Yup, how many times have we seen it here on HN alone where someone has posted “Google nuked us from the Play store and won’t talk to us about it” only to be returned after the post hit the front page?
People shouldn’t have to go viral on social media to get decent customer service just because “computer says no.”
> More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.
I too am a little suspicious of anyone who codes in PERL
> You can only email. If you email, you get robots.
Their dev support on discord is S-tier, but every now and then some issue has to be moved to email support; where it dies. It always takes months for something to be resolved, if at all.
My only consolation is that every other provider is just as terrible.
I would hope your mother is hiring a developer to build her payment infrastructure if standard over the counter solutions like those iPhone swipe attachments don't work for her.
What kind of excuse is that? I've seen so many small businesses using Stripe. I doubt all their owners are developers who are comfortable with Discord.
Discord has excellent moderation tools, is economical and relatively user friendly (compared to IRC). If you desire a public space for your community to engage with you in real time, I'm not aware of a better alternative.
No, you're supposed to use the abysmal Discord search feature to find your question among a billion chat messages, or post it in one of the 150 channels we have for each topic under the sun. No sorry, wrong channel. Oops, your message got lost somewhere in the thousands of messages we receive per day.
My history might be a bit fuzzy, but that exists in lineage from when Stripe had an IRC channel for dev support.
This is Stripe opting to go to where a core customer segment (developers) live. Discord sucks but from a business perspective it’s smart. You wouldn’t use their Discord chat for just any issue.
And the thing about their tech stack is its old..but absolutely workable. They have examples in pretty much every language, decent documentation, and support. And they are very slow to sunset things because their customers are slow moving traditional businesses. So code you write for a customer may work without tweaking for 4, 5, or even 10 years.
In my case, 20 years. No change in API calls in that time.
Very few errors, except in the early days. I hate them because of the complexity of the solution (I needed a relationship with a separate "payment processor" that has changed names/systems/owners five times in those 20 years) but I have had few problems with withholding etc.
But my monthly charges and individual charges are very consistent, and chargeback rate very low (but not zero).
This looks really good. Apart from anything else, they have a fraud detection tool that you can configure to match your own requirements, and can control yourself what happens to payments when filters are triggered:
I have always been able to get a service rep on live chat within 5 minutes... which is literally a "Live Chat" button on their contact page not even hidden.
Note this is different than the Discord dev chat which is for technical questions.
Once I get live chat it may take a day or two to resolve but if it takes longer I just hop on live chat again and pester them until it's escalated.
But as you can see in the Reddit comments, there are people posting screen shots showing that is absolutely not true. Which leaves 3 options:
1. The UX was confusing and the OP couldn't find those options.
2. Stripe somehow has some logic that disables it specifically for that person or that person's region.
3. The OP didn't actually try and is lying in their post.
1 and 3 are more negative reflections on the OP than Stripe. And for 2 I'd need more details.
I saw this in the replies to the comment:
> The "chat" and "have us call you" options get greyed out once they have frozen your account.
But from my own experience, that is wrong. Also OP didn't say their account was frozen just that the money from that particular transaction was being held.
There's someone else down thread here who says that they've had the call/email greyed out on their Stripe account as well.
>Stripe somehow has some logic that disables it specifically for that person
I'm not sure why you wrote this as if it'd be a grand technical challenge to implement. Locking-out specific features based on X criteria is pretty damn common.
I don't particularly care in any case, I just had the impression that you might of missed that specific line when you wrote your original comment regarding the short wait times you've had when calling support.
Edit: Seems like you saw the other post as well.
>But from my own experience, that is wrong.
Well, from my vantage point I see 2 people claiming it gets greyed out and 1 person (you) claiming it doesn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
> I'm not sure why you wrote this as if it'd be a grand technical challenge to implement.
No, I meant that as literally "somehow" as in "has some logic to"... no implication of difficulty. But I can see how that may sound that way.
> Well, from my vantage point I see 2 people claiming it gets greyed out and 1 person (you) claiming it doesn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
3 people is not a large sample size. I did notice an issue where it is grayed out until you select a topic. Which may be partially at play here (which is a UX issue).
My accounts got temp locked because they needed to verify some KYC information. Maybe there is another more severe level of lock that does gray it out. But then I'd need to know way more details about what Stripe thinks the OP did to get that lock before I start blaming Stripe or the OP.
> The "chat" and "have us call you" options get greyed out once they have frozen your account. They do not allow such users to have them call. You can only receive a call if they have not frozen your account.
I suppose you can create a second account and then contact support from there, but they'll probably flag you for ban evasion and make your situation worse.
> I have always been able to get a service rep on live chat within 5 minutes
That's neat and all but try to get them to actually fix anything. They will 100% move you to email once you explain your issue (assuming it's not "I can't find my password" or equally basic) and then you will be in limbo. I hope you enjoy no one responding to your ticket for days/weeks at a time even after you provide them with all the info they ask for.
You are correct, but the aim of the reddit post / this post is to get the problem solved. Billing is a complicated subject, and fraud is even more complicated.
A well placed, polite email to C-level staff often fixes the problem, but can draw attention to flaws in the support flow - or validate a customer-hostile standpoint, at which point you can make an informed decision about where to place your business.
I've definitely never encountered many automated responses to their e-mail support. Definitely I've hit support people who don't know much beyond basic troubleshooting, and it's pretty much impossible to get escalated to the point where you're talking directly to a dev through support@, but generally not canned responses.
(That might be based on our usage maybe, we're a OK sized Connect partner)
A lot of organizations route suspended accounts through an entirely different support team focused on fraud. That team is often not a management priority, either.
If it was, say, a $30000 charge I could give Stripe the benefit of doubt, but $3300 is a pretty ordinary amount for any retailer. Could be e.g. a laptop sale, or three phones?
When I see Stripe's apology here it will not be enough for me - not at least without a detailed blog post / postmortem.
Until/if that moment happens, I'll regard Stripe as an untrustworthy entity and will recommend doing the same to do anyone I do business with.
Zero tolerance for Google-style algo-decisions and stonewalling.
In a different HN thread that has no or positive reaction to Stripe, you'd be seeing many praises for Stripe.
For local businesses, perhaps your local bank has a better solution? They will be cheaper (if they use networks other than Visa/Master), and often has zero fees when you withdraw money to a bank account.
Here in my country, for a business that only caters to local customers, I pay about 2% for payments with no fixed fee and no fee for withdrawals, which happens daily. I can directly call the person who handles my queries, and charge backs have never been anything but a few quick clicks with no mind games. All I do is redirect the user to the payment page, and validate the payment upon arrival. The UX isn't as good as Stripe of course, but many of the locals are quite used to that UI anyway.
Don't know what country you are from but guess your acquiring bank gets orders of magnitude less fraud than Stripe does so your bank can afford to take your calls.
It boils down to wildly skewed regulatory environment in the US.
They probably have orders of magnitude less revenue with which to pay customer service agents than Stripe has (or would have, if they hadn't delegated their customer service to the machine in the sky).
We see this in many circumstances: centralization and scale are great for efficiency, but bad for resilience.
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Just as a counter-anecdote, my one-person SAAS has used Stripe since 2017 and I’ve had an excellent experience with them, including personal customer support. Of course, YMMV.
> Is there an alternative service one could use? Is there a way not to give these shady companies power to steal all my money?
There are many alternative services listed in other comments, but to be clear, every single one of them has the power to do exactly what Stripe did.
There is no way to accept credit card payments without accepting that power to freeze suspicious incoming payments, simply because fundamentally credit card payments are not final and can (and often will) be reversed afterward, and if someone promised to never freeze merchants' funds, every fraudster in the world would come to try out their services, bankrupting them in the process.
I'm not sure of the facts on this case and always need to hear both sides fully before i would comment on them.
But; I have run 4 different businesses on stripe over about 6 years and have never had a serious issue. Yes there have been ups and downs but even with no phone number I would have to rate their support head and shoulders above most. Maybe 24-36 hours for a response, but we always got one, and in most cases it solved the issue.
You should always, always, have multiple ways to accept payments. Don't rely on one provider, even if they're the greatest processor in the world. Never have a single point of failure for your business.
I'm not an entrepreneur but this approach sounds way too safe to be competitive. IMHO if you're starting a 2-person company then yeah, be bold enough to rely on a single payment provider, and maybe consider redundancy when you have already have a working business with massive reputation.
