thriftwy3 years ago
I mean, come on, you've all been through this already, how could you fall for a reissue of PayPal?
I assumed that support and transparency were selling points of Stripe. If not, why bother? Just go with a good old local bank.
It is one thing to say this is a red flag, fine... I hear you... no problem. a transaction multiple times the size... sure. I get it. However, A normal payment processor would then query you for documents authorizing the charge, bank statements, financial statements, some sort of procedure to remedy the issue. Stripe provides NO SUCH METHOD TO RESOLVE these issues.
There are reports of Stripe continuing to add "30 days" to the reserve hold past the initial 120 days, indefinitely. Stripe is taking advantage of a lack of regulation in this space to steal small merchant's large transactions. They see a big, outlier transaction and lick their chops, hiding behind KYC and "Fraud prevention" To hold your money indefinitely.
You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number. Their support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots. Even in the same email thread, a different "agent" (with a different name and everything) answers each time with not prior knowledge of your history. There are no ticket numbers to your support request; nothing tracking it. The robots respond with what is quite obviously a template response.
If you do a little bit of research about this topic, you immediately see this is a prevailing issue. Reports of Stripe taking up to $31,000 are all over the internet! Again, Stripe gives no manner to remedy this. There is NO ONE you can call. NO ONE you can talk to. More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.
In my case, I sent my EIN letter, Sales Tax Receipt, Articles of Org, Statement of Trade Name, Certificate of Good Standing, Bank Statements, Website links, Signed transaction receipts, and anything I could think of to Stripe to review. I just received robot-responses.
I challenge anyone here to connect me to a human being at Stripe that can tell me how to resolve the issue. It can't be done. This is a big problem and should be brought to the attention of small business owners, and regulators!
TL;DR: Stripe is a faceless enterprise with no humans you can talk to, no publicly listed phone number, and will allow your small account to operate just fine for a while. As soon as they see that you are growing (and thus your chances of leaving Stripe for a larger, more favorable processor) they will Freeze your account, disallow you to issue refunds, and hold your money indefinitely. You've been warned!!!
I assumed that support and transparency were selling points of Stripe. If not, why bother? Just go with a good old local bank.
There definitely needs to be more regulation of fraud holds.
IANAL ofc...
They consented when they signed up. Read the terms. They have NO liability.
It's a serious question. In you layman's view, what do you THINK signing something means?
I’m not saying this is a sure winner: I don’t know the case law well enough to have an opinion. But I don’t think it’s capitalization-level obvious. And really the goal would be to get the attention of a human at Stripe who can just fix it.
In fact there is case law that confirms that.
That's what consent IS.
Also this is the biggest season for sales and tech companies in general are dealing with navigating an extremely volatile macro economic environment - companies are planning for doing more with less staff and Q4 is likely pushing the limits for the customer support of many companies.
It is frustrating having your money on hold and there is a meaningful business impact that can have, but if you have tens of thousands of dollars tied up in Stripe (or any other payment processor), may I suggest expanding your other credit facilities such as lines of credit and loans, to allow you to navigate these sorts of situations, especially during Q4.
Sometimes even, I send an email and they respond by phone.
The story state of credit card payments forces this solution. Card payments are not your money, it's a statement of intention that someone wants to receive your product, try it out, and then pay for it only when they have found it completely satisfactory.
Your processor cannot simply launder that to hard cash and be on the hook when a large wave of chargebacks comes crushing in.
Surely there should be a way to do consumer protection better and more granular, with an actual dispute resolution system.
> reality of dealing with payments online given the regulatory environment it operates in?
In my book not having a phone number and not attempting to answer and resolve the issue isn't "dealing with it". That would be not dealing with something.
I was curious and looked at some.
2C2P 02-026-3000
Adyen - no phone
Alipay +65 68307260
Amazon Pay - no phone
Apple Pay - no phone
Atos +33 1 73 26 00 00
Authorize.Net 1-888-323-4289
BHIM 1800-120-1740
BitPay 1-404-907-2055
bKash 16247
BPAY +61 130 036 8098
I couldn't think of an automated way of obtaining the numbers. Maybe someone else (you lol) has some idea or is willing to do a few lines of data entry.
How many calls before the sales department would take legal action against me? Would they talk with support first?
You don't keep legitimate customers by subjecting them to erroneous fraud mitigation. That's the end of the story. Stripe can figure it out, or they can die. "Stripe cuts 14% of its workforce, CEO says they ‘overhired for the world we’re in’" Stripe handled an estimated $350B in payments annually (as of 2020) with around 8,000 employees. JP Morgan Chase handles somewhere around $2T, with around 250,000 employees. They didn't overhire. They never had enough people in the first place. They certainly don't now. It's going to get worse, and it may not get better.
