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

(Stripe cofounder.)

Ugh, apologies. Something very clearly went wrong here and we’re already investigating.

Zooming out, a few broader comments:

* Unlike most services, Stripe can easily lose very large amounts of money on individual accounts, and thousands of people try to do so every day. We are de facto running a big bug bounty/incentive program for evading our fraudulent user detection systems.

* Errors like these happen, which we hate, and we take every single false rejection that we discover seriously, knowing that there’s another founder at the other end of the line. We try to make it easy to get in touch with the humans at Stripe, me included, to maximize the number that we discover and the speed with which we get to remedy them.

* When these mistaken rejections happen, it’s usually because the business (inadvertently) clusters strongly with behavior that fraudulent users tend to engage in. Seeking to cloak spending and using virtual cards to mask activity is a common fraudulent pattern. Of course, there are very legitimate reasons to want to do this too (as this case demonstrates).

* We actually have an ongoing project to reduce the occurrence of these mistaken rejections by 90% by the end of this year. I think we’ll succeed at it. (They’re already down 50% since earlier this year.)

This post reminds me of when the same thing happened to me about 5 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085706

It feels like there should just be a better process. Shut down payments to protect yourselves sure, but spare a real life person to email the customer and give them a chance to explain or at least understand why.

It seems like companies can't seem to get their act together to offer some kind of rapid escalation/remediation service. Maybe it's time for legislation to force their hand. This could potentially cost a business a ton of money (and affect a non-trivial number of employees) in the process.