Single person company here. It's not hard to do, maybe an extra PHP class that abstracts details of different providers, and a separate class implementation on each provider. But you're right that you wouldn't do it for launch day.
It comes in really, really handy when your tiny 1-person company outlives your giant multinational payment provider. Happened to me a few times now, I'm on to my 3rd (4th?) provider in 20 years. There's a tendency for Borg-like consolidation in the payments industry (eg Avangate acquired 2Checkout, then were bought by Verifone). Anyone who lived through the Digital River era will know what I mean.
If you haven't done that code abstraction, imagine that you're suddenly unable to take any payments or make any sales and you are unable to do so until you rewrite all your payment processing code. That can be a long outage.
Having a backup is also useful when a customer's card gets declined by an overly zealous fraud screen at one provider. You can give that customer a "promocode" that changes the logic of your checkout flow and redirects processing to a different payment processor.
And having different processors active also lets you add different payment options (eg maybe your primary processor doesn't support Alipay or Pay With Amazon). But in practice that turned out not to be a good reason for me, Paypal/Visa/MC/Amex/Optima covered almost 100% of customers anyway. For the tiny handful that use checks I can handle that manually.
Flagging a larger than normal transaction is fine. Placing a 120 day hold is very much NOT fine. This should be resolvable within 24-48 hours after the business provides the requisite documentation showing the transaction to be legitimate. The root cause is a completely automated process devoid of any capability for human review like we see with so many online platforms these days.
It is a tiny amount of money comparatively speaking. They should not put a freeze over a couple of days. If there is no dispute, then their risk drops exponentially. If the amount were much higher, they should just devote more human resources to verifying the charge, and still keep the frozen period low.
Oh Paypal? Look up the horror stories there. Or directly work with a legacy provider like FirstData? They will also freeze your account and won't even accept you if you just have just $3k of sales.
Isn't it interesting that credit card processors really like to give crappy customer support and enjoy freezing accounts? Is it because they just attract misanthropic people? If only a caring company that didn't freeze accounts and gave wonderful support could enter, the field would be better. /s
Actually, the problem is super structural:
- Due to payment processing regulations, there is a fixed overhead from taking a small merchant on. (KYC, AML, ensuring you're not selling drugs). This makes tiny merchants incredibly unprofitable to begin with. Legacy providers like FirstData will reject you outright or make you pay fees to onboard. They will also make you fill out pages of paper forms and put the time cost on you to verify you're a legit business.
We as a society have said the gatekeeping features of finance are more important that making sure tiny businesses have access to payment infrastructure. We should change this parameter if we truly cared about this. I suspect we don't.
- Merchants simply race to the CC provider that is easiest to set up or have lowest fees. If you were OK paying a couple of hundred dollars of setup fees to, you know, properly reimburse your vendor for vetting you, or pay 5% fees for a high risk (read: tiny merchant) specialty account, you probably wouldn't have been frozen like this, at least without them calling you.
This is exactly the problem with Google services. Are you paying Google a bunch of money? If you are a high level enterprise account where the fully-burdened cost of a 1-hour customer support call (~$100) is a small part of your yearly net margin to Google, I bet they would take your call.
didn't stripe (maybe it was a competitor, idk) go to a Paypal conference and took like 2000lb blocks of ice with dollar bills frozen in them and drop them off in front of the convention center? And then posted signs everywhere to the effect "tired of paypal freezing your money?"
FWIW If you want to be able to quickly switch payment providers without stripe (or any provider) holding your customer's payment info hostage, you should consider using a PCI tokenization service like BasisTheory.com
Reach out to local credit unions or even smallish bank. They usually are middleman to firstdata, chase paymentech etc. But you get a dedicated account rep at cost of nominal monthly fee. Rates usually are competitive often lower than what stripe and paypal offers.
Implement it all yourself and have the UI be awful is not a good solution. Stripe takes about 1 day to set up. Getting a meeting with an interested bank or credit union could easily take 1 month.
I am an extremely small account and have a merchant account with Authorize.net. Most of my customers pay by check so I even have some months where I have zero card transactions.
There is a small monthly fee and the processing fee is variable depending on the card. Plain debit/check card under 2%, compared to an airline rewards card that’s more like 4%…
I’m not even eligible for a Stripe account because a large part of my business could be called computer repair and that is explicitly disallowed.
All the alternative entities will also sometimes freeze funds for incoming credit card payments due to some algo-decision flagging them. Both fraud and such anti-fraud measures are an unavoidable part of the credit card infrastructure.
The major difference is that some platforms offer more hand-holding support and some don't, but even those who will talk to you (e.g. your local bank) can and sometimes will refuse unblocking such funds for a prolonged time.
Without taking away from your point, deep in the Reddit comments the OP states Stripe put a hold on the account after billing the sale of a literal company truck through Stripe and not via selling their normal store merchandise.
As usual, there’s always an undisclosed fact that changes the narrative and explains the ban. Whether this should trigger Stripe’s scorched earth mechanisms is another matter.
Maybe there's more to the story, but executing transactions which do not conform to Stripe's fraud detection model is not an offense that should be punished.
no the entire store account should not be blocked, at least not for a first offense, but I could understand that the transaction is blocked, and that it might that quite some time to figure out what is going on
> not at least without a detailed blog post / postmortem.
Can they legally give that considering its, most likely, private customer information? If they give detailed information out in a "Detailed" post mortem... isn't that proof that they are an untrustworthy entity?
Just seems to me this is a damned if you do, damned if you don't attitude against Stripe (or, any company in general that has a complaint but can't do a "detailed" public response because, well, that's private information... .. . )
>>>but $3300 is a pretty ordinary amount for any retailer.
Really? There are entire classes of retailers where that would be a truly exceptional event. I don't know if that's true of the OP (post removed), but if their average transaction is $27 or something this would rightly trigger alarm bells. If they are in fact being stonewalled on support that's pretty inexcusable though.
It honestly seems like it would have been fine if they had been like "you tripped our fraud detection, and because the payment was made with a CC money will be held in escrow until the dispute period ends. There's no point in providing documentation because customer can still issue a chargeback."
I don't really disagree, except I think there are a couple different types of fraud Stripe might be on the lookout for in these types of cases:
1. Customer of retailer buys something with stolen cc, retailer is none the wiser, although Stripe has sophisticated techniques that suggest it might be fraud. Probably looks like a very ordinary transaction. e.g. person filling up gas tank with stolen card.
2. Accomplice of retailer buys something with "stolen" cc, retailer in on it. Probably looks like unusual transaction. e.g. person buying 10 laptops, reselling for cash, waiting until retailer gets money from Stripe, does a chargeback, retailer disappears, they split all the cash.
If it's the first case, sure, tell the retailer. If it's the second (or it could be the second, which I think is what might be the case here), you probably maintain radio silence while you investigate.
Edit: also, by all the documentation the OP wants to provide, it sounds like they understand why it could look like the second. If it's the first they should understand there's nothing they can provide that would suggest it's not a stolen card - it has very little to do with them.
They seem to be using stripe to process transactions for a cell phone stores, but the $3300 transaction is for selling a van. I guess this tripped some fraud prevention system.
Hopefully making enough noise on HN and social media will help your case move quickly. That appears to be the only way to get a response these days.
Maybe one day non-custodial and permissionless payment rails will prevent this situation, for those services that choose to use it. Shame that HN is so polarized about blockchain that they refuse to entertain the idea.
AFAIK, there are no permissionless payment rail that do fiat-> crypto payment processing. They all require intermediaries and presumably would run into similar issues.
Crypto-> crypto would be a different story, but requires a more sophisticated buyer.
I play in this space, so would definitely like to hear what you've got in mind.
Imagining either crypto to crypto, or a permissioned rollup handling crypto to fiat that lets the sequencer block a users address for KYC purposes, but user can still trustlessly withdraw funds to mainnet.
But what about the people who don't have social clout? I think for every person like this, there are 100s if not thousands who's money and accounts get locked away.
Poor technical and legal frameworks for digital payment processors is how we have gotten to this point. Strict AML, KYC, copyright protection, and anti-adult requirements forces payment processors to err on the side of caution and deploy mass automated systems to flag and lock accounts that trigger the slightest internal alarm bells, even if this leads to some false positives and destroys a few small businesses along the way.
