Maybe if you can create a donation for that that would work. I would be really glad if you create a donation to use that money for better payment provider than stripe
I think the OP would make a stronger case if they were more literal: they had exactly 1 dispute according to the evidence provided. In a sense the idea that you could be shut down for one dispute would be even more extraordinary.
I guess stripe wasn't kidding when they said they would disrupt online payments.
On a more serious note; How much further is society going to allow this kind of thing? Hiding behind templated e-mails without any explanation. Disrupting people's lives who become collateral damage with no way out.
I'm not sure about that. The companies employing these kind of techniques are typically making huge profits. I suspect supply and demand would dictate that a bunch of the cost came out of those
Maybe I wasn't clear. I meant, why have the ML algorithm disable the account automatically if human review happens nearly 100% of the time, rather than simply have ML flag the account for human review, and let them decide whether to disable the account.
> The typical duties of an ombudsman are to investigate complaints and attempt to resolve them, usually through recommendations (binding or not) or mediation. Ombudsmen sometimes also aim to identify systemic issues leading to poor service or breaches of people's rights. At the national level, most ombudsmen have a wide mandate to deal with the entire public sector, and sometimes also elements of the private sector (for example, contracted service providers). In some cases, there is a more restricted mandate, for example with particular sectors of society.
I don't want to sound too cynical but I don't know of an ombudsman which has binding authority. Here in the Netherlands all ombudsman I know are non-binding.
I personally know of 2 dealings with an Ombudsman in the Netherlands. One involved me personally and another one of a good friend. In both cases the ombudsman advised in our favor. In both cases the reaction on the advice was: "Thanks for the advice, ombudsman, but we are not going to act on it.".
A non-binding ombudsman is in my experience just a paper tiger to make an organization look good and I have never seen a binding one.
Ive had an experience with an Ombudsman in the UK. I was stuck in a loop with a major broadband provider in the UK who were giving me the run around. I contacted the ombudsman and within 14 days of my first email the company resolved the issue, (after 4 months of back and forth before that). Despite being non binding, the moment they were involved my problem was resolved.
Why would "society" care whether company A makes money instead of company B? This kind of thing is only remotely concerning to, like, VCs and tech workers hoping to strike it rich in the startup game.
That's a weird take. Society wants stability. Having large companies companies use a random number generator to determine whether they will arbitrarily blacklist (and thereby try to destroy) smaller companies isn't leading to stability.
Yes, society doesn't break down. Just as it doesn't break down if 1% of people were murdered each year. But society won't accept 1% being murdered. And once it's public enough, they'll also not accept that companies do stuff like that. Case in point: banks are tightly regulated exactly because of that, we need to rely on them to handle money efficiently, so we don't want randomness in their processes. Maybe it's time that Stripe & friends get more regulatory oversight as well, since they don't seem to be capable of managing themselves.
I think you're overstating the importance of small companies to the vast majority of people. If Amazon comes along and annihilates all the small bookstores by undercutting their prices, people will just get their books from Amazon. That happened; that's a fact. It doesn't really matter to anyone except the bookstore owners who are now annoyed that they can't make profits anymore. It has nothing to do with "stability."
It requires a paradigm shift. Automated escrow services could handle almost every dispute where both parties are honest, APIs for validating shipping and handling of goods/egoods could handle another large chunk, and human dispute resolution could handle the remainder.
Such a service could be offered by the legacy payment providers.
I have used such services in the past, but still feel the field is ripe for disruption.
I have considered this too. The issue I have encountered is that the vast majority of potential users/customers do not have and cannot quickly obtain Monero or Bitcoin or whatever.
Most all of them have VISA cards.
Expecting customers to carefully create a wallet, an exchange account (so they can buy the crypto) and considering how difficult that can be (even for technical users) is really unreasonable. When people can use crypto as easily as they can use a credit card, then it would be an alternative.
IMPO, this problem is very similar to the PGP problem. You'll get a lot less email if you only accept PGP encrypted and signed emails. You cannot expect your customers to do that. They won't, but they will send you plaintext emails from their Gmail accounts, just as quickly as they will pay using a VISA card.
How much further is society going to allow this kind of thing?
