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Tell HN: Stripe shut down my 4-year business with no explanation

83 points buf | 1 comments | 06 Aug 21 11:31 UTC | HN request time: 0.226s | source

I'm posting this as a warning to other startups who might be thinking of using Stripe to process payments.

I was employee #10 at Eventbrite, founding engineer at Reforge, Techstars alum, startup founder X 3. I can't imagine treating my users like this and I am really upset with how Stripe is handling this situation.

The situation: I own an online SaaS company that processes $500k+ per year through both Stripe and Braintree. I've been using Stripe for years.

Today I received this email:

[b]"Our systems recently identified charges that appear to be unauthorized by the customer, meaning that the owner of the card or bank account did not consent to these payments. This unfortunately means that we will no longer be able to accept payments for

Refunds on card payments will be issued in 5–7 business days, although they may take longer to appear on the cardholder's statement. Please refer to your dashboard for a list of the charges to be refunded[1]."[/b]

I have NO idea what payments they could possibly be referring to & support doesn't respond to my numerous messages. They won't tell me which payments are being refunded (dashboard link they provided just sends me to the list of ALL our payments).

There was a button to verify my identity, which I did, and an hour later, I got:

[b]"Thank you for completing our verification process. Unfortunately, after conducting a further review of your account, we’ve determined that we still won't be able to accept payments for xx moving forward."[/b]

I have messaged my friends who work at Stripe, and edwin@stripe who works there who responded to the last HN thread there was about this (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21030633).

Until I get a response through a backdoor way in, my business is at a complete halt.

Show context
edwinwee ◴[06 Aug 21 14:09 UTC] No.28087356[source]▶
(Edwin from Stripe here.) Just saw your email. I’m sorry for the trouble—we’re looking into this now.
replies(2): >>28088173 #>>28092720 #
thunkshift1 ◴[06 Aug 21 21:04 UTC] No.28092720[source]▶
Edwin from stripe - is it too much to ask to have an actual human look at the data and make decisions that concern someones finances and earning situations? What does a ‘100B’ startup even mean if you cant even invest in some decent customer care and outreach… looks like nothing was learned from the Robinhood fiasco.
replies(1): >>28092864 #
edwinwee ◴[06 Aug 21 21:20 UTC] No.28092864[source]▶
I can't share specifics about OP's account, but four humans reviewed the data (i.e. humans hit send on each of the above emails). This is no excuse, though—verifying the legitimacy of a business while protecting customers from fraudsters is something we don't take lightly. This was a rare case in which we were missing some info—but we want future cases to be increasingly rarer. We're reviewing what happened to prevent something similiar from happening again.
replies(2): >>28105838 #>>28111310 #
1. busymom0 ◴[08 Aug 21 11:03 UTC] No.28105838[source]▶
> humans hit send on each of the above emails

Some human might have hit the send button but those emails definitely don't look like they were authored for this specific case as it looks like a generic template email.

Good to see the OP got their issue resolved but I hope someone at stripe implements at least a call back and email reach out before shutting down someone's business in the future. This is a very similar issue with Google where they shut down entire developer accounts without explanation and developers have to create enough shit storm from social media and tech blog posts to get a human to reach out. Droidscript being the most recent well known case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956077