Stripe shut our microbiology conference for adult content?

Question

I've heard about some crazy Stripe stories from HN, but never thought our tiny microbiology conference (go phage therapy!) would ever be in the cross-hairs, but yet here we are.Apparently we're selling "adult content" &mdash; maybe because we use the words "early-bird" and "student" in the same sentence?Either way, appealing doesn't seem to work. We DID use Stripe two years ago, on the same account, for the same event, with no problems.Help???

yawnxyz · Accepted Answer

Thank you Stripe &mdash; your support is amazing.So what happened was, the non-profit and owner of the Stripe account lost access to their organization website to a squatter, which replaced the site with adult content. So even though the event website is correct (and is microbiology related!) the parent org's site &mdash; probably used to register for the Stripe account, is not as kosher.Stripe's support works INCREDIBLY FAST, thank you for this..

smca · Answer

Hey Jan, I work at Stripe&mdash;sorry for the hassle. I can see our support team has already gotten your message.I'll make sure we get this sorted out quickly.

waboremo · Answer

If they haven't explicitly stated why they've flagged your account, it's not worth trying to reason out yourself.
Everyone eventually gets caught in Stripe's crossfire, unfortunately they have done nothing to make it easier to get out of that rut outside of making a lot of noise on social media. So hopefully someone from Stripe reaches out to you here, if not make some noise on twitter/reddit/facebook/etc until they do.
Unfortunately the rest of us can't help here since Stripe is generally vague about why they flag accounts.

sparrish · Answer

They're right; microbiology isn't for children.

zxcvbn4038 · Answer

Write the stripe CEO, that will get routed to someone who can help. Front line support people are pretty useless except for the most routine functions.

EddieEngineers · Answer

I purchased a subscription to some AI tooling yesterday that accepted either card or cashapp, is cashapp a way you could go?

villgax · Answer

Just move on to some other gateway

c7DJTLrn · Answer

Hopefully a Stripe engineer reads this and gives you a hotline to support. As that's what usually happens.
As for other customers who don't browse HN, they can get fucked apparently.
EDIT: aaand it happened

Stripe shut our microbiology conference for adult content?

Hey Jan, I work at Stripe—sorry for the hassle. I can see our support team has already gotten your message.I'll make sure we get this sorted out quickly.

They're right; microbiology isn't for children.

Write the stripe CEO, that will get routed to someone who can help. Front line support people are pretty useless except for the most routine functions.

I purchased a subscription to some AI tooling yesterday that accepted either card or cashapp, is cashapp a way you could go?

Just move on to some other gateway

Hopefully a Stripe engineer reads this and gives you a hotline to support. As that's what usually happens.As for other customers who don't browse HN, they can get fucked apparently.EDIT: aaand it happened

Hey Jan, I work at Stripe—sorry for the hassle. I can see our support team has already gotten your message.
I'll make sure we get this sorted out quickly.

Hopefully a Stripe engineer reads this and gives you a hotline to support. As that's what usually happens.
As for other customers who don't browse HN, they can get fucked apparently.
EDIT: aaand it happened