"what these corporations are doing is literally destroying the basis for a developed economy.... [They] have all collectively routed around the rule of law which is necessary for sustained economic growth over time.
In countries with strong rule of law:
1. Property rights over land, equipment, and personal items are clear and protected by law.
2. Contracts between people, businesses, and the government are effectively enforced by the legal system.
3. Political accountability is high and corruption is low.
4. Business regulations are clear and enforced in a transparent manner.
In such environments people make long-term investments and build large organizations. In contrast, if the property rights and contracts are not enforced and the business regulations are not clear, most of the economy consists of small family owned firms with little modern equipment. A high-tech, prosperous economy would not develop.
Effectively, there are no contracts anymore in the digital economy. There is no predictability anymore. There is no accountability. There is no responsibility. There are no requirements for performance anymore. In sum, the US digital economy is rapidly becoming the equivalent of a third-world economy, complete with crony capitalism and digital robber barons."
How are we a "high risk" merchant when our business is not different from Truebill.com (subscription tracking) and Ramp Inc (spend management) a company Stripe recently invested in?
The cynical me says there is your answer right there. You are a bit to close to something Stripe invested in, or at least close enough to something they will offer as a service soon.
If they wanted the biggest part of the cake, the should keep the small businesses next to their own. The know their competitors and, in the case of them failing, they'd still be on the winning side.
As the saying goes, to make money in a gold rush, sell pickaxes.
>Is everyone learning from the best (cough Amazon)?
You mean learning from the 5th highest market cap company? Isn't that sort of expected? The question you should ask if why the government doesn't step in since companies will do what they can to optimize stock price.
If that actually worked as some people think it does, the corporate income tax rate would be 0%, there would be no labor laws, no OSHA, no EPA, and so on.
Or, alternatively, the business (issuing virtual credit cards to consumers, seemingly worldwide) is pretty different from truebill.com (subscription tracking, yes, but doesn't issue cards, AFAICT) or Ramp (issues corporate cards instead of consumer cards, where I would assume there's a bit more due diligence).
> Our credit card comes with a U.S. billing address, so you can unlock features restricted to the U.S or Western markets especially if you don't live there.
Isn't this just straight up fraud?
Admittedly I'm not familiar with any of the services mentioned, so correction is welcome.
I think all payment processors grow until they hit scale and become paypal. This may be because at that scale they hit new regulations, or have to manage their customers as aggressively as paypal.
well their website banned me from viewing it because I use a VPN, so I can't comment on the justice/injustice of their position. My irony sensor went off though.
My SaaS business serves corporate law firms and investment banks that invest in large corporate bankruptcies (think Hertz). When I launched, I first applied for a merchant license from Stripe, and was quickly denied by an automated system, citing violation of TOS (no reference to what violation). But given there are a ton of alternatives, I just used Braintree instead and it's been a great experience so far.
I really feel for the author. We had once decided to participate in Stripe's Identity Verification beta. After submitting the form to request participation, Stripe's system locked our account pending verification.
We were fortunate in that we had a backup payment gateway integration "just in case", because otherwise we would have been completely unable to accept any payments at all for a full week.
That week was still extremely stressful. They offered no explanation or reason for putting our entire business on hold.
>We were fortunate in that we had a backup payment gateway integration "just in case"
This seems like the key point here. I'm not a software guy or even a payments guy, I'm a network infrastructure engineer.
For anything that we want more than 99% uptime, we put in two of everything, sometimes more. Two separate service providers, ideally coming down different physical paths where practical.
"Treat infrastructure as possible failure points and prepare accordingly" holds just as well for the payment infrastructure. Interesting and fresh perspective, thank you for sharing.
Great practice, specifically determining how much redundancy you need, and making sure it is available. The theme also goes with your acct name quite nicely!
It's not possible to increase availability with redundancy in all cases, because not all financial actions are idempotent.
For example, sending money via a banking wire. If the bank goes down, you can't send a second wire through another bank without loss because the first wire is not retractable.
If I understand correctly you use Stripe Issuing to give people cards that they can then spend with in a way that you control? How do people recharge their Justuseapp cards? You charge their real card and credit their virtual ones? And if one of the apps being used makes a unauthorised charge do you then raise a dispute on behalf of the customer?
