[smca]

(I work at Stripe) As jmillikin points out below, this particular complaint has been repeatedly posted about Stripe on both Reddit and HN, with slight modifications to the claimed business.

Publicly represented facts are not always reliable. As a rule, we won’t comment on specific user cases for privacy reasons. However, as a trend, we’ve seen an uptick in HN posts requesting we release funds held.

We review every case posted here and, since summer, have confirmed in almost every case that the activity was fraudulent.

We know that confirming we're looking into cases here provides more incentive for bad actors to post. We wish that weren’t the case, but we do pay attention to both internal case reviews and to public forums where users post about having a bad day (or, in some cases, profess to be having a bad day).

We do not hold any user funds for any reason other than fraud prevention.

We do not own Reddit (or other) accounts that are used to downvote users genuinely looking for help.

We do show up on Hacker News, Twitter, Reddit, or via email to help good actors who need better help and post there as a means of last resort.

The above does not absolve us of any responsibility. We can make mistakes, and those can be acutely painful to legitimate users. But we do endeavour to help those that need help.

[noduerme]

It's not just this complaint or similar ones, though. What recourse does a merchant have if you freeze funds and don't provide a reason or don't immediately put them in touch with a human? Stripe generally appears to misrepresent itself as a payment gateway when in fact it takes on merchants and bundles their payments as its own. Then you apparently sever connection with any merchant that might raise a flag with the bank, without giving a clear reason. This isn't "unfortunate" other than in the sense that it's unfortunate someone would be stupid enough to hinge their business on the mistaken belief that your company actually processed credit card payments.

[411111111111111]

I'm not affiliated with stripe nor have I've ever used their services for payments. I did work for another payment providers before however.

> It's not just this complaint or similar ones, though. What recourse does a merchant have if you freeze funds and don't provide a reason or don't immediately put them in touch with a human?

The reason seems to have been provided, which is fraud suspicion. Stripe can't be expected to unfreeze the suspect money until this suspicion is cleared, which might take anything from hours to months, depending on the case. What kind of recourse do you think the payment providers can provide in this scenario?

[noduerme]

The issue as I understand it with Stripe is that Stripe takes on the chargeback and fraud risk on behalf of the merchant, but as a result will seize funds preemptively to any flag that might potentially be raised by their partner banks. In other words they are incentivized to look for fraud where there is none.

Then they send an automated email saying they suspect fraud, without details.

The recourse they should provide is a way for the merchant to clear their name of a specific accusation, by both providing details of the transaction(s) in doubt and allowing the merchant to show whatever documentation is necessary. But they don't want to go through that because again, there is no actual fraud call in some of these cases from a bank, they're just automatically flagged as a potential risk for Stripe. So they just put the merchant on endless hold and steal their money.

[pas]

why does it take months though?

in these situations the payment provider absolutely has the upper hand, and they abuse it in the name of safety. the same way Amazon treats their merchants like shit, because there is an endless queue of fools to try to "start a business"

it's the same security theater that is done at airports. there are always suspicious things. false positive rate be damned.

if there's a suspicion, that the card used may have been "stolen" then freeze it, call the end user. it takes a few days at most, right? banks do this all the time, usually these are cleared in minutes.

if the bank cannot reach the user, ask the merchant to ask the user to call the bank.

these are clear and trivial steps to do. yet instead there's "investigation" by the useless middleman.

[411111111111111]

the duration was heavily dependent on outside factors for the payment provider I've worked for.

Usually, the police had been notified if it was a very long time, which the customer can't be told as they could be involved in the crime. It really depends on the case so there is very little value our discussion here can provide.

Also, Banks have kept accounts frozen for months too if their holders are suspected of fraud.

[pas]

The customer can be involved. At this point why not just shoot everyone? The payment processor can be involved too! The police are on in it, obviously.

I mean, we're almost beyond the civil asset forfeiture guilty-until-proven-innocent level.

It's plain and simple corporate bullying. Because they can. Yes, I know it's a hard problem. Yes, if it were easy there were endless cheap knockoff payment processors. Yes, criminals are constantly outsmarting the good guys. Yes, I know it's in the ToS, etc. Yes, I know we don't live in a just world.

These still not make it right. It's yet again a fucking tax on the small shops.

[gnopgnip]

Does it take months when there is no fraud?

[Fatnino]

> I did work for another payment provider

Username checks out.

[matiasfernandez]

> We do not hold any user funds for any reason other than fraud prevention.

Ah yes, the things we do for "fraud prevention". I get that regulations might have Stripe's hands tied, but to say that the users posting their frustrations with frozen payouts are almost always fraudulent is a straight up lie. They might have triggered "fraud prevention" flags imposed by regulations on your system, but the majority are not fraudulent themselves (including me, who's had payouts frozen multiple times by both Stripe and Shopify, which I assume uses Stripe as a backend). We keep getting flagged and then "ok'd" by you guys almost twice each year. It's incredibly frustrating.

[ldarby]

Given this story from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34021944 it's easy to believe these stories about companies having awful support departments that can only be contacted via social media side-channels.

Can you post anything public to confirm Stripe's department isn't like that?

[smca]

You don't need to backchannel your requests to reach a human at Stripe. If you reach out over chat, email, or by requesting a callback, you reach a human 100% of the time.

When you introduce elements of risk (fraudulent actors who might try to game our processes) or situations outside of the control of Stripe (high rate of chargebacks from your customers) it can change things. Those situations typically end up on HN or on Twitter. We respect that users can/will try all available channels to have a decision reversed and so we respond to or read every complaint.

This isn't just marketing speak. If you have a Stripe account, you can navigate to support.stripe.com/contact right now and speak to someone. Chat is near instantaneous (which has been an almighty task by the teams involved), email takes a little longer, and, if you request a call it takes three minutes (as of this moment in time). If you're a developer, we also staff a Discord channel for more technical questions.

It's an incredibly complex system to provide support at scale to all Stripe users 365 24x7. We support millions of businesses and all types of integrations.

As someone who ran a business on Stripe before I joined Stripe, I would feel much more comfortable trying to get through to someone here than at other larger orgs.