Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute

Recently quality of service at Stripe has gone seriously down the drain.

They arbitrarily closed my account a while ago, and after following their draconian re-activation process (somehow my government issued ID is not good enough to identify me, they need to verify the same information and ID in a video call) I think we’re now at 20+ emails and counting.

I just gave up and will go with a different provider or open a new account since it’s easier.

At some point Stripe was the provider that took everyone, but they’ve become allergic to any kind of risk and trust nothing.

My speculative guess is they raised the bar on the low-pass filter by tightening up the algorithm after losing way too much to credit card fraud.

It was absolutely scary the amounts of fraud I dealt with running a dropshipping shop a decade ago.

Every bad fraud order that I dropshipped ate the entire profits from a dozen legit orders, and card fraud was attempted on approximately 25% of orders we received.

After a few years I shut the site down as it was just barely making a profit as the fraud costs escalated and I felt I was wasting my time screening every order with my own (imperfect) hand-rolled fuzzy logic fraud detection algorithms and manual investigation of every single order.

I false-rejected a lot of legit customers in the final year, vowing to stamp out the scammers I drove some customers away... it's hard to be perfect when card fraud is easy to achieve.

Actually what the final straw was for me, that made me delete the server, was not the regular identity fraud stolen-card scumbags, but the pathological liars who you could validate as 100% legitimate, but after they received and signed for the goods, would call their bank and lodge a chargeback to get a full refund, because he banks ALWAYS take the customers side and ALWAYS charged me an extra $35 penalty for every dispute I lost (which was every single one, despite sending pages of strong proof showing the customer was a baldfaced lying thief)

I’m just not sure what to think about practices surrounding these chargebacks any more. When I was working at a company where they were a thing, I don’t think we ever lost one. Does the whole thing just depend on who you are friends with? Or does anyone actually look at the proof you send?

The banks in your country sound much more reasonable and fair.

I'm in Australia and our 4 banks are way too powerful, and some of the worlds most profitable on a percentage basis, with nearly the highest paid executives globally.

In the decade since I deleted that site in despair, there have been several royal commissions / public inquiries into the shocking unfair and outright illegal actions all the 4 banks systematically entrenched, including forging customer signatures, ripping off customers at every opportunity, including siphoning customers money when the bank knew they had died, facilitating money laundering of cash earned from drugs on vast scales, influencing our captured politicians to roll back recently-legislated consumer protection laws the previous govt enacted, to absolve them from any culpability whatsoever by writing larger "liar loans" they knew people would struggle to live with, and these are which still going strongly (approx 1 in 3 recently admitting to this in a follow-up survey).

The AUD$35 per chargeback was an easy profit centre for them a decade ago, and no way would they ever take my side when it was free money for them.

I had a USD bank with them for the ecommerce dropship account. Our average order was around USD$51 with a little over 10% gross profit.

I was the only one losing out. The bank, my dropship supplier, and the card fraudsters all got paid and received their goods.