts on real families.
What do you do in this scenario? I have tried contacting support at Stripe but seems to be of no help.
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.
[1] https://www.mtraweb.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Contact-l...
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.
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.”
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
Having an actual merchant account, and going through KYB, seems like it’d solve a lot of these problems.
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.
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".
> 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.
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.