Stripe is a low interest rate environment corporation, with $2.3B in venture funding, which will not exist in 10 years. You give a great piece of advice: diversity your payment processing.
1. Has customer service
2. Doesn’t charge high fees
I feel like those two things are mutually exclusive, the high fees can be thought of as an insurance policy to ensure good cs. The lower fee options are like those fly by night insurance companies.
Everyone wants a fantastic experience without paying for it, turns out cs is very expensive, and even if stripe offered a paid support option, then we’d have people here complaining about being forced to pay to get their money back… no you took a discount service and now are being charged for premium.
2) On the back of my credit card there is an 800 number that I can call 24/7 and reach a human and get my problems sorted out. That's for my piddly 5 and 10 dollar transactions. For my checking account I can not only reach someone on the phone, I can go to a branch and sit across a desk from a bank officer in person, again with relatively piddly balances on account. OP has 10's of thousands on hold if the story is accurate: that seems to be deserving of at least as much attention.
3) I'm not a seller but on the buying side, it's also a huge hassle that I have to frequently jump through hoops and get some company's permission to spend my own money. The OP's story shows that the chokehold happens to sellers too. For me at least, bypassing that was a much bigger attraction of cryptocurrency than any of the cypherpunk weirdness was. (I never pursued it though). We need some kind of low-dollar payment product where the customer can choose to assume their own risk. I can understand if it doesn't extend to bigger transactions without qualifying the customer more extensively.
Not sure about other countries, the only downside is they have setup fees and don't usually accept low volume.
Low volume is really what make PayPal and later Stripe so approachable.
the service that got traction because paypal fucking sucks is now rapidly becoming just as bad
Will definitely be collating the few stories of this I've seen though. We have a couple of large clients considering moving from PP to stripe, and while slow and somewhat useless, they could always talk to a human account manager at PP..
You seem to be underestimating the power of fanboyism. If someone is a fanboy for a company/technology/whatever, they will defend it vehemently without even being paid for it.
> mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.
But this now makes me want to ask you if you think those accounts are in the room with you right now.
Now my theory is that Stripe will be a tad more inclined to help developers who help them build their empire via integrations and platforms and such, while actual merchants are a dime a dozen (in their eyes). I also have a perception that they have become way more MBA-aggressive in the recent years.
Exact width of the window may be adjusted case by case and depends on the stuff you sell — e.g. if it's digital goods with immediate delivery it may be shorter, if it's physical goods it may be certain amount of days after delivery verified by tracking number. In my case I was working for a company that provided proxy auction participation support, PayPal forced 30d non-negotiable hold on all our transactions.
So, you may transfer it every night, but it's safe to assume that 25-100% of your monthly revenue going through PayPal is sitting there at all times.
My experience with this is that I sold an iMac on eBay, then a week later PayPal informed me that the person who paid in fact has stolen someone else’s login, and so they sent a debt collection agency after me to make me refund the money, even though I no longer had the iMac.
If it looks like duck...
> PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. et Cie, S.C.A. is a credit institution (or bank) authorised and supervised by Luxembourg’s financial regulator, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier (or CSSF). CSSF’s registered office: 283, route d’Arlon, L-1150 Luxembourg.
Can't comment re PayPal specifically.
Paypal and revolut are 100% not banks, they are financial institutions or emis, They can manage your money but not lend out anything and they have to hold the assets at 3rd party banks.
It handles money. You're not supposed to keep money IN it, not for very long anyway. It's a path, not a destination.
Paypal is different. They are b2c and heavily advertise their wallet service. They have crypto and ways to earn interest off of it. They upsell insurance and credit cards.
How are they comparable?!
The quickest way to get Stripe support is by posting on HN. You should have done that first.
>...we start getting attention we get payments of $3300 and more.
Thinking of others that may encounter this issue, I wonder if it's possible to spread orders between separate payment processors based on order $ value.
Processor #1: low average order value
Processor #2: high average order value
That way each processor handles orders within 1 standard deviation of the 30 day average (or however you might calculate it). I've never handled inventory for ecommerce. Just wondering.
If that's not possible, should ecommerce sites only ever have a min - max per unit value that isn't too large? e.g. $10 - $100 unit values, with avg $50 orders. Not $10 - $1000 unit values, with avg $50 orders.
So, are there any open-source solutions available?
- kyc onboarding, getting and processing the docs and forms never goes smooth, can take 2 to 10 business days.
