3 weeks ago, I woke up to a pissed off customer telling me her payments were broken. My startup uses Stripe Connect to accept payments on behalf of our clients, and when I looked into it, I found that Stripe had decided to deactivate her account. Reason listed: 'Other'.
Great.
I contact Stripe via chat, and I learn nothing. Frontline support says "we'll look into it." Days go by, still nothing. Meanwhile, this customer is losing a massive amount of business and suffering.
After a few days, my team and I go at them from as many angles as possible. We're on the phone, we're on Twitter, we're reaching out to connections who work there / used to work there, and of course, we reach out to patio11. All of these support channels give us nothing except "we've got a team looking into it". But Stripe's frontline seems to be prohibited from offering any other info, I assume for liability reasons. "We wouldn't want to accidentally tell you the reason this happened, and have it be a bad one."
We ask: 1. Why was this account flagged? "I don't have that information" 2. What can we do to get this fixed? "I don't have access to that information. 3. Who does? "I don't have access to that information" 4. What can you do about this? "I've escalated your case. It's being reviewed."
I should mention at this point that I've been running this business since 2016, my customers have been more or less the same since then, and I've had (back when it was apparently possible) several phone conversations with Stripe staff about my business model. They know exactly who our customers are and what services we offer, and have approved it as such.
After a week of templated email responses and endless anxiety, we finally got an email from Stripe letting us know that they had reviewed the account and reactivated it. We never got a reason for why any of this had happened, despite asking for one multiple times. Oh well, still good news right? Except nope, this was only the beginning.
This morning I woke up to an email that about 35% of my client accounts had been deactivated and were "Under review", the kicker here being that one of those accounts is the same one they already reviewed last week! This is either the work of incompetent staff or (more likely) a bad algorithm. No reasonable human could make this mistake after last week's drama.
So currently, my product doesn't work for 35% of my customers. Cue torrent of pissed off customer emails.
And the best part is, this time I have an email from Stripe this time: Apparently these accounts are being flagged, despite the notes on our file, and despite the review completed literally last week, as not in compliance with Stripe's ToS. They suggest that if I believe this was done in error, I should reach out to customer support. Oh, you mean the same customer support that can't give me literally any information at all other than "We have a team looking into it"? The same customer support that won't give me any estimates as to how long it's going to take to put this fire out? The same customer support that literally looked into this a week ago and found no issues!?
I feel like I'm going crazy over here. These accounts have hundreds of thousands of dollars in them being held hostage by an utterly incompetent team / algorithm that seems to lack any and all empathy for the havoc they wreak on businesses when they pull the rug out from under them with no warning, nor for the impact they have on customers when they all of a sudden lose all ability to make money. And all that for an account that has been using Stripe for nearly 7 years without issue!
This goes so far beyond "customer support declining at scale." If lack of customer support means that critical integrations start to fail, that's not a customer support failure, that's a fundamental business failure.
It's an arms race with fraudsters that eventually sucks in legitimate businesses.
As much as I hate government intervention in business, it really seems like there needs to be a way to force companies to actually be direct, accessible, and reactive in cases like this. I went through something similar with Venmo randomly locking my account after I received a large-ish payment, and not getting any real action or sense of urgency on their side.
I still love them. That issue aside they allow me to have a personal and business account in multiple currencies, and don't screw me on the exchange rates.
This. This is a common tune to about 100% of "BigSomething killed my business" stories that appear on HN almost weekly. If you go to BigSomething, you get a polished, automated, convenient, cheap service that would not hesitate to kill you account the moment something looks wrong to any of the robots watching it, and the customer support (the non-robotic kind, I don't count "we are working on it" auto-replies) is not part of the package because it doesn't scale. You have to either accept this as the risk for doing business, or not use BigSomething as you primary or critical vendor.
Government has made entry to this space hard which is why there aren't enough competitors, so they're really the source of the problem.
I assume the government didn't want to put all the work in of making sure the currency they've societally coerced the world to use isn't being used for fraudulent transactions, they'd rather pawn it off onto the banks because it's easier for the government to not do anything about it.
Now the banks have been shooting anything and everything that has even a semblance of fraud with account locks/funds freezing/etc., because if they don't the government will go after them.
How does this system make any sense to anybody? So frustrating. Let me exchange currency with anybody for any reason at any time.
Stripe and other companies are doing their best, but they are in an arms race with more and more elaborate fraudsters. At planet scale.
Others (adult services) are not due to government regulations, they are there simply there because banks don't want to deal with chargebacks.
Except the operationalization of those rules is: here are some vague guidelines that you have to follow, and if we don't like you we'll retroactively decide you were committing a crime even if you followed those guidelines to the letter. See HSBC for a case in point.
This would be the same as saying: I want zero car accidents on the road, so I'll scale the police headcount linearly with the number of reckless drivers.
No, that's wrong. Firstly, as others have pointed out, society long predates any such notions.
Secondly, determining what is illegal activity, and putting a stop to it, is ostensibly the job of law enforcement and the courts, not the bank.