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Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

501 points eeemmmooo | 5 comments | 03 Jan 23 15:52 UTC | HN request time: 1.249s | source

This is an update to my previous post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189717 . Stripe has resolved the issue and everything has been released. I told the contacts at Stripe that I would do a write up about what happened from my point of view to help them understand what happened to me. I figured it would be good to do that write up publicly to help both Stripe and potential Stripe customers understand what happened and how it was resolved.

Summary: Stripe put my accounts in review for a spike in sales on Cyber Monday. Throughout the month we received very little communication from Stripe and had many support chats and calls. Keep in mind that the whole time Stripe was still accepting payments on our behalf on all of these accounts. Each of the chats/calls asked us to upload the same invoices each time for review and gave us vague information that our accounts were being reviewed. Finally out of frustration I posted on HN about my issue. Thanks to @dang for getting a Stripe employee to respond and he was finally able to resolve the issue for me.

Overall this review process was pretty bad. Very little communication and nothing I could really do directly to move things along or get any real information. It took a random Stripe employee to get an email from @dang and post on HN in order to get this issue resolved. I’m lucky because I know about HN and know that Stripe employees frequent the site, but I don’t think HN wants to become the Stripe support forum.

Stripe you can do better. We all know that in order to scale you need to automate pieces of your infrastructure and communication. But, there is a balance between automation and manual review. When someone like me gets caught up in an automated system there needs to be better ways of letting support help that person.

See my comments below for actual details and dates.

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honoraryfly ◴[03 Jan 23 16:07 UTC] No.34233231[source]▶
Did they give any explanation of exactly why they had temporarily stolen your $400,000?

That's what would worry me the most after it's been resolved, just how arbitrary and opaque and uncommunicative their whole process is.

I wonder how many other people they've screwed over with this terrible approach to customer service. We'll probably never know, it's not something they're likely to be transparent about.

I'm very glad you went public with this to show the unapologetically uncooperative underbelly of such a well-marketed darling of the payment services space.

replies(1): >>34233350 #
1. sdwr ◴[03 Jan 23 16:14 UTC] No.34233350[source]▶
I'm guessing the risk on Stripe's side is that OP (or someone else!) is using a bunch of stolen credit cards to make purchases. If there are a lot of chargebacks, Stripe's on the hook for that.
replies(3): >>34233411 #>>34233517 #>>34233537 #
2. looping__lui ◴[03 Jan 23 16:18 UTC] No.34233411[source]▶
High-risk businesses have like 14 day payout period, no? So what’s the risk?

I think like 5+ years back chargebacks and credit card fraud was like 0.5% or less for us…

3. soco ◴[03 Jan 23 16:24 UTC] No.34233517[source]▶
Whatever tripped their alarm, not offering customer support for reviewing it is disgraceful. And this is the complaint here: their automated support scripts which send the user to /dev/null.
4. eeemmmooo ◴[03 Jan 23 16:25 UTC] No.34233537[source]▶
Yeah this. I'm actually not upset with Stripe that put our accounts into review. We did have a big sale spike and I can see how that would warrant a review. My issue is with the speed and communication of the whole process.
replies(1): >>34235176 #
5. iam-TJ ◴[03 Jan 23 18:04 UTC] No.34235176[source]▶
1. Were you expecting or able to forecast a likely spike due to marketing activities?

2. Could it have helped if Stripe/random payment processor had a way for you to indicate you expect a sales spike and a specific contact route?

Possibly only available to accounts with a cyclic transaction history (multi-year).