> I know many who drop ship and are not money launders.
No one said that all drop shippers, or even the majority of drop shippers, are doing anything illegitimate.
Those who provide merchant accounts for credit card processing are the ones who assume the risk if one of their account holders is not able to cover chargebacks, and so from their point of view it doesn't matter that the vast majority of drop shippers are legitimate. What matters from their angle is how much they will be on the hook for because of the small fraction that are illegitimate. If that is too high, it can be better for them to just disallow the whole category.
> No one said that all drop shippers, or even the majority of drop shippers, are doing anything illegitimate.
Yes, but STRIPE are saying this. Because it's in their prohibitive items list and if you do it as part of your business, they will not do business with you. This is my whole point.
Other merchants will happily do business, so why not stripe? They have yet explained why...
The guy you are replying to is a co-founder of stripe. You are being downvoted for disagreeing with him. On Hacker News there are certain personalities that you must not debate.
I don't get the connection between drop shipping and money laundering either (As if money laundering was a crime as defined at the federal level- everyone is already guilty).
Nobody would use a credit card to launder money since it is tied to a bank, or in the case of a visa gift card, limited to such small denominations its impractical for money laundering.
That's neither true nor fair; downvotes are explained by the commenter clearly wanting to escalate the argument. collision said tends to, so the objection here is weak and certainly doesn't merit name-calling like "Laughable".
A better way to phrase something like this is as a question. For example: "Wouldn't these criteria apply to Shopify? If Shopify is a legitimate business, how can other legitimate businesses overcome the same hurdle?" Putting it that way would abide by the HN guidelines, would be more likely to get a substantive response, and would take the thread in a direction where we all learn something.
It's hard, of course, to keep one's poise in a discussion about one's business being rejected for an arguable reason, but the alternative is for people to yell at each other, which helps no one and degrades this site.
I know many who drop ship and are not money launders.