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.)

  if (transactionInvalid > 5) {
     if (accountPossiblyFraudulent) {
       sendAccountCancellationEmail(accountid))
       stripeBackEnd.closeUserAccount()
     }
  }

It's disgraceful that there isn't multiple layers of careful analysis and INCLUDING personal reachout before canceling an account.

Big companies like Stripe need to be reigned in with legislation because they wield the power to destroy businesses and they do it without care.

Where is Stripes ombudsman - a customer advocate - an independent person with CEO level power within Stripe who's primary duty is to customers and is a channel of last resort when your normal support channels have failed? Why don't you have this?

How can you allow Hacker News to be the channel of last resort?

You're running a financial services company and doing it as though it's unimportant to cancel someones ability to invoice.

The lack of protection for your customers is why companies like Stripe need much tougher regulation.

In fact, you as the co-founder of Stripe should NOT be answering here on Hacker News. You should make it a point to NOT personally resolve such issues because if you have to, then you are acknowledging serious failure in your companies systems and serious letdown of your customers. In fact you should be appalled that Stripe so fails it's customers that they must go to social media to solve valid problems. You should simply be able to rely on some lower level person in Stripe finding this and posting a short message saying "please contact our ombudsman", and being assured that your ombudsman will give it due and fair consideration.

So surely this is not the only time Stripe has mistakenly cancelled an account - but this is the one case where the person who's account was cancelled was able to get their issue on the front page of Hacker News. Therefore is can be said that many people have their accounts mistakenly cancelled by Stripe and have no recourse - again where is your ombudsman?

This is serious systemic failure of Stripe. And the worst thing is it is not just Stripe - this is what people have now come to expect from giant companies that are a critical part of business - such as Apple's app store - people now expect that the company might one day send a random email saying, in effect that your business is over. You can't or won't fix it, so the law should.

Stripe founder need to hear this: "sorry" ain't enough.