Stripe Shutdown Our Nonprofit's Account, Holding $12k in Donations Hostage
We requested further review of our account and supplied Stripe with further information in the dashboard. Just 45 minutes later, we received a second email confirming their decision to close our account. I find it hard to believe that Stripe was able to "conduct another review of [our] account" in such a short span of time.
While trying to figure out what could possibly present "a high level of risk for customer disputes," only one recent, major incident comes to mind. About two months ago, we experienced a security breach where an unauthorized user gained access to the account owner's Stripe login. They attempted to send six large invoices, of which only two went through. We promptly resolved the issue by resetting passwords and multi-factor authentication, and we refunded the wrongful charges. We contacted Stripe support to ensure everything was in order.
Support was helpful, they said they would escalate the issue and ensure everything was fine. A few days later, the owner's login was disabled by the security team. Getting it enabled again took nearly two months of trying to get in touch with support. Stripe was emailing us, but the emails were going into the ether. The attack hit the owner's inbox as well, as rules were configured to delete all incoming emails from Stripe, something Stripe support caught!
Once we sorted out that mess, we discovered Stripe withheld over $12,000 in donations while the login was disabled. The funds were scheduled to be released today, the same day the account was cancelled. That's $12,000 of donations people have made that we can't access. We are very small, and very much need access to that money to keep our programs running. It took months for us to get there, but only 45 minutes for Stripe to decide to kill our account.
We want to figure out what's going on and how to resolve this, but Stripe has disabled both live chat and phone support for our account. (I'm still able to use those options in other Stripe accounts under the same login).
Overnight, we've gone from planning our largest annual fundraiser, to considering pulling the plug altogether. We are incredibly frustrated by the complete and utter lack of transparency, the inability to contact Stripe, and absolute hopelessness we're feeling. If anyone knows someone we can hop on a call to discuss this situation with, please leave details or contact us at: Founder & Executive Director: bev@integrateforgood.org Director of Technology (me): nick@integrateforgood.org
20 comments
[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 53.6 ms ] threadpaypal has been doing this forever and its just theft. you cannot offer to hold or transfer funds for people while simultaneously holding unchecked power to take it away without any reason while answering to no one.
it could be that stripe needed another $12K for their own budget and targeted one of their customers.
Maybe notify Stripe about the below action you would be taking, as they have neither released the funds to you nor returned them to the donors. Well if you have contact details of your donors, please write to them and request them to raise a chargeback with reason that payment gateway/processor stripe didn't deliver the funds to intended recepient, this would be more painful and costly for stripe themselves.
Really, unless you are purposefully trying to get the OP into even more trouble this is stupendously irresponsible.
Stripe and others, up your game.
(c+p my comment from 8mths ago...)
Did you see the greyzone had a fundraiser shutdown by gofundme? Recall wikileaks getting their banking shut down based on an evidence-free accusation from a politician with no recourse. Whether those jounalistic outfits are to your liking is beside the point.
There needs to be clear rules, called "law" and their enforcement needs to be the same for everyone regardless of their popularity, wealth or power. A right to your day in court. This used to be uncontroversial and encroachment on it something met with widespread fiery fury on principle.
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=pc
All I can say is good luck. At this point probably better off trying to pressure them from the outside via local media, social media, and of course taking them to court. Maybe the backlash will get them to resolve it faster.
So what happens to this money? They can't possibly just get to keep it and use it to buy beer and pizza for company parties, or can they? I guess they could try to push it back as refunds to those who donated. But what if those individuals don't have active accounts or credit cards any longer.
It usually gets released, eventually; the freeze is theoretically to prevent Stripe from being on the hook for the chargebacks they think are coming.
Given the choice, I would have every payment transferred out to a real bank as soon as it landed, and only keep pocket change on balance within Stripe, Paypal etc.
It always seems to be the fancy newer processors that started as SV startups.
I don't know if this is because the old school payment processors do this sort of thing less often, or if because the kind of organizations that use old school processors are the kind that probably would not post on HN about problems they have.
Secondly, my two cents: May not work for stripe, but an excellent post shared somewhere on HN about what one Paypal user who also happened to be a lawyer did to make that trashfire company respond very quickly to his request for an unfreeze might help your case too. It's possible that the same legal procedures apply. Stripe and Paypal are both payment handlers after all.
trying to find it.... And here! https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-fought-the-paypal-and-i...