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by slownews45 1725 days ago
A took a quick look through your email thread.

From your first communication it's a very combative communication style and it continues that way to the end.

"By the way, lest you think Kelsey was being super considerate above, she made sure to time several of her messages so that they arrived at three and four AM to make it rather harder to reply. Sometimes timing can be a quasi-malicious act."

Business may need to determine if its worth doing business with a customer. For stripe, it may simply not have been worth trying to business with you. The good news - TONS of other providers in this space, including for very high charge back industries (adult, tatoo, strip clubs etc) so you should be able to get services if needed.

2 comments

It was odd that they came back telling him used books sales was crowdfunding. They seemed to get that wrong. After that it was a bunch of useless corporate spam emails of the like you get from an App Store review or similar.
We don't know that they considered used books crowdfunding. It may have been other stuff on the site.

It also looks like the site changed from the initial email to later emails but the author is confused as to why stripe is confused.

http://www.beitesheldonate.org/ was maybe first website? Then a books website?

What can happen is they look into things more closely and see they are doing donations perhaps without a clear exempt entity (ie, not setup as a charity) or any number of things.

Anyways, to say that stripe should be shut down and is the "Gestapo" seems a bit misplaced. The crimes and methods of the Gestapo were truly horrific if you pay attention to WWII history - I'm still having trouble connecting stripe's behavior to the Gestapo.

We don’t know. We also have only his selection of a subset of the emails.

His description seems very clearly a bookstore. He even names a book.

The rejection is very vague. Maybe he got more detail later. It would be helpful if for example it’s a non exempt entity, they specifically told him that so he could decide to remedy or appeal if they were incorrect.

It was another site that used Stripe as a payment processor for used books that donated the proceeds into the church. The site changed because after several years of this kind of behavior from Stripe and elsewhere, I dissolved the LLC that formed it. It is a kind of religious discrimination.(unless you buy Stripe's weird crowd sourcing explanation and if you do, I've got a swamp I'd like to sell you to build a house on)

I am quite cognizant of what the Gestapo did. They discriminated slowly but surely on the basis of the religious identify of people who were Jewish. Our church was Messianic Jewish as was indicated on the site. Some of our members had, in fact, relatives in the Holocaust.

If they had said it isn't worth doing business with you say, four years ago, your point might persuade me.

As to my communication style, you are entitled to your opinion. I won't cut your credit card off because you voiced it.

An ounce of tact would help you so much. It's not that you're wrong, it's that you know how you're being and you don't do anything to help yourself and still expect a better outcome.
So let me get this straight--if I freeze your bank account on the basis on what you believe and blow some kind of smoke about why I actually froze the account--you are going to be extremely tactful in that situation?

Given the absurdity of the situation, I was tactful.