- integrating the gateway, 3k setup fee on average, plus dev cost for mapping the servers, doing the front end and the tests
- sometimes, due to being labeled a high risk sector industry, only trusted visa traffic, or an allocation thereof
And indeed, losing 30 percent would be the end, we operate with a 4 to 12 percent net margin, thanks goodness credit card payments are only 10 percent or so.
I am a total crypto sceptic, and the crypto psps are immature, but they are causing the least hassle.
They have a downtime for visa, lasting 3 weeks? Nothing you can do, the gateway still charge you one quid per failed TX.
The worst was a single chargeback collapsed a MID and the processor refuses or claims they will not honor the settlement.Something like 20k usd for a months business.
All due to them miscoding and the chargeback exposing their miscoding practices.
Is there any recourse for this?
Any fintech news outlet where they can be named and shamed?
You're right about the phone number "...Note: We do not have an inbound support phone number at the moment. Request a phone call to connect with Stripe Support by phone..."
In case you missed it, a callback can be requested.
It's a national sport over there to figure out new ways of getting people's money, whether it's peculiar made-up fees, or like in your case plain robbery under the ironical guise of crime prevention.
I run a small business in UK and have had a few issues in the past where I've been unable to get any sort of resolution through regular channels and I've actually contacted my local MP and asked them to help intervene or at least reach a person in authority who could own the problem.
I may not agree with his actual political party but as a local MP he is good with small businesses and uses the clout of his office and name. Obviously YMMV on this depending on your MP but desperate times etc.
If only there was some kind of virtual cash that could be sent from one party to another almost instantly without an intermediary
If only such a system wasn't ripe with fraud, get rich quick schemes, and the same general predatory behaviors found in our systems with intermediaries yet lacking the ability for the common user to have some ability to recover when things go wrong.
Alas, such a thing does not exist. ;P
Why should I care that other people engage in fraud with the same currency that I'm using for a legal transaction? Why should I care that other people engage in get rich quick schemes with the same currency that I'm using for a legal transaction?
I lost £150,000 to a fraudulent account the bank knew about https://www.theguardian.com/money/2022/dec/14/i-lost-150000-to-a-fraudulent-account-the-bank-knew-about
Bank transfer scammers steal £700,000 a day from UK victims https://www.theguardian.com/money/2021/may/28/bank-transfer-scammers-steal-700000-a-day-from-uk-victims
https://www.ecb.europa.eu/paym/digital_euro/html/index.en.html
The EU may not be the first to make this.
You bear all the risk as the merchant, the customers can simply reverse a transaction, repeatedly, without providing a reason, for up to couple months.
My customers usually even ask to pay in crypto. It's surprisingly complicated for people in less fortunate countries to move higher amounts of money without an endless cycle of hoops, fees and waiting.
Actually, there are issues that raise red flags when a business only accepts bank transfers:
(a) It raises a GIGANTIC red flag as to why a business was unable to get a merchant account with a card processor. Pretty much any business can get a merchant account with a bit of paperwork (generally not much more paperwork than for opening a bank account). So if a business is refused a merchant account everywhere (including PayPal) then, well .....
(b) At least in Europe, credit card holders gain SIGNIFICANT protection under law. Basically as long as your transaction is over a minimum amount (normally small, e.g. £100/€100), then the card issuer (i.e. bank) is *automatically* equally liable in the event something goes wrong (i.e. goods or services are faulty, are not delivered as promised, are not as advertised or if the trader or retailer goes out of business). This legal protection applies even if the amount you paid on your card was a mere deposit instead of the full amount. (Generally the only caveat here is that you need to pay the merchant directly on their merchant account, not via a pooling intermediary such as Paypal).
Credit cards work great for small transactions for both consumers and businesses, but risks get high for the business (espcially small businesses) for larger transactions.
I really wish there was a near instant payment method without heavy overregulation so I could do normal business with people from not so fortunate countries.
Sure they do: it's called their general counsel. I would recommend you could have had an attorney reach out in writing by day 15 (30 if you are generous) if you legitimately could not get in contact through any other means - including writing your own written letter. At $50,000 in funds locked up, you likely have enough to afford representation in resolving this matter (less than $500.)
With a quick Google search:
> 6. Contact and complaints. You can contact SPC at https://stripe.com/contact or by mail to Stripe Payments Company, 354 Oyster Point Boulevard, South San Francisco, California, 94080. SPC may provide you with information and notifications in relation to the SPC Services via your Stripe Dashboard.
