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.)

Sorry to say that, but the fact that founders have to post on Hacker News to get necessary support from Stripe in case something like this happens, gives the impression that your reply is just reputation damage control, and nothing will actually change.

> and nothing will actually change

If nothing changes, people will move away from Stripe on to something else. I'd say stuff like this is exactly how a business that wants to stay alive needs to react to swiftly and figure out the root cause for.

The communication from the founder or representative needs to reflect the commitment to change and show the plan they intend to execute. The GP didn't do so well on the second point (vague plan, at best).

If we see stuff like this still happening in 3-6 months, I think it's time to bring out the pitchforks.

Not really. Stripe has a better platform than competitors, and even though its support isn’t a strong point it’s still better than competitors (which admittedly is not a very high bar). It’s probably much better for large businesses who have their own contact/account manager at Stripe etc.

Last time I contacted Stripe I was given a round circle between departments, the department responsible denying the issue and/or sending me to an unrelated department (who had a good agent but, as expected, admitted she couldn’t fix the issue even though she recognised its existence). In the end it turned out to be a bug in Billing that was eventually fixed (per the dev IRC) but support denied there was any bug and kept giving bot-like responses. It was ridiculous. Stripe should probably improve its support, but even if it doesn’t it’ll probably do just fine.

Big tech and developed ‘startups’ are famous for bad support. Consider Coinbase, which barely responds, PayPal, which is useless, or Google/FB, which don’t even provide a contact option except in limited cases (eg GSuite for Business issues).

> Stripe has a better platform than competitors

.... If you weren't disabled by an automated system, and "customer support" (probably another level of shitty ML) continues to double down.

I concur with mikepechadotcom that this is simply a one-off damage control via "Social Media Escalation".