I'm not trying to apologise for Stripe, I'm trying to see what's special about this financial arrangement. It's obviously not a SaaS nor are you selling anything physical.
"You can then use the virtual credit card to signup for free trials on the web and on apps without worry. We approve only free trials and not actual purchases."
I assume when you sign up to a free trail, they'll charge your card £0.00 to confirm it's a valid card, then when the trail ends and they try to automatically charge you for a full subscription they'll block the transaction.
This is not the intended use for stripe issuing at all, and would lead to stripe handling thousands of disputes from companies trying to charge cards with 0 balance after trials end.
Automatically charging a 12 month subscription after a free trail is not the intended consequence of signing up to a free trail for most people at all.
It leads to thousands of disputes from innocent people being changed a lot of money they never intended to part with, sadly most will never get that money back.
>We had worked hard to make sure we pose to risk to Stripe or card networks and it had worked! Our efforts had paid off. But that was not enough for Stripe.
I went through the same thing.
Some ML algorithm at Stripe randomly classified my business (bog standard WooCommerce/WordPress e-Commerce store selling a single product in low volumes) as a risk and I found that the process for escalating it was Kafkaesque and slow.
Switched to Pin Payments[1] shortly after that experience and have never looked back. Of course, we live in the 2021 century and algorithms will flag issues automatically (I ported my phone number and changed my bank account on the same day, which was fun!), but they've always made sure to contact me and resolve the issue within minutes instead of cutting access. The few times I've contacted them, a competent person has both understood the issue and responded to it appropriately and promptly.
This product was leaning heavily on Stripe’s issuing API, so I don’t think pin payments is a viable alternative. I’m actually not sure if anybody else is a viable alternative. Is there another service that offers card issuing as an API?
Hiring humans is not as scalable as technology is. You can't just hire 150 more customer support agents _each month_ like you can fire up another Kubernetes cluster. They need training, middle managers, leads, special training, good tooling, office space, adjusted KPI-s, etc.
Ideally, good companies will find a balance with AI and human operators that's also sustainable as a business.
You're saying, however, "We can scale our tech but not our business." If you could scale everything but payroll, that wouldn't make it okay to use an automated payroll system that left some employees unpaid with no recourse. Leaving your customers unjustly banned with no recourse is no more justifiable.
> Ideally, good companies will find a balance with AI and human operators that's also sustainable as a business.
This is the crux of it. What do you define as a balance? In this example, Stripe shouldn’t be using ML to actually ban accounts but instead to flag accounts for manual review.
My company distributes advertisements. We need to watch every ad we ever distribute to ensure both its quality and legality. We have and still are investigating ML to improve this process, but because regulations put the cost on us for false negatives, we would use ML only to identify when it knows an ad fails our checks. It would then pulls it from the QC queue before any tech manually reviews it and emails the client informing it was blocked and why it was blocked and a link to a form where they can request a manual review if they think it was a false positive.
Our contracts allow for a fee to be imposed on the client if they challenge a block which is upheld after manual review.
Doing it this way we reduced our tech workload by removing clearly violating ads from QC queue and we give the client a clear and quick way to challenge the results of the ML.
At least, that is the plan here. It’s still in R&D.
I agree with this sentiment in general, but in this case it sounds like a human at Stripe did review the case, and Stripe still decided not to do business with them.
Hiring more customer service humans is not a guarantee that every customer will get what they want.
Funny how this has beeing a tendency last years. Big american corps just banning small users/companies without any reason and not giving them support whatsoever.
As a developer this puts a big dent on Stripe's reliability and I'm not advising it to any client. Ever.
I think big companies tend to do this by accident, more out of incompetence than malice.
Yet this sort of thing just begs for future draconian government interference. Seems to me a smart company would find a way to not invite that unpleasantness on themselves.
> I think big companies tend to do this by accident, more out of incompetence than malice.
They have bots deciding the future of their users. And when the bots make some kind of mistake they don't give support for the costumer or neither check if the user got wrongly banned. It's some kind of sick blind trust they place on automated systems. Nothing wrong against these systems, but they should have a system in place to check wether these made a mistake or not.
Silicon Valley wanting to "disrupt" industries seems to have a bad habit of becoming the thing they tried to disrupt. Guess you can put some money in an iceblock in front of their HQ and see what happens.