If resources are an issue, I entered this prompt into ChatGPT: "Write a letter to Stripe Payments Company demanding release of my $50,000 in legitimate sales proceeds from my dress-selling business."
I received any number of useful letters that would be applicable to resolving this situation. This HN post is more lengthly than the demand letter that would have resolved this.
Recently heard of Lago Billing, which is great because it is self-hostable, but only supports Stripe and GoCardless. Chargebee sounds good, but expensive and a single point of failure itself. Primer.io looks like it is only for large enterprises.
[edit] my main point here wasn't about Stripe, shitheads though they may be, it was that it's unhealthy to cultivate either (A) an external image that we can intervene (re: "I challenge anyone here to connect me to a human being at Stripe"), or (B) some kinda internal savior complex that would go along with that.
Why? What did they do to you?
I mean, I'm pretty sure they are giving some people unintentionally a bad time once in a while but I don't have evidence that they are "scummy". And really we shouldn't just swallow whatever people write here.
Like the current submission seems to be turning out to be fake (see other comments).
But my bias against Stripe is not based on internet gripes. I've guided clients through and written custom APIs to connect with at least half a dozen payment processors since early days (when it was direct to gateway). As such I've heard horror stories about many of them, and have a relatively good grasp of their respective business models as pertain to KYC, banking relationships, reserve holdings and how they deal with chargebacks. Many of the new wave engage in what I'd call shady practices or dark patterns geared toward screwing small business, but Stripe has the worst model and the worst reputation of anything I've seen since the dude who ran Liberty Reserve went into hiding. I don't think it's a stretch to call them scummy. Hell, my own barber and my massage therapist both got screwed by them.
I have no dog in this one, but stripe certainly should not get away scott free.
Even with the most shitty PSPs and processors, I get answers to my emails within hours, within minutes on Skype and phone calls whenever I want, and thats still slow for my taste.
Locking funds without costomer service or account managers? Wth?
I have psps smaller and bigger than stripe and none of them would dare to not habe 247 support.
At least my psps tell me to the face they will not pay out. Makes me sleep that little bit better.
Whatever the law or reason, there has to be a minimal correspondence.
Lets not give anyone the benefit of the doubt when there is more than one story like this.
I am from the finance sector and I guarantee that what is happening here is neither right nor professional, assuming the op story is truthful.
Is this some anti-Stripe targetting?
mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.
Four months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261868
The Reddit post linked to by ^^: https://old.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/wa230m/tifu_by_using_stripe_as_a_payment_processor_for/
60 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33254485
Note how the following paragraph appears word-for-word the same in all three posts (select, ctrl+c, ctrl+f to verify):
If you do a little bit of research about this topic,
[...]
mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus.That said, the rant seems pretty clear. But I have no clue as to how truthful.
For example: > I can't believe XXXXX is holding my payments for at least 120 days for KYC checks. I'm a merchant whose money is frozen and I can't access it. This is totally unacceptable and they shouldn't be allowed to get away with this. How am I supposed to run my business when I can't access my funds? If they don't change their policy soon, I'm going to have to find another payment processor. XXXXX is taking advantage of merchants and needs to be held accountable. #XXXXXSucks #PaymentProcessorAbuse
GPT-3 in particular likes to put stop sequences (things you would expect at the end of text, like hashtags) after their rants, and no matter how much I try to remove them, it will put more and still produce a short rant.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Username checks out.
Can you post anything public to confirm Stripe's department isn't like that?
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.
You can easily and quickly reach Stripe support. They don't really do robot responses; their support has worsened in recent years but talking to humans there is not difficult.
Furthermore, you have utter nonsense like this:
> Stripe is taking advantage of a lack of regulation in this space to steal small merchant's large transactions. They see a big, outlier transaction and lick their chops, hiding behind KYC and "Fraud prevention" To hold your money indefinitely.
1. There is a TON of regulation in the space. That is why transactions get flagged in the first place.
2. Stripe cannot legally TOUCH that money. It's frozen, but it's absolutely not Stripe's, and that specifically is why I flagged the post.
3. The idea that Stripe "licks its chops" at a 3k usd transaction is so idiotic it deserves its own spot on the farm.
Really, how do you fall for this? I remember years ago, this hope that the current generations are growing up on technology and won't fall for the nigerian prince scams like grandma does.
escalate to —Arbitration—, if possible; —Court—, alternatively.
edit: https://www.google.com/search?q=stripe+arbitration+provision
Relevant, see my "Stripe’s opportunity: Reinventing Customer Service" from a while ago. [0]
[0]: https://medium.com/@simon/stripes-opportunity-reinventing-customer-service-babde2febce4