Why not file a police report for the theft of 400k USD?
replies(2):
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.
this is clearly a matter across state lines, so it's an FBI issue. at least get your LEA correct when making non-sense posts like this. it's the least you could do. I don't even know if FBI is the correct agency either though, so there's that bit of info from some rando on the interwebs
If I had to guess? File it in your state and it'll get routed from there. Or how about you literally ask the police this exact question?
> "at least get your LEA correct when making non-sense posts like this"
I think you're over complicating this, but you sound like you might know better so...
The police is a sensible starting point, from which you as a citizen should get better guidance on next steps. There may be other mechanisms in the US government that are more appropriate here (ie. FBI, or FinCEN, IRS, etc).
However, you'll find in your ToS contract that they tell you they can/will suspend your account for suspicion of fraud or other activities. Just because they suck at explaining themselves is not a crime according to the law. Otherwise, so many companies would be breaking the law.
It's so easy to react emotionally to things when they affect your livelihood, but rarely does that actually help the situation.
Inexplicably being denied access to your own funds without being told what's going on or when the issue will be resolved could be an indication of a crime. I'm not saying it is a clear indication, but I'm not denying the possibility either.
There can be any number of hypothetical reasons for the situation being the way it is, and you can't exclude ones which are clearly criminal in nature (say somebody hacked their account and emptied it for funds). You should also draw parallels to other service providers (hospitals, universities, etc).
> "It's so easy to react emotionally to things when they affect your livelihood"
What other choice do you have in such a situation? This person exhausted every option they had, only to eventually get the help they needed by randomly reaching out to internet strangers. If it wasn't for this, who knows how long they would remain locked out of their account without any visibility into what's going on? Meanwhile, their business would be hurting, creating a cascading effect.
Filing a police report in such a situation isn't "reacting emotionally".
You made a business contract with a company. In that contract, they stipulate that under certain circumstances they will hold your money. What is a problem is the company is completely full of shit in how they handle these situations. They are "protecting themselves" from your account potentially being some sort of fraud. This is all automated with zero to little human involvement which creates potential for lots of false positives. During these cases, the company is 100% at fault for being cheap ass bastards that show zero sympathy towards users.
This is not something for local police to be involved. The disconnect seems to be emotional vs logical.
We're going around in circles, but all I'll say is that you could say that about anything. And yet people sometimes end up in prison for stealing candy.
If people won't file reports - all deterrence is lost, and there won't be any incentive for the other side to change. If the mechanism exists, why not use it?