[slownews45]

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.

[nuclearnice1]

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.

[jbschirtzs]

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.