> Maybe one day non-custodial and permissionless payment rails will prevent this situation, for those services that choose to use it. Shame that HN is so polarized about blockchain that they refuse to entertain the idea.
It's a shame that we've only figured out "pay $200 to the guy using a derelict coal plant to run the world's fanciest space heater" and "pay $200 to the guy who hoards the most of your 'currency'" then and not "non-custodial and permissionless payment rails" then.
Lol this comment reveals a lot of ignorance. My last transaction fee on Eth was in the range of $1, most of that value is burned and not sent to a miner, and anyone who wants to participate in protocol rewards can do so through delegation.
PoS is not perfect but far better than current norm of “pay a billion dollar corporation a fixed fee and also give them total control of the world’s payment rails.”
Burning is identical to regressive redistribution. It takes value from those who transact and assigns it directly to those who hoard through deflation. If you have a money velocity of 5 and an average transaction of $100 and burn 1% every transaction, it is equivalent to a ~5% pa tax directly into the pockets of currency hoarders. No different to paying visa 1% or $1 per transaction.
It's not an improvement. Just a changing of the guard with less oversight.
"Pay $1 to a single private company" is not the same as "pay $1 toward every circulating token in the network." If you consider this a tax, it is a tax distributed to all current and future holders of the currency, including the user doing the transaction.
If "changing of the guard" means replacing VISA with thousands of VISAs in a decentralized network, where any non-VISA can become yet another VISA through permissionless software, that is far better in my opinion.
If you have another economic model than EIP 1559 that you feel is superior, you have the power to propose that as an EIP and start to develop consensus around it. EIP 1559 was first proposed in 2019 and it took some years for consensus to build around it.
> If you consider this a tax, it is a tax distributed to all current and future holders of the currency, including the user doing the transaction.
Yes. A tax on every transaction apportioned by wealth to current holders (not to future holders because they will receive fewer tokens from constant input). A regressive tax.
> If "changing of the guard" means replacing VISA with thousands of VISAs in a decentralized network, where any non-VISA can become yet another VISA through permissionless software, that is far better in my opinion.
It's not 'thousands of visas' though. It's "a big faceless entity taking a fee on every transaction with the rules being set and the takings being apportioned by wealth" being replaced by "a big faceless entity taking a fee on every transaction with the rules being set and the takings being apportioned by wealth" the ability to volunteer to provide infrastructure doesn't change that.
> If you have another economic model than EIP 1559 that you feel is superior, you have the power to propose that as an EIP and start to develop consensus around it. EIP 1559 was first proposed in 2019 and it took some years for consensus to build around it.
The entire 'a deflationary token on one global trustless network, buy now or miss out' model has fundamental unsolved and potentially unsolvable flaws. It is capitalism distilled and on fast forward without the grifters even having to make the pretense of being involved in real productive activity.
We don't need 'currency but on the internet' to solve 'how do we distribute stuff'. We needto think about the problem from scratch. Blockchains may even be a part of it, but so long as d(wealth)/dt ~ wealth, it's just another method of making the same people rich.
Ethereum, like USD but unlike Bitcoin, does not have a fixed supply cap. The protocol 'prints' new currency every minute. The EIP 1559 document even made this point clear: Ethereum no longer has a strictly deflationary or inflationary design - it depends on the current block space demand and issuance rate. At the moment there is more Eth being issued than burned, so it is inflationary[1].
> rules being set ... by wealth
I'm not sure where you got that. Depending on what you mean, in PoS some rules are set by node operators - software that can be run by anybody for free - and the hard rules of the protocol are set by social consensus.
I think this discussion also misses the forest for the trees: Eth tokens are not coupled to dollar wealth. Ethers are not "up-only" and they do not need to be for the network to function. A boom or bust in the price of Eth does not change the price of DAI or USDC, and pegged stablecoin tokens is what users would be transacting with if we are entertaining the idea of a crypto alternative to VISA.
As Stripe keeps growing this seems to be a more recurring problem, as it seems to be with most companies that eventually get too big to care about the little guy.
Which leads to my question: is there a smaller alternative similar to the Stripe of five years ago which might appreciate our business more?
PastePay is a great alt to Stripe. Check them out https://www.pastepay.com. I posted this elsewhere in this comment section. PastePay is a “smaller service”. It is more customer focused than Stripe.
Stripe is going the way of PayPal it seems. Many people learned this lesson the hard way with PayPal now they will learn it with Stripe I guess. You have no real recourse when these companies decide to steal your money and their incentives are very much to do so as they get to hang onto it for extended periods.
I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened as we go into economic downturn and layoffs. Too bad they're not a public company, if they were I would be shorting their stock right now.
Stripe like paypal is not to blame in this story. The problem is the credit card payment standard. Transactions can be charged back up to 180 days. This means that by giving the merchant the money right away, Stripe runs the risk that a transaction will be charged back and that the merchant wont have fund to cover it.
Stripe like any other processor runs an algo to determine the risk profile of each transaction to decide if you get the money immediately or not. If you have a sudden high ticket transaction, the odds this will be charged back are much higher. This is why they freeze that money up to 180 days.
It sucks, but it is how the credit card system works. Someone has to cover the chargeback risk.
Temporarily freezing the funds is understandable, just long enough to ask for clarification or documentation from the merchant. Instead they decided to go the Google route of ignoring your customer because "algorithm said no".
In the EU most countries have a financial sector regulator. If this happens in the EU and a payment provider does not respond contact them as it will light a fire under their seats.
This type of canned response is so repulsive, I imagine the only reason why it might be a good idea to send things like this is because it's less offensive than nothing and just as expensive.
As someone who’s recently looking into using stripe for a small business, this makes me hesitant. And this isn’t the first time I have read this type of thing about them.
Google also does this sort of stuff with canned robot responses for play store developers.
Nobody is saying there's no use case for cryptocurrencies. However they absolutely suck in the main use case - payments. There are no chargebacks/protections against scams, the UX is atrocious or relies on an unregulated and unprotected third party. It's slow, it costs money to spend money. And it's also destroying the planet with useless electricity consumption when there's an energy crisis and climate change with resulting need for transition going on.
All the rest hippie anarchist bullshit "take control", "inflation", "fiat" etc. is just bullshit that's either idealistic to the point of stupid or just stupid.
Hmm, seems like this guy wouldn't get his $3,000 stolen if he got paid SPL USDC. The transaction would also cost less energy than it did through Stripe.
Funny because you sound like a guy that could claim crypto is an unregulated far west full or scammers, while trying to prove that seizing 100K at law enforcement request is the same as randomly keeping 3K of your customers funds.
> If Circle suspects or determines that you or any of your authorized users or customers, as applicable, have violated this these Terms, including, but not limited to, attempting to transact or transacting with Blocked Addresses (as defined in Section 13) or attempting to engage or engaging in Restricted Activities or Prohibited Transactions, and you have a Circle Account, then Circle may be forced to terminate your Circle Account and you may forfeit any USD funds otherwise eligible for redemption.
The list of "Restricted Activities" this applies to is quite broad, including "provide false, inaccurate, or misleading information". The parent poster's claim this couldn't happen with USDC is readily proven false.
So how can you possibly say "The transaction would also cost less energy than it did through Stripe" if you have no idea how much energy a traditional transaction takes?
The linked page includes the energy cost of a Google search. I made an informed guess that operations done infrequently and deliberately written in extremely power-inefficient ways cost at least that much.
And what did you base that off of? Do you know the efficiency of a Stripe transaction, compared to a Google search? And what does "a Google search" even entail? How far down does it go? Where did that number come from?
How could you possibly compare the two?
At best, you're making a guess (I wouldn't exactly call it "informed") based on some randomly sourced data on a blog, which uses another blog for its source, which uses a third blog.
It would end up exactly the same way. Just as no serious merchant simply puts up their IBAN and says "wire me the money", no serious merchant will put up their crypto wallet address saying "wire me the cryptos". They would use some kind of crypto wallet payment provider/aggregator putting them at the exact same spot they were at before.
Sending money to an arbitrary IBAN is much more difficult than sending money to an arbitrary crypto wallet address. There is far less friction, to the extent that it's closer to the difficulty of clicking a link on the Internet (not difficult at all, in other words).
Because not only they are not a solution to payments in general, not only their deflative nature will never make them good at being "money", but they are not even the solution to this very specific problem as well.
