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

501 points eeemmmooo | 4 comments | 03 Jan 23 15:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.636s | 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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cj ◴[03 Jan 23 16:41 UTC] No.34233819[source]▶
This reminds me of an issue my sister is having with Etsy.

She runs an Etsy store with $1-2 million in annual sales, and her store keeps getting taken down by Etsy's automated copyright infringement system -- which keeps getting triggered by someone submitting fraudulent copyright claims and then immediately asking her to pay $5k/month in exchange for the person to stop submitting the infringement claims (in other words, she's being extorted).

Basically Etsy immediately takes down listings with no human review upon receiving a copyright complaint, which can be used by black hat scammers to extort stores into paying $5k-10k/month in exchange for the black hat to stop submitting fraudulent claims.

It's really astounding that companies build these automated systems that hurt their customers with no humans on standby to resolve these kind of edge cases (false positives).

replies(5): >>34234095 #>>34234465 #>>34234680 #>>34235649 #>>34238843 #
1. neilv ◴[03 Jan 23 16:57 UTC] No.34234095[source]▶
If this extortion practice isn't a common curse of Etsy stores with her scale of revenue, I wonder whether it might actually be a competitor (who gets the sales and customers whenever her store is down).
replies(1): >>34234415 #
2. hex4def6 ◴[03 Jan 23 17:19 UTC] No.34234415[source]▶
That seems unlikely. The legal risk you put yourself in doing that would be easy higher than any gains you could hope to make.

This is likely some callcenter-adjacent scam. They're probably doing this to hundreds of shops, and occasionally get one cave in and pay.

replies(2): >>34234913 #>>34234923 #
3. m-ee ◴[03 Jan 23 17:46 UTC] No.34234913[source]▶
It happens on Amazon, there was a post on here about it. I’m not sure they’d want to double dip and demand the hush money in that case, but it seems possible it happens on Etsy too.
4. ceejayoz ◴[03 Jan 23 17:47 UTC] No.34234923[source]▶
What legal risk? You're a fly-by-night vendor outside Etsy's jurisdiction who can close up shop and have twelve new corporate entities by tomorrow morning.