Reminds me of when people loved online video like YouTube because of the lack of commercials.
I have a hunch their main concern is this kind of marketing on your site:
"Access the American market
Our credit card comes with a U.S. billing address, so you can unlock features restricted to the U.S or Western markets especially if you don't live there."
Stripe might not even be allowed to say the reason if they brushed up against anti-money laundering policies. This is probably the exact reason for the ban, and the reason they wouldn't talk to the company about it.
Looking at what service they actually offer, I can easily see why Stripe would not want to do business with them. They offer private credit card services, which seems like it could easily be a magnet for people trying to launder stolen credit cards and the like.
Just because they have not yet been hit with this, does not mean they are not at risk of becoming a target if they get a bit more known. Stripe doesn't want to have to deal with that.
We preempted this by using Stripe radar along with our own tools. The fact we had only one charge-back in 3 months which we won, speaks to the efficiency of our protection mechanisms.
Finally, all bigger software shops face this issue so we are not unique.
But that is just promises from your side. From their side, they have no idea how much effort you are or are not making, nor whether that effort will be enough or not.
To them, you are a risk. They don't want that risk.
The more stories I read about VISA/Mastercard (yes, Stripe is there to accept payments of these networks) the less I want to use them.
The only alternative I found so far were cryptos.
(yes, there is paypal and such - but I have never seen any brick and mortar shop accepting it)
There's an interesting efficiency/reverse-opportunity-cost issue here.
If you set up your ML so that it works x% of the time, you might very well have a profitable business even if you end up accidentally screwing over a bunch of folks. But no competitor can challenge you in the marketplace because the human cost of answering phones and emails to find that last little bit of efficiency is overwhelmingly disproportionate to any economic value the business would gain.
Many of us like to bang on businesses as being amoral and impersonal, but most are trying to do something people want, only better and more efficiently. ML may be providing an upper limit to efficiency by taking out any opportunity to do some serious analysis. Because in many cases removing that last 1-5% in inefficiency is the bit that leads to a completely new way of working, in many areas we may be boxing ourselves in to a very long-term status quo.
You can build a system that efficiently serves the 98% case of "simple" customers. Then you can ignore the 2% unprofitable/complicated customers, forcing them to go to other vendors.
If you're big enough, you starve your competitors of the low-cost/simple customers. So their cost structure goes way up, which in turn prices the services out of reach of all other customers except the stupidly profitable, which is to say: gambling and porn.
(This has parallels to the USPS v. FedEx/UPS problem in the US, with the exception that the USPS is required to serve all customers, so no one is completely without service)
Recently quality of service at Stripe has gone seriously down the drain.
They arbitrarily closed my account a while ago, and after following their draconian re-activation process (somehow my government issued ID is not good enough to identify me, they need to verify the same information and ID in a video call) I think we’re now at 20+ emails and counting.
I just gave up and will go with a different provider or open a new account since it’s easier.
At some point Stripe was the provider that took everyone, but they’ve become allergic to any kind of risk and trust nothing.
My speculative guess is they raised the bar on the low-pass filter by tightening up the algorithm after losing way too much to credit card fraud.
It was absolutely scary the amounts of fraud I dealt with running a dropshipping shop a decade ago.
Every bad fraud order that I dropshipped ate the entire profits from a dozen legit orders, and card fraud was attempted on approximately 25% of orders we received.
After a few years I shut the site down as it was just barely making a profit as the fraud costs escalated and I felt I was wasting my time screening every order with my own (imperfect) hand-rolled fuzzy logic fraud detection algorithms and manual investigation of every single order.
I false-rejected a lot of legit customers in the final year, vowing to stamp out the scammers I drove some customers away... it's hard to be perfect when card fraud is easy to achieve.
Actually what the final straw was for me, that made me delete the server, was not the regular identity fraud stolen-card scumbags, but the pathological liars who you could validate as 100% legitimate, but after they received and signed for the goods, would call their bank and lodge a chargeback to get a full refund, because he banks ALWAYS take the customers side and ALWAYS charged me an extra $35 penalty for every dispute I lost (which was every single one, despite sending pages of strong proof showing the customer was a baldfaced lying thief)
I’m just not sure what to think about practices surrounding these chargebacks any more. When I was working at a company where they were a thing, I don’t think we ever lost one. Does the whole thing just depend on who you are friends with? Or does anyone actually look at the proof you send?