Because the solution to this problem is providing a better customer care or face losing business and legal action.
Yet another story of Stripe holding big sums (yes 3k can be huge for small businesses) with no proper support structure. Consumers must rely on social networks to get some form of reaction.A $74 billion company has no proper support structure. Just wow.
If you're self employed and your monthly income is 5k$ from your business, 3k is a lot and can mean that you're unable to pay bills or food for this month.
So can I borrow it for four months? I’ll invest it and give it back but I’ll keep the interest. Oh by the way inflation will have devalued it. Sorry about that.
Won’t make any difference to you as your business is robust, right?
Average annual turnover for 1-9 employee companies in the uk is ~£500k, £3k represents around 8% of their monthly turnover. There's no world where that is insignificant.
Well then it should be f-ing NOTHING to stripe, and they should shorten their hold time. No doubt they, with all their supposed programming intelligence, can come up with a fancy algorithm that reduces their risk by 99% but releases the money within a week.
Clearly stated by someone who has never run a legitimate small business.
As someone who has run them for decades, it can be a SERIOUS issue at the wrong time. Sure, there are good times where it'll hardly be noticed, and can be dealt with in due course.
However, there are OFTEN other times when $3K failing to show up when expected can create real problems. Cash Flow is key.
To even suggest that it is OK for a company to arbitrarily cutoff funds, merely because it might be resolved sometime next year and "shouldn't be a problem" is massively ignorant and ethically bankrupt.
For your own sake, and for others on HN, read the room. Stop posting such 'hot takes' that only broadcast your bad assumptions based on massive ignorance of the topic and distract from the actual discussion (or if you're just trolling for responses, pls take it elsewhere).
I have run a small business, and I am somewhat familiar with payments infrastructure. From my perspective, it is the room that is ignorant. Have you ever had a customer fail to pay an invoice on time? Have you ever not been reimbursed for expenses in a timely manner? Have you ever been charged the wrong amount? Had a supplier go bankrupt?
If 3k cash flow made or break my small business, then I would've been toast within months of starting. If it's a real business, then 3k breaking the bank means you're over leveraged.
I'm not saying what Stripe is doing is okay. Nobody but Stripe and the OP have enough context to make a fair judgement. It certainly sucks, especially if OP did nothing wrong. If OP feels this is truly unjust, then that's what small claims court is for. But calling it theft when your payment processor withholds funds is an exaggeration. Is it theft if I pay my bills late?
Depending on how late you pay them, YES, it is theft, and can be so judged in court.
>>. Have you ever had a customer fail to pay an invoice on time? Have you ever not been reimbursed for expenses in a timely manner? Have you ever been charged the wrong amount? Had a supplier go bankrupt?
Yes, all of those things. And I pointed out that SOMETIMES, they can go by almost unnoticed and dealt with in due course, but OFTEN they can create real problems. It is one thing when they happen by accident, but when it is the result of capricious and hostile decisions by a vendor, it is an outrage.
Your own argument points this out - if $3K is supposed to be so manageable to a small biz, then it is not even a daily rounding error for Stripe, and THEY should give him the benefit of the doubt, and not externalize these costs onto the small biz.
I'd also point out that just the fact that you're justifying paying your bills late as "well it isn't theft" already tells me that you are in the class of ethically-challenged shady operators with whom I work to avoid.
Just because you make a profit does not mean that you are running a sound or ethical business or personally have either of those properties. I'd suggest you do some rethinking.
It doesn't matter — even if it started entirely as an accident— the vendor's failure to promptly address it, and the fact that that failure is a systematic property of their operation, puts them into the outrageous category.
It's like when you're on hold for 20minutes hearing recordings about long wait timed due to "high call volume".
No, it is not high call volume, it is the damn company systematically understaffing the call center and overloading their workers to extract more money and externalize more costs onto their customers.
We should avoid doing business with them if possible.
I agree it's ridiculous that the vendor has gone radio silent -- in any other industry this would be deadly behavior.
But I've been in weird, regulatory spots before where communication is forbidden pending investigation or an audit. If you get flagged for money laundering, they're not allowed to say "hey we flagged you for money laundering", and possibly not even allowed to say "we're looking into it".
What would you call it if I broke into your house, stole your TV and laptop, and told you "I'm just holding them, I'll return them someday, probably 240 days from now but maybe later".
Your issue with the analogy is that it doesn't include an indefinite timeline for the eventual return of the property? You might be missing the forest here.
This reads like victim blaming.. "I bet the business was wearing something slutty. If they didn't want the stripe gang to bother them, they shouldn't have been wearing that".
What does a business soundness have to do with stripe robbing them?
It depends on the business model. For a high margin business, it might be fine, but for a business that has slim margins, it could significantly reduce the amount of product they can buy over the next quarter, which could make net margins negative.
Even in a high-margin business, and even if the funds may eventually be returned, having funds not suddenly held by surprise can create real problems. These create real distractions, extra entirely unprofitable work that is only to secure what is already due to you.
This is not acceptable from a critical infrastructure vendor.
That anyone is willing to reveal just how obtuse they are by attempting to justify it is astonishing.
I was specifically responding to the question of whether or not "if you can't tolerate a loss of 3k, isn't your business practically doomed?"
To which the answer is "It depends on the business." These things also don't happen in isolation; most small businesses will be able to survive $3k frozen for a quarter on a good day, but even well-run small businesses have bad days.
Yup! Good days and bad days (weeks/months) — in the good times, all kinds of bad stuff can happen without much impact, and in the bad ones, small things can become real problems, even existential problems.
This says NOTHING about the quality of the business.
Notice that both Tesla and SpaceX are extremely good businesses yet were within weeks of bankruptcy at several points in their history — a bad event at the wrong moment, even though very small percentage-wise, could have tipped them over the edge and they'd be history.
Stripe actively markets to the smallest of businesses.
My church uses Stripe for various fundraising events. It would cause a serious cash flow issue if our payments for the bbq chicken fundraiser were held up for 3 months. We don’t have $3k to pay the chicken guy.
A key feature of Stripe is daily deposits. To me it’s understandable that they will flag transactions to address risk. But there has to be a process to adjudicate quickly.
I have no idea how companies like Stripe and to a great extent Revolut made it to forefront of banking. They are Uber of banking industry. And have done shady things. As the time passes and VC money runs out; these companies will implode
I have a close friend, working for Uber since 5-6 years now. I don't think he ever expected company to engage in anything shady. SWEs are higher up than service counter staff but in the game of business they are not far from being expensive pawns. Sorry
So he started 5-6 years ago, after Uber was already caught doing shady shit? Does not compute.
I don't think Uber was ever particularly transparent, whereas I believe the other poster was implying that all Stripe employees can see revenue, profit margin, etc. plainly, which seems very uncommon for a non-public corp.
I think people forget how much effort it took to accept credit cards at the time Stripe launched, too. Not just technical, but having to get a merchant account, which would be through a bank, who'd want to sell you a rented point-of-sale and a contract for a minimum amount of fees per month, and a rate hike for being a "risky online business".
Well, when it launched, but few years down the road Stripe was already in a class of his own on the topic of developer experience compared to their competitors.
Yeah, I tried to leave the Stripe platform for lower fees and... well I'd give just about anything to go back in time and stop myself from doing something so stupid. Also in the end the %/per-transaction fees were barely lower AND they had a TON of hidden fees/charges.
The processor lied about fees/rates, API/docs were absolute shit (and they were on the better end of what else I've seen but compared to Stripe they sucked), and I had to go through 3-5 video calls before they gave me API keys for even the dev environment. Then you get to enter the world of monthly charges on your account, minimum fees (if you don't pay enough in fees you have to pay the difference, for me it was $35 in fees minimum which doesn't work well for seasonal things or in-house test accounts), PCI compliance (fuck that form), even worse service, and slimy sales people.
Even with Stripe's absolutely terrible customer support (that I've experienced first-hand multiple times) I'll stick with them over dealing with the alternatives.
> Like other payment processors, we periodically review your sales to assess the risk of payment disputes. In a recent review of your account, we determined that we have to hold a portion of your transfer in a reserve balance. Beginning <redacted>, 30% of each transaction on your Square account will be stored in your reserve balance, and will be released 120 days after the original transaction date.
>You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number.
