I forwarded the email from @Stripe to stripe, with the invoice attached, and explained that the company was defunct and asked if they would please stop charging my card every month. They emailed back and asked for all the details I'd included in the original email. I provided them again, and they said they could not find any record of the charge in their system, even though I forwarded them the email FROM Stripe that includes all the details. I emailed back and said it's weird they couldn't find the charge because the email very clearly comes from Stripe, includes the company name, etc.
They told me the only solution is to call my bank and ask them to block the payments moving forward. My bank does a lot of things right, but unfortunately the process of rejecting charges, especially recurring ones, isn't one of them.
It's strange stripe won't do this, it's very clear the company is gone... I don't understand why they won't just stop the charges going forward?
It's a good opportunity to do a 'scream test' also. When all those subscription holders scream that they can't charge your card anymore, just give the ones you actually want to keep your new card number.
If this is a automated charge stripe is making against a credit card and they have refused to take action you should report this as fraud. You should also report it back for the beginning date of when the original company providing your service went defunct and stopped providing the service. At that moment stripe should have blocked their ability to process transactions. It boggles my mind that stripe is not more helpful in getting this resolved without going through the credit card dispute process. Once you've initiated the credit card dispute process you're effectively not liable for any of those charges save for $50 at the max which most of the time you'll never have to pay anyway. All you'll need to do for the dispute is provide evidence that the service has not been rendered which can be done by showing that the company is defunct. It's usually very straightforward. And when the dispute happens it is now on stripe to prove that the charges are legitimate. When companies are found to have too many fraudulent charges they are processing their fees will be increased. This is why I say he's very odd that stripe is not paying more attention to this it is better for them to resolve the situation directly than for you to get the credit card company involved.
If this is a debit card your bank will still have similar protections but you don't ask them to block a recurring charge you report it as a fraudulent charge. Because any charge that is made to you where you're not receiving a service is fraud and it needs to be classified as such. Don't try to explain the full situation just say the company went out of business but I'm still receiving the charge therefore I want to report this as fraud. Debit card protections are not nearly as robust as credit card protections but once you've reported fraud the bank still has very specific legal obligations that they have to undertake one of which is blocking the charges and beginning a fraud investigation.
These kind of dispute processes are even better when you have an intermediate such as stripe or PayPal or some other intermediate processor. It is incredibly easy for you to win in those situations. This is also one of the reasons why always use a credit card. Even if you don't want to have outstanding credit use a credit card as if it was a debit card your protections are very very strong. I've had problems with eBay purchases and you do the eBay dispute resolution and they don't care so you move on to the PayPal dispute resolution and they also seem to not care. After exhausting those options and I reported it through my credit card all of a sudden PayPal took notice I wanted to offer to resolve it but at that point I didn't care cuz my credit card will just deal with it.