The banks in your country sound much more reasonable and fair.
I'm in Australia and our 4 banks are way too powerful, and some of the worlds most profitable on a percentage basis, with nearly the highest paid executives globally.
In the decade since I deleted that site in despair, there have been several royal commissions /
public inquiries into the shocking unfair and outright illegal actions all the 4 banks systematically entrenched, including forging customer signatures, ripping off customers at every opportunity, including siphoning customers money when the bank knew they had died, facilitating money laundering of cash earned from drugs on vast scales, influencing our captured politicians to roll back recently-legislated consumer protection laws the previous govt enacted, to absolve them from any culpability whatsoever by writing larger "liar loans" they knew people would struggle to live with, and these are which still going strongly (approx 1 in 3 recently admitting to this in a follow-up survey).
The AUD$35 per chargeback was an easy profit centre for them a decade ago, and no way would they ever take my side when it was free money for them.
I had a USD bank with them for the ecommerce dropship account. Our average order was around USD$51 with a little over 10% gross profit.
I was the only one losing out. The bank, my dropship supplier, and the card fraudsters all got paid and received their goods.
301 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 272 ms ] threadOn a more serious note; How much further is society going to allow this kind of thing? Hiding behind templated e-mails without any explanation. Disrupting people's lives who become collateral damage with no way out.
Society will put up with it as long as it works most of the time, because algorithms without humans are cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ombudsman
> The typical duties of an ombudsman are to investigate complaints and attempt to resolve them, usually through recommendations (binding or not) or mediation. Ombudsmen sometimes also aim to identify systemic issues leading to poor service or breaches of people's rights. At the national level, most ombudsmen have a wide mandate to deal with the entire public sector, and sometimes also elements of the private sector (for example, contracted service providers). In some cases, there is a more restricted mandate, for example with particular sectors of society.
I personally know of 2 dealings with an Ombudsman in the Netherlands. One involved me personally and another one of a good friend. In both cases the ombudsman advised in our favor. In both cases the reaction on the advice was: "Thanks for the advice, ombudsman, but we are not going to act on it.".
A non-binding ombudsman is in my experience just a paper tiger to make an organization look good and I have never seen a binding one.
Yes, society doesn't break down. Just as it doesn't break down if 1% of people were murdered each year. But society won't accept 1% being murdered. And once it's public enough, they'll also not accept that companies do stuff like that. Case in point: banks are tightly regulated exactly because of that, we need to rely on them to handle money efficiently, so we don't want randomness in their processes. Maybe it's time that Stripe & friends get more regulatory oversight as well, since they don't seem to be capable of managing themselves.
Such a service could be offered by the legacy payment providers.
I have used such services in the past, but still feel the field is ripe for disruption.
Most all of them have VISA cards.
Expecting customers to carefully create a wallet, an exchange account (so they can buy the crypto) and considering how difficult that can be (even for technical users) is really unreasonable. When people can use crypto as easily as they can use a credit card, then it would be an alternative.
IMPO, this problem is very similar to the PGP problem. You'll get a lot less email if you only accept PGP encrypted and signed emails. You cannot expect your customers to do that. They won't, but they will send you plaintext emails from their Gmail accounts, just as quickly as they will pay using a VISA card.
"what these corporations are doing is literally destroying the basis for a developed economy.... [They] have all collectively routed around the rule of law which is necessary for sustained economic growth over time.
In countries with strong rule of law:
1. Property rights over land, equipment, and personal items are clear and protected by law.
2. Contracts between people, businesses, and the government are effectively enforced by the legal system.
3. Political accountability is high and corruption is low.
4. Business regulations are clear and enforced in a transparent manner.
In such environments people make long-term investments and build large organizations. In contrast, if the property rights and contracts are not enforced and the business regulations are not clear, most of the economy consists of small family owned firms with little modern equipment. A high-tech, prosperous economy would not develop.