Not sure whether this person was specifically locked out or something, but I've had consistently good experience with Stripe's phone support. As they note email (and chat) are a joke, but phone reps are highly knowledgeable and have quickly resolved my issues.
I do not know. I only state what the original author posted.
Maybe someone is willing to create a Stripe account and trigger a block to test it.
Edit: another thread 3 years ago mentions the same: “I tried to contact support by chat or phone, but it seems that when they suspend an acct, they block your ability to contact support by any method except by email...” [0]
Stripe folks have confirmed that they will only allow certain support channels when certain situations come up (I'd imagine certain types of assumed fraud would merit async channels only, etc.).
It's just a crazy coincidence that they also won't tell you the underlying truths to the situation that would let you understand why they aren't letting you call them. Surely they are reasonable and not just standard corpo tech negligent customer support. Surely.
Watch the Stripe apologist come out in force soon. They’ll brand you as 100% running a crypto CP arms dealing coke selling dark net platform owner because surely YC darling Stripe would never mess up like this. Truth is they are just horrible.
Exactly. The Stripe fans and its nobility will try to keep boosting Stripe's sainthood as if they do no wrong or won't kill your business if you had fraudulent chargebacks (also known as friendly fraud) and will make sure they are only the exception. In reality, you are going to get destroyed by Stripe with such large payments, even if they are not fraudulent.
They actually are killing businesses when they do that and locking their accounts down for months. Even if you have a sum like that for a business or it was an error, well good luck with support as you are not getting that money back and your business will end up shutting down.
That is the dark truth that the Stripe boosters and that the hype squad won't tell you.
There are also apologists for coinbase. I wonder if these are paid "internet agencies" that realize that brand management is increasingly done through social media.
This isn't surprising to me, and I don't think less of Stripe for doing this. It appears everybody is jumping to conclusions. Saying Stripe is "stealing" is laughable.
There is a tremendous amount of fraud abound. Payment service providers like Stripe sit in between businesses and credit card companies, who proxy banks, who proxy customers.
Banks are pretty solid, as are credit card companies, so the transitive nature of these transactions means Stripe proxies customers. A significant feature of modern payment processing is the ability to reconcile fraud for either party, but typically these measures are structured in a way to protect the customer.
For example, you buy a $3000 computer and the business goes under before they can ship it to you. It's likely you can get your money back by calling your credit card company but it's not like they're being generous. What happens is exactly what is happening here:
Money is held until it can be safely cleared without dispute; money is clawed back from merchant bank accounts and held until it can be cleared (there is practically no limit to what can be clawed back out of your merchant bank account).
If this makes you uncomfortable, don't deal with credit card companies, and only take cash. It doesn't matter who your payment processor is, this can and will happen with any of them.
I'm sympathetic to the OP here, but from a business perspective, the fact that this is such a significant event is a red flag. Shit happens -- your credit card could be stolen, you could be robbed, you could be defrauded -- it's prudent to have a safety net for when such things occur. And while realistically such safety can be unreasonable to secure, that just signals to me that so much of society is living at the edge of a knife. It's easy to be angry at Stripe here, but I believe that's misguided.
I don't think Stripe holding money is the problem here. The problem to me seems that there is no support to be reached at Stripe to dispute their decision or get a human to answer. I agree that OP's business doesn't seem that healthy if $3000 are such a big problem, however that doesn't make Stripe's non-existing support any better.
I've dealt with Stripe support and it's been... fine? Good even? I can only assume that if they've gone radio silent there's a reason. I'm not convinced Stripe is acting in bad faith, as shitty as this is. (Unlike, say, PayPal, who is notorious for shit like this).
At least one instance I'm aware of has to do with anti-money laundering regulations, where it can be disallowed to communicate regarding a pending investigation, but obviously I can't speak to if that's happening here.
I'd be very interested to know what your issue was that they helped with. I'm 0 for 3 (potentially 1 is fixed now, 1 fixed itself, and the last I gave up on). Unless your issue is trivial you will be thrown in limbo and go days/weeks without a reply.
> I can only assume that if they've gone radio silent there's a reason
This is the fundamental mistake made when dealing with these corporations. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, but beyond that, any customer service system that has a heavy bot presence and outright removes inconvenient (for them) points of contact should be assumed negligent and suspect by default.
Why do you assume they're holding the money for legimitate reasons? I count as much more likely they're just fucking up and have no idea or don't care enough.
Plenty of example of this, event amongst top tech companies: see the clusterfuck that is youtube copyright claims for instance.
Every time there are automated flaggings, there are fuckups. We can accept it if there's an efficient way to challenge, but that's not happening. Stripe/Google doesn't care and/or it would hurt the bottom line too much.
Also if credit cards company are much better at this, I don't see why Stripe gets a free pass for sucking.
All of the companies are needlessly inviting the wrath of regulation on themselves. Sooner or later (probably later) a political consensus could emerge to require detailed human review, subject to a regulator intervening on any/every case, whenever they keep more than $X for more than Y days.
I suggest that it might be smarter for all of these firms to do a better job, voluntarily, of providing human interaction and review - to forestall such regulation as long as possible.
Federal law requires that banks hold you harmless from certain perils. Your risk for the $3000 computer is limited to $50.
Money is not held until cleared. Credit cards are a cash flow business and settle very quickly, but contract terms allow the credit card to recover chargebacks or other losses by nabbing future cash flows.
My guess is the issue that triggered this is that a big transaction is a risk as a chargeback may not be recoverable as there is no baseline level of activity. Or… they suspect that the merchant is getting a cash advance outside of the terms of the contract.
Other than the lack of process to resolve the hold, I always reserve judgement on stuff like this as you never get the full story.
This "rant" is in general, and not related to OPs case
I would strongly recommend to not rely on stripe, their service level has become a joke. I get it, they have a nice API, their system is technically nice in many ways, and they are (or atleast were ~5 years ago) way easier to deal with for developers than the "old" players on the market.
but they are kinda like google, their support is pretty much non existent when things arent on the "happy path", they will GLADLY ignore any inquiry for months if they feel like it, I know this for bitter personal experience.
Yeah, their fees might be slightly lower than the older players, but the old ones you could call if it comes to it, and they will NOT be doing the same shenanigans on a whim, as it appears Stripe do.
Authorize.net is the old one that Stripe always seems to be compared against. And in that race... Stripe has already crossed the finish line before Authorize.net has taken its first step.
i do not want to name specific names, but in my neighborhood theres a couple of big online payment processors that until somewhat "recently" were the ones that 99.9% of online shops used. I imagine it be roughly similar in other places, though perhaps more the bigger the country
until it doesnt work. Yeah, they may well be fast in the support of what essentially is a sales support.
Talking to insurance companies is also extremely pleasant, almost giving a vibe of talking to yes-men and shoeshine boys... until its time to make a claim :)
I feel confident most strip customers never have issues, but when you do, you are screwed. They simply do not care at all, they even feel perfectly justified simply not responding for months
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 350 ms ] threadThe morale of the story is that you should not behave like Google if you aren't as big as Google...
I’d end it there.
People shouldn’t have to go viral on social media to get decent customer service just because “computer says no.”
I too am a little suspicious of anyone who codes in PERL
Their dev support on discord is S-tier, but every now and then some issue has to be moved to email support; where it dies. It always takes months for something to be resolved, if at all.
My only consolation is that every other provider is just as terrible.
This is also a red flag
I don't really like Discord, but i must admit it is a smart choice.
What kind of company builds itself as only being a product usable by developers? We're a small niche market at best.
What kind of excuse is that? I've seen so many small businesses using Stripe. I doubt all their owners are developers who are comfortable with Discord.
For the customer?
By default, you have a linear, IM-like UX, but it is trivial to fork conversations on specific topics.
Discord has excellent moderation tools, is economical and relatively user friendly (compared to IRC). If you desire a public space for your community to engage with you in real time, I'm not aware of a better alternative.
Discord support is hell on Earth.
This is Stripe opting to go to where a core customer segment (developers) live. Discord sucks but from a business perspective it’s smart. You wouldn’t use their Discord chat for just any issue.
My experience with Authorize.net support was really good. Their tech stack/api was absolutely archaic, but you could talk to real humans.
Very few errors, except in the early days. I hate them because of the complexity of the solution (I needed a relationship with a separate "payment processor" that has changed names/systems/owners five times in those 20 years) but I have had few problems with withholding etc.
