←back to thread

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

501 points eeemmmooo | 1 comments | 03 Jan 23 15:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.213s | 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.

Show context
smca ◴[03 Jan 23 16:57 UTC] No.34234079[source]▶
Evan, thanks for taking the time to write this up. I helped resolve your particular issue on NYE and I’m acutely aware of how painful it’s been.

I broadly agree with a lot of your statements. The lack of clear communication and the repetitive requests for information during the review process isn’t good. We’re working on striking the right balance between giving good users relevant information without giving bad actors a roadmap to defraud Stripe. And we need clear channels to escalate when users need to. While I’m happy your issue was resolved, the process isn’t where it should be yet.

replies(2): >>34234166 #>>34234480 #
johnhaddock ◴[03 Jan 23 17:02 UTC] No.34234166[source]▶
John here from Stripe (I lead our Risk product area). As OP noted, we try to spot unexpected spikes in processing volume, which are often associated with risky activity. In this case, that was in error — we were too fast to act and (much) too slow to unwind. In particular, we erred in not taking congruent action across OP’s related accounts. We’re working on a fix for this. I’m following up with OP to make sure we fully digest this one, so that it doesn’t happen again.

Since I came onboard in Sept, the team has made a lot of progress (e.g., mistaken actions like this one are down by 75%), but we have a lot more planned to further improve. We’re always on the look out for additional examples of mistaken action - please email me at jhaddock@stripe.com so I can take a look.

replies(2): >>34235283 #>>34237156 #
iam-TJ ◴[03 Jan 23 18:11 UTC] No.34235283[source]▶
In a former business I had several 'customer advocates' who were tasked with representing customers to internal teams. Difficult/complex/delayed issues could be escalated to the advocates by customer support.

I view customer support as a marketing opportunity via goodwill and word of mouth.

Accounting for customer support as a debit against the marketing budget is an incentive to prevent incidents.

In another comment I asked the OP if it could have helped if they were able to notify ahead of time of expected spikes in turnover (due to marketing initiatives, etc.) that could be factored into the risk management equation.

replies(1): >>34239497 #
1. Rastonbury ◴[03 Jan 23 23:12 UTC] No.34239497[source]▶
Stripe knows this, when they were smaller the founder used to reply to threads like this or patio11 who they hired (but he just wrote that he is no longer there!).

Makes me wonder what's going on in there post-layoff, the business model is sound and they are market leader. No pressure too IPO quickly in the down market