Effectively, there are no contracts anymore in the digital economy. There is no predictability anymore. There is no accountability. There is no responsibility. There are no requirements for performance anymore. In sum, the US digital economy is rapidly becoming the equivalent of a third-world economy, complete with crony capitalism and digital robber barons."
The cynical me says there is your answer right there. You are a bit to close to something Stripe invested in, or at least close enough to something they will offer as a service soon.
Does that mean morons? From their perspective, it's a smart thing to do, if they can get away with it. Or does it mean like "such big balls?".
As the saying goes, to make money in a gold rush, sell pickaxes.
You mean learning from the 5th highest market cap company? Isn't that sort of expected? The question you should ask if why the government doesn't step in since companies will do what they can to optimize stock price.
https://justuseapp.com/free-trial-card claims that one of their main selling points is
> Access the American market
> Our credit card comes with a U.S. billing address, so you can unlock features restricted to the U.S or Western markets especially if you don't live there.
Isn't this just straight up fraud?
Admittedly I'm not familiar with any of the services mentioned, so correction is welcome.
Well at least PayPal has a spotless history of treating their users nicely.
1. Deal with bad actors
2. Misjudge an honest actor as a bad actor
both approach 1.
To make a general statement about Stripe, we'd need a broader statistical analysis rather than a single anecdote.
We were fortunate in that we had a backup payment gateway integration "just in case", because otherwise we would have been completely unable to accept any payments at all for a full week.
That week was still extremely stressful. They offered no explanation or reason for putting our entire business on hold.
This seems like the key point here. I'm not a software guy or even a payments guy, I'm a network infrastructure engineer.
For anything that we want more than 99% uptime, we put in two of everything, sometimes more. Two separate service providers, ideally coming down different physical paths where practical.
For example, sending money via a banking wire. If the bank goes down, you can't send a second wire through another bank without loss because the first wire is not retractable.
I'm not trying to apologise for Stripe, I'm trying to see what's special about this financial arrangement. It's obviously not a SaaS nor are you selling anything physical.
I assume when you sign up to a free trail, they'll charge your card £0.00 to confirm it's a valid card, then when the trail ends and they try to automatically charge you for a full subscription they'll block the transaction.
https://justuseapp.com/free-trial-card
I can see why they blocked it.
Unfortunately a word there.
I hope this all works out for you!
Switched to Pin Payments[1] shortly after that experience and have never looked back. Of course, we live in the 2021 century and algorithms will flag issues automatically (I ported my phone number and changed my bank account on the same day, which was fun!), but they've always made sure to contact me and resolve the issue within minutes instead of cutting access. The few times I've contacted them, a competent person has both understood the issue and responded to it appropriately and promptly.
[1]https://pinpayments.com/
I know I've been in lockdown for a while now, but what century is it?
1. Hire human beings 2. Empower them to fix problems 3. Let your users talk to them
Ideally, good companies will find a balance with AI and human operators that's also sustainable as a business.
This is the crux of it. What do you define as a balance? In this example, Stripe shouldn’t be using ML to actually ban accounts but instead to flag accounts for manual review.
My company distributes advertisements. We need to watch every ad we ever distribute to ensure both its quality and legality. We have and still are investigating ML to improve this process, but because regulations put the cost on us for false negatives, we would use ML only to identify when it knows an ad fails our checks. It would then pulls it from the QC queue before any tech manually reviews it and emails the client informing it was blocked and why it was blocked and a link to a form where they can request a manual review if they think it was a false positive.
Our contracts allow for a fee to be imposed on the client if they challenge a block which is upheld after manual review.
Doing it this way we reduced our tech workload by removing clearly violating ads from QC queue and we give the client a clear and quick way to challenge the results of the ML.
At least, that is the plan here. It’s still in R&D.
Hiring more customer service humans is not a guarantee that every customer will get what they want.
As a developer this puts a big dent on Stripe's reliability and I'm not advising it to any client. Ever.
Yet this sort of thing just begs for future draconian government interference. Seems to me a smart company would find a way to not invite that unpleasantness on themselves.
They have bots deciding the future of their users. And when the bots make some kind of mistake they don't give support for the costumer or neither check if the user got wrongly banned. It's some kind of sick blind trust they place on automated systems. Nothing wrong against these systems, but they should have a system in place to check wether these made a mistake or not.