But my monthly charges and individual charges are very consistent, and chargeback rate very low (but not zero).
https://www.authorize.net/en-us/resources/our-features/advan...
Note this is different than the Discord dev chat which is for technical questions.
Once I get live chat it may take a day or two to resolve but if it takes longer I just hop on live chat again and pester them until it's escalated.
According to the OP.
1. The UX was confusing and the OP couldn't find those options.
2. Stripe somehow has some logic that disables it specifically for that person or that person's region.
3. The OP didn't actually try and is lying in their post.
1 and 3 are more negative reflections on the OP than Stripe. And for 2 I'd need more details.
I saw this in the replies to the comment:
> The "chat" and "have us call you" options get greyed out once they have frozen your account.
But from my own experience, that is wrong. Also OP didn't say their account was frozen just that the money from that particular transaction was being held.
>Stripe somehow has some logic that disables it specifically for that person
I'm not sure why you wrote this as if it'd be a grand technical challenge to implement. Locking-out specific features based on X criteria is pretty damn common.
I don't particularly care in any case, I just had the impression that you might of missed that specific line when you wrote your original comment regarding the short wait times you've had when calling support.
Edit: Seems like you saw the other post as well.
>But from my own experience, that is wrong.
Well, from my vantage point I see 2 people claiming it gets greyed out and 1 person (you) claiming it doesn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
No, I meant that as literally "somehow" as in "has some logic to"... no implication of difficulty. But I can see how that may sound that way.
> Well, from my vantage point I see 2 people claiming it gets greyed out and 1 person (you) claiming it doesn't. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
3 people is not a large sample size. I did notice an issue where it is grayed out until you select a topic. Which may be partially at play here (which is a UX issue).
My accounts got temp locked because they needed to verify some KYC information. Maybe there is another more severe level of lock that does gray it out. But then I'd need to know way more details about what Stripe thinks the OP did to get that lock before I start blaming Stripe or the OP.
FWIW I asked upthread to a Stripe person, and they do apparently grey out the support/call buttons in certain situations.
> The "chat" and "have us call you" options get greyed out once they have frozen your account. They do not allow such users to have them call. You can only receive a call if they have not frozen your account.
I suppose you can create a second account and then contact support from there, but they'll probably flag you for ban evasion and make your situation worse.
That's neat and all but try to get them to actually fix anything. They will 100% move you to email once you explain your issue (assuming it's not "I can't find my password" or equally basic) and then you will be in limbo. I hope you enjoy no one responding to your ticket for days/weeks at a time even after you provide them with all the info they ask for.
A well placed, polite email to C-level staff often fixes the problem, but can draw attention to flaws in the support flow - or validate a customer-hostile standpoint, at which point you can make an informed decision about where to place your business.
(That might be based on our usage maybe, we're a OK sized Connect partner)
When I see Stripe's apology here it will not be enough for me - not at least without a detailed blog post / postmortem.
Until/if that moment happens, I'll regard Stripe as an untrustworthy entity and will recommend doing the same to do anyone I do business with.
Zero tolerance for Google-style algo-decisions and stonewalling.
I'm actually just starting a business using Stripe for handling payments, and this makes me very concerned.
Is there an alternative service one could use? Is there a way not to give these shady companies power to steal all my money?
For local businesses, perhaps your local bank has a better solution? They will be cheaper (if they use networks other than Visa/Master), and often has zero fees when you withdraw money to a bank account.
Here in my country, for a business that only caters to local customers, I pay about 2% for payments with no fixed fee and no fee for withdrawals, which happens daily. I can directly call the person who handles my queries, and charge backs have never been anything but a few quick clicks with no mind games. All I do is redirect the user to the payment page, and validate the payment upon arrival. The UX isn't as good as Stripe of course, but many of the locals are quite used to that UI anyway.
We see this in many circumstances: centralization and scale are great for efficiency, but bad for resilience.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263465
curl https://www.pastepay.com
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;URL=https://www.pastepay.com/industry/international-merchants">
curl https://www.pastepay.com/industry/international-merchants
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//IETF//DTD HTML 2.0//EN"> <html><head> <title>302 Found</title> </head><body> <h1>Found</h1> <p>The document has moved <a href="https://www.pastepay.com/">here</a>.</p> </body></html>
https://docs.klarna.com/
Mollie for one is complete garbage.
There are many alternative services listed in other comments, but to be clear, every single one of them has the power to do exactly what Stripe did.
There is no way to accept credit card payments without accepting that power to freeze suspicious incoming payments, simply because fundamentally credit card payments are not final and can (and often will) be reversed afterward, and if someone promised to never freeze merchants' funds, every fraudster in the world would come to try out their services, bankrupting them in the process.
But; I have run 4 different businesses on stripe over about 6 years and have never had a serious issue. Yes there have been ups and downs but even with no phone number I would have to rate their support head and shoulders above most. Maybe 24-36 hours for a response, but we always got one, and in most cases it solved the issue.
We are still with them.
It comes in really, really handy when your tiny 1-person company outlives your giant multinational payment provider. Happened to me a few times now, I'm on to my 3rd (4th?) provider in 20 years. There's a tendency for Borg-like consolidation in the payments industry (eg Avangate acquired 2Checkout, then were bought by Verifone). Anyone who lived through the Digital River era will know what I mean.
If you haven't done that code abstraction, imagine that you're suddenly unable to take any payments or make any sales and you are unable to do so until you rewrite all your payment processing code. That can be a long outage.
Having a backup is also useful when a customer's card gets declined by an overly zealous fraud screen at one provider. You can give that customer a "promocode" that changes the logic of your checkout flow and redirects processing to a different payment processor.
And having different processors active also lets you add different payment options (eg maybe your primary processor doesn't support Alipay or Pay With Amazon). But in practice that turned out not to be a good reason for me, Paypal/Visa/MC/Amex/Optima covered almost 100% of customers anyway. For the tiny handful that use checks I can handle that manually.
It's hardly the only charge of this nature.
Oh Paypal? Look up the horror stories there. Or directly work with a legacy provider like FirstData? They will also freeze your account and won't even accept you if you just have just $3k of sales.
Isn't it interesting that credit card processors really like to give crappy customer support and enjoy freezing accounts? Is it because they just attract misanthropic people? If only a caring company that didn't freeze accounts and gave wonderful support could enter, the field would be better. /s
Actually, the problem is super structural:
- Due to payment processing regulations, there is a fixed overhead from taking a small merchant on. (KYC, AML, ensuring you're not selling drugs). This makes tiny merchants incredibly unprofitable to begin with. Legacy providers like FirstData will reject you outright or make you pay fees to onboard. They will also make you fill out pages of paper forms and put the time cost on you to verify you're a legit business.
We as a society have said the gatekeeping features of finance are more important that making sure tiny businesses have access to payment infrastructure. We should change this parameter if we truly cared about this. I suspect we don't.
- Merchants simply race to the CC provider that is easiest to set up or have lowest fees. If you were OK paying a couple of hundred dollars of setup fees to, you know, properly reimburse your vendor for vetting you, or pay 5% fees for a high risk (read: tiny merchant) specialty account, you probably wouldn't have been frozen like this, at least without them calling you.
This is exactly the problem with Google services. Are you paying Google a bunch of money? If you are a high level enterprise account where the fully-burdened cost of a 1-hour customer support call (~$100) is a small part of your yearly net margin to Google, I bet they would take your call.
FWIW If you want to be able to quickly switch payment providers without stripe (or any provider) holding your customer's payment info hostage, you should consider using a PCI tokenization service like BasisTheory.com
Reach out to local credit unions or even smallish bank. They usually are middleman to firstdata, chase paymentech etc. But you get a dedicated account rep at cost of nominal monthly fee. Rates usually are competitive often lower than what stripe and paypal offers.
That people would prioritize ui and initial setup costs over payment processing reliability is insane to me.
There is a small monthly fee and the processing fee is variable depending on the card. Plain debit/check card under 2%, compared to an airline rewards card that’s more like 4%…
I’m not even eligible for a Stripe account because a large part of my business could be called computer repair and that is explicitly disallowed.
Square is one. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
The major difference is that some platforms offer more hand-holding support and some don't, but even those who will talk to you (e.g. your local bank) can and sometimes will refuse unblocking such funds for a prolonged time.
https://reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/_/ihyq7tl...
As usual, there’s always an undisclosed fact that changes the narrative and explains the ban. Whether this should trigger Stripe’s scorched earth mechanisms is another matter.
Can they legally give that considering its, most likely, private customer information? If they give detailed information out in a "Detailed" post mortem... isn't that proof that they are an untrustworthy entity?
Just seems to me this is a damned if you do, damned if you don't attitude against Stripe (or, any company in general that has a complaint but can't do a "detailed" public response because, well, that's private information... .. . )
Really? There are entire classes of retailers where that would be a truly exceptional event. I don't know if that's true of the OP (post removed), but if their average transaction is $27 or something this would rightly trigger alarm bells. If they are in fact being stonewalled on support that's pretty inexcusable though.
1. Customer of retailer buys something with stolen cc, retailer is none the wiser, although Stripe has sophisticated techniques that suggest it might be fraud. Probably looks like a very ordinary transaction. e.g. person filling up gas tank with stolen card.
2. Accomplice of retailer buys something with "stolen" cc, retailer in on it. Probably looks like unusual transaction. e.g. person buying 10 laptops, reselling for cash, waiting until retailer gets money from Stripe, does a chargeback, retailer disappears, they split all the cash.
If it's the first case, sure, tell the retailer. If it's the second (or it could be the second, which I think is what might be the case here), you probably maintain radio silence while you investigate.
Edit: also, by all the documentation the OP wants to provide, it sounds like they understand why it could look like the second. If it's the first they should understand there's nothing they can provide that would suggest it's not a stolen card - it has very little to do with them.
Maybe one day non-custodial and permissionless payment rails will prevent this situation, for those services that choose to use it. Shame that HN is so polarized about blockchain that they refuse to entertain the idea.
Crypto-> crypto would be a different story, but requires a more sophisticated buyer.
I play in this space, so would definitely like to hear what you've got in mind.
It's a shame that we've only figured out "pay $200 to the guy using a derelict coal plant to run the world's fanciest space heater" and "pay $200 to the guy who hoards the most of your 'currency'" then and not "non-custodial and permissionless payment rails" then.
PoS is not perfect but far better than current norm of “pay a billion dollar corporation a fixed fee and also give them total control of the world’s payment rails.”
It's not an improvement. Just a changing of the guard with less oversight.
If "changing of the guard" means replacing VISA with thousands of VISAs in a decentralized network, where any non-VISA can become yet another VISA through permissionless software, that is far better in my opinion.
If you have another economic model than EIP 1559 that you feel is superior, you have the power to propose that as an EIP and start to develop consensus around it. EIP 1559 was first proposed in 2019 and it took some years for consensus to build around it.
Yes. A tax on every transaction apportioned by wealth to current holders (not to future holders because they will receive fewer tokens from constant input). A regressive tax.
> If "changing of the guard" means replacing VISA with thousands of VISAs in a decentralized network, where any non-VISA can become yet another VISA through permissionless software, that is far better in my opinion.
It's not 'thousands of visas' though. It's "a big faceless entity taking a fee on every transaction with the rules being set and the takings being apportioned by wealth" being replaced by "a big faceless entity taking a fee on every transaction with the rules being set and the takings being apportioned by wealth" the ability to volunteer to provide infrastructure doesn't change that.
> If you have another economic model than EIP 1559 that you feel is superior, you have the power to propose that as an EIP and start to develop consensus around it. EIP 1559 was first proposed in 2019 and it took some years for consensus to build around it.
The entire 'a deflationary token on one global trustless network, buy now or miss out' model has fundamental unsolved and potentially unsolvable flaws. It is capitalism distilled and on fast forward without the grifters even having to make the pretense of being involved in real productive activity.
We don't need 'currency but on the internet' to solve 'how do we distribute stuff'. We needto think about the problem from scratch. Blockchains may even be a part of it, but so long as d(wealth)/dt ~ wealth, it's just another method of making the same people rich.
> rules being set ... by wealth
I'm not sure where you got that. Depending on what you mean, in PoS some rules are set by node operators - software that can be run by anybody for free - and the hard rules of the protocol are set by social consensus.
I think this discussion also misses the forest for the trees: Eth tokens are not coupled to dollar wealth. Ethers are not "up-only" and they do not need to be for the network to function. A boom or bust in the price of Eth does not change the price of DAI or USDC, and pegged stablecoin tokens is what users would be transacting with if we are entertaining the idea of a crypto alternative to VISA.
[1] https://watchtheburn.com/insights
Which leads to my question: is there a smaller alternative similar to the Stripe of five years ago which might appreciate our business more?
I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened as we go into economic downturn and layoffs. Too bad they're not a public company, if they were I would be shorting their stock right now.
Stripe like any other processor runs an algo to determine the risk profile of each transaction to decide if you get the money immediately or not. If you have a sudden high ticket transaction, the odds this will be charged back are much higher. This is why they freeze that money up to 180 days.
It sucks, but it is how the credit card system works. Someone has to cover the chargeback risk.
it's to provide a human being to talk to or ask for clarifying information
https://twitter.com/GenosAtHonda/status/1552588035077726208
I'll wait with bated breath.
All the rest hippie anarchist bullshit "take control", "inflation", "fiat" etc. is just bullshit that's either idealistic to the point of stupid or just stupid.
https://www.circle.com/en/legal/usdc-terms
> If Circle suspects or determines that you or any of your authorized users or customers, as applicable, have violated this these Terms, including, but not limited to, attempting to transact or transacting with Blocked Addresses (as defined in Section 13) or attempting to engage or engaging in Restricted Activities or Prohibited Transactions, and you have a Circle Account, then Circle may be forced to terminate your Circle Account and you may forfeit any USD funds otherwise eligible for redemption.
The list of "Restricted Activities" this applies to is quite broad, including "provide false, inaccurate, or misleading information". The parent poster's claim this couldn't happen with USDC is readily proven false.
The ecosystem has vastly improved since
Citation very much required.
https://solana.com/news/solanas-energy-use-report-march-2022
Second, i don't trust their numbers - how could they possibly know what type of electricity is used by their validators?
Third - even if we assume those numbers are true, I don't see a comparison with Stripe's per transaction CO2 emissions.
This is like saying that Ethereum stole from AnubisDAO contributors.
> Second, i don't trust their numbers - how could they possibly know what type of electricity is used by their validators?
I think most of the validators are hosted at Equinix through a deal negotiated by the Solana Foundation, but not all of them.
> Third - even if we assume those numbers are true, I don't see a comparison with Stripe's per transaction CO2 emissions.
If you can find any published numbers on this from Stripe (or any other Ruby shop) that would be great.
How could you possibly compare the two?
At best, you're making a guess (I wouldn't exactly call it "informed") based on some randomly sourced data on a blog, which uses another blog for its source, which uses a third blog.
There is no use case for cryptocurrencies.
Typical crypto shilling.
Because the solution to this problem is providing a better customer care or face losing business and legal action.
Is this meant to defend Stripe?
What a weird way of looking at things.
A delayed payment must not exceed 2-3 weeks tops.
Won’t make any difference to you as your business is robust, right?
I still don't get your point.
Even if it is $1, why would someone take what is rightfully mine?
As someone who has run them for decades, it can be a SERIOUS issue at the wrong time. Sure, there are good times where it'll hardly be noticed, and can be dealt with in due course.
However, there are OFTEN other times when $3K failing to show up when expected can create real problems. Cash Flow is key.
To even suggest that it is OK for a company to arbitrarily cutoff funds, merely because it might be resolved sometime next year and "shouldn't be a problem" is massively ignorant and ethically bankrupt.
For your own sake, and for others on HN, read the room. Stop posting such 'hot takes' that only broadcast your bad assumptions based on massive ignorance of the topic and distract from the actual discussion (or if you're just trolling for responses, pls take it elsewhere).
If 3k cash flow made or break my small business, then I would've been toast within months of starting. If it's a real business, then 3k breaking the bank means you're over leveraged.
I'm not saying what Stripe is doing is okay. Nobody but Stripe and the OP have enough context to make a fair judgement. It certainly sucks, especially if OP did nothing wrong. If OP feels this is truly unjust, then that's what small claims court is for. But calling it theft when your payment processor withholds funds is an exaggeration. Is it theft if I pay my bills late?