Reminds me of when people loved online video like YouTube because of the lack of commercials.
"Access the American market Our credit card comes with a U.S. billing address, so you can unlock features restricted to the U.S or Western markets especially if you don't live there."
https://justuseapp.com/free-trial-card
Just because they have not yet been hit with this, does not mean they are not at risk of becoming a target if they get a bit more known. Stripe doesn't want to have to deal with that.
Finally, all bigger software shops face this issue so we are not unique.
1. https://kinsta.com/blog/credit-card-fraud-stripe/
To them, you are a risk. They don't want that risk.
If you set up your ML so that it works x% of the time, you might very well have a profitable business even if you end up accidentally screwing over a bunch of folks. But no competitor can challenge you in the marketplace because the human cost of answering phones and emails to find that last little bit of efficiency is overwhelmingly disproportionate to any economic value the business would gain.
Many of us like to bang on businesses as being amoral and impersonal, but most are trying to do something people want, only better and more efficiently. ML may be providing an upper limit to efficiency by taking out any opportunity to do some serious analysis. Because in many cases removing that last 1-5% in inefficiency is the bit that leads to a completely new way of working, in many areas we may be boxing ourselves in to a very long-term status quo.
You can build a system that efficiently serves the 98% case of "simple" customers. Then you can ignore the 2% unprofitable/complicated customers, forcing them to go to other vendors.
If you're big enough, you starve your competitors of the low-cost/simple customers. So their cost structure goes way up, which in turn prices the services out of reach of all other customers except the stupidly profitable, which is to say: gambling and porn.
(This has parallels to the USPS v. FedEx/UPS problem in the US, with the exception that the USPS is required to serve all customers, so no one is completely without service)
They arbitrarily closed my account a while ago, and after following their draconian re-activation process (somehow my government issued ID is not good enough to identify me, they need to verify the same information and ID in a video call) I think we’re now at 20+ emails and counting.
I just gave up and will go with a different provider or open a new account since it’s easier.
At some point Stripe was the provider that took everyone, but they’ve become allergic to any kind of risk and trust nothing.
It was absolutely scary the amounts of fraud I dealt with running a dropshipping shop a decade ago.
Every bad fraud order that I dropshipped ate the entire profits from a dozen legit orders, and card fraud was attempted on approximately 25% of orders we received.
After a few years I shut the site down as it was just barely making a profit as the fraud costs escalated and I felt I was wasting my time screening every order with my own (imperfect) hand-rolled fuzzy logic fraud detection algorithms and manual investigation of every single order.
I false-rejected a lot of legit customers in the final year, vowing to stamp out the scammers I drove some customers away... it's hard to be perfect when card fraud is easy to achieve.
Actually what the final straw was for me, that made me delete the server, was not the regular identity fraud stolen-card scumbags, but the pathological liars who you could validate as 100% legitimate, but after they received and signed for the goods, would call their bank and lodge a chargeback to get a full refund, because he banks ALWAYS take the customers side and ALWAYS charged me an extra $35 penalty for every dispute I lost (which was every single one, despite sending pages of strong proof showing the customer was a baldfaced lying thief)
I'm in Australia and our 4 banks are way too powerful, and some of the worlds most profitable on a percentage basis, with nearly the highest paid executives globally.
In the decade since I deleted that site in despair, there have been several royal commissions / public inquiries into the shocking unfair and outright illegal actions all the 4 banks systematically entrenched, including forging customer signatures, ripping off customers at every opportunity, including siphoning customers money when the bank knew they had died, facilitating money laundering of cash earned from drugs on vast scales, influencing our captured politicians to roll back recently-legislated consumer protection laws the previous govt enacted, to absolve them from any culpability whatsoever by writing larger "liar loans" they knew people would struggle to live with, and these are which still going strongly (approx 1 in 3 recently admitting to this in a follow-up survey).
The AUD$35 per chargeback was an easy profit centre for them a decade ago, and no way would they ever take my side when it was free money for them.
I had a USD bank with them for the ecommerce dropship account. Our average order was around USD$51 with a little over 10% gross profit.
I was the only one losing out. The bank, my dropship supplier, and the card fraudsters all got paid and received their goods.