Depending on how late you pay them, YES, it is theft, and can be so judged in court.
>>. Have you ever had a customer fail to pay an invoice on time? Have you ever not been reimbursed for expenses in a timely manner? Have you ever been charged the wrong amount? Had a supplier go bankrupt?
Yes, all of those things. And I pointed out that SOMETIMES, they can go by almost unnoticed and dealt with in due course, but OFTEN they can create real problems. It is one thing when they happen by accident, but when it is the result of capricious and hostile decisions by a vendor, it is an outrage.
Your own argument points this out - if $3K is supposed to be so manageable to a small biz, then it is not even a daily rounding error for Stripe, and THEY should give him the benefit of the doubt, and not externalize these costs onto the small biz.
I'd also point out that just the fact that you're justifying paying your bills late as "well it isn't theft" already tells me that you are in the class of ethically-challenged shady operators with whom I work to avoid.
Just because you make a profit does not mean that you are running a sound or ethical business or personally have either of those properties. I'd suggest you do some rethinking.
I couldn't agree more. Which of these is happening with respect to the OP? It's entirely not clear.
It's like when you're on hold for 20minutes hearing recordings about long wait timed due to "high call volume".
No, it is not high call volume, it is the damn company systematically understaffing the call center and overloading their workers to extract more money and externalize more costs onto their customers.
We should avoid doing business with them if possible.
But I've been in weird, regulatory spots before where communication is forbidden pending investigation or an audit. If you get flagged for money laundering, they're not allowed to say "hey we flagged you for money laundering", and possibly not even allowed to say "we're looking into it".
What does a business soundness have to do with stripe robbing them?
This is not acceptable from a critical infrastructure vendor.
That anyone is willing to reveal just how obtuse they are by attempting to justify it is astonishing.
To which the answer is "It depends on the business." These things also don't happen in isolation; most small businesses will be able to survive $3k frozen for a quarter on a good day, but even well-run small businesses have bad days.
This says NOTHING about the quality of the business.
Notice that both Tesla and SpaceX are extremely good businesses yet were within weeks of bankruptcy at several points in their history — a bad event at the wrong moment, even though very small percentage-wise, could have tipped them over the edge and they'd be history.
My church uses Stripe for various fundraising events. It would cause a serious cash flow issue if our payments for the bbq chicken fundraiser were held up for 3 months. We don’t have $3k to pay the chicken guy.
A key feature of Stripe is daily deposits. To me it’s understandable that they will flag transactions to address risk. But there has to be a process to adjudicate quickly.
I don't think Uber was ever particularly transparent, whereas I believe the other poster was implying that all Stripe employees can see revenue, profit margin, etc. plainly, which seems very uncommon for a non-public corp.
The processor lied about fees/rates, API/docs were absolute shit (and they were on the better end of what else I've seen but compared to Stripe they sucked), and I had to go through 3-5 video calls before they gave me API keys for even the dev environment. Then you get to enter the world of monthly charges on your account, minimum fees (if you don't pay enough in fees you have to pay the difference, for me it was $35 in fees minimum which doesn't work well for seasonal things or in-house test accounts), PCI compliance (fuck that form), even worse service, and slimy sales people.
Even with Stripe's absolutely terrible customer support (that I've experienced first-hand multiple times) I'll stick with them over dealing with the alternatives.
https://www.eseller365.com/square-holding-funds-business-120...
> Like other payment processors, we periodically review your sales to assess the risk of payment disputes. In a recent review of your account, we determined that we have to hold a portion of your transfer in a reserve balance. Beginning <redacted>, 30% of each transaction on your Square account will be stored in your reserve balance, and will be released 120 days after the original transaction date.
Not sure whether this person was specifically locked out or something, but I've had consistently good experience with Stripe's phone support. As they note email (and chat) are a joke, but phone reps are highly knowledgeable and have quickly resolved my issues.
Maybe someone is willing to create a Stripe account and trigger a block to test it.
Edit: another thread 3 years ago mentions the same: “I tried to contact support by chat or phone, but it seems that when they suspend an acct, they block your ability to contact support by any method except by email...” [0]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21031665
It's just a crazy coincidence that they also won't tell you the underlying truths to the situation that would let you understand why they aren't letting you call them. Surely they are reasonable and not just standard corpo tech negligent customer support. Surely.
They actually are killing businesses when they do that and locking their accounts down for months. Even if you have a sum like that for a business or it was an error, well good luck with support as you are not getting that money back and your business will end up shutting down.
That is the dark truth that the Stripe boosters and that the hype squad won't tell you.
I’m thinking all financial players sometimes do stuff like this?
There is a tremendous amount of fraud abound. Payment service providers like Stripe sit in between businesses and credit card companies, who proxy banks, who proxy customers.
Banks are pretty solid, as are credit card companies, so the transitive nature of these transactions means Stripe proxies customers. A significant feature of modern payment processing is the ability to reconcile fraud for either party, but typically these measures are structured in a way to protect the customer.
For example, you buy a $3000 computer and the business goes under before they can ship it to you. It's likely you can get your money back by calling your credit card company but it's not like they're being generous. What happens is exactly what is happening here:
Money is held until it can be safely cleared without dispute; money is clawed back from merchant bank accounts and held until it can be cleared (there is practically no limit to what can be clawed back out of your merchant bank account).
If this makes you uncomfortable, don't deal with credit card companies, and only take cash. It doesn't matter who your payment processor is, this can and will happen with any of them.
I'm sympathetic to the OP here, but from a business perspective, the fact that this is such a significant event is a red flag. Shit happens -- your credit card could be stolen, you could be robbed, you could be defrauded -- it's prudent to have a safety net for when such things occur. And while realistically such safety can be unreasonable to secure, that just signals to me that so much of society is living at the edge of a knife. It's easy to be angry at Stripe here, but I believe that's misguided.
At least one instance I'm aware of has to do with anti-money laundering regulations, where it can be disallowed to communicate regarding a pending investigation, but obviously I can't speak to if that's happening here.
This is the fundamental mistake made when dealing with these corporations. They do not deserve the benefit of the doubt, but beyond that, any customer service system that has a heavy bot presence and outright removes inconvenient (for them) points of contact should be assumed negligent and suspect by default.
Plenty of example of this, event amongst top tech companies: see the clusterfuck that is youtube copyright claims for instance.
Every time there are automated flaggings, there are fuckups. We can accept it if there's an efficient way to challenge, but that's not happening. Stripe/Google doesn't care and/or it would hurt the bottom line too much.
Also if credit cards company are much better at this, I don't see why Stripe gets a free pass for sucking.
I suggest that it might be smarter for all of these firms to do a better job, voluntarily, of providing human interaction and review - to forestall such regulation as long as possible.
Give me a effin proper response. I am your customer!
Money is not held until cleared. Credit cards are a cash flow business and settle very quickly, but contract terms allow the credit card to recover chargebacks or other losses by nabbing future cash flows.
My guess is the issue that triggered this is that a big transaction is a risk as a chargeback may not be recoverable as there is no baseline level of activity. Or… they suspect that the merchant is getting a cash advance outside of the terms of the contract.
Other than the lack of process to resolve the hold, I always reserve judgement on stuff like this as you never get the full story.
I would strongly recommend to not rely on stripe, their service level has become a joke. I get it, they have a nice API, their system is technically nice in many ways, and they are (or atleast were ~5 years ago) way easier to deal with for developers than the "old" players on the market.
but they are kinda like google, their support is pretty much non existent when things arent on the "happy path", they will GLADLY ignore any inquiry for months if they feel like it, I know this for bitter personal experience.
Yeah, their fees might be slightly lower than the older players, but the old ones you could call if it comes to it, and they will NOT be doing the same shenanigans on a whim, as it appears Stripe do.
And honestly I feel like Stripe actually responds to support tickets that are related to the integrations side in like half an hour.
Talking to insurance companies is also extremely pleasant, almost giving a vibe of talking to yes-men and shoeshine boys... until its time to make a claim :)
I feel confident most strip customers never have issues, but when you do, you are screwed. They simply do not care at all, they even feel perfectly justified simply not responding for months
The integration on my website is bad... But payments and payouts have been solid so far.
Gumroad itself uses Stripe, it seems so if Stripe decides to hold funds it's likely Gumroad will just forward that experience to you.