jonas213 years ago
Can you provide a link to your business or what you're selling?
The accounts that are restricted are all 5+ years old and have been used nonstop in that time. Anyone know a better way to get this resolved because regular support hasn’t been able to do anything to help or explain what happened.
Not that this helps at all, I’m just curious.
The principles that we apply to this kind of thing are clear, but they conflict with each other in this case because Stripe is a YC-funded startup. Basically, these two:
- We downweight overly repetitive topics and follow-up posts [1] because repetition goes against the mandate of the site [2]
- For major ongoing topics, keep the stories that contain significant new information and downweight the rest [3]
conflict with this one:
- We moderate less when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story [4]
The latter takes precedence, so for years we've downweighted these posts much less when the story is connected to YC. However, they've been proliferating, and when complaints like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189858 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33744053 start showing up in numbers, that's a community immune response that we have to take care of. So we've recently started downweighting.
(Of course none of this is a comment on the OP's situation, which I'm sure is distressing and stressful.)
Edit: I got an email with a question that I should clarify. The "major ongoing topic" here is really the "customer support of last resort" category of post in general. It's not Stripe-specific—there are tons of these, like this one from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116361. The trouble is that they're repetitive and usually not intellectually interesting (not to discount how important these situations are to the people caught in them). For this reason and because of the repetitive quality (see [2]), we often downweight these. It's just that when the YC angle gets entwingled into this, there's a constraint on how much we can downweight. That's the aspect I was talking about above.
Why not just go for "correct and helpful" instead? It's only a few extra sentences, and comes across much more believably.
I say that from experience with Stripe...
So, double check to make sure you didn't do anything stupid.
stop putting paranoid financial services on a pedestal
It's because if it turns out to be money laundering, theft, or fraud, Stripe gets shafted financially (best case), and fairly likely FBI agents show up and start asking pointed questions.
most of these things are:
- poor company policies masquerading as response to a law but are actually
- poor implementations of a
- poor legal interpretation
great user experience because they dgaf and their relationship with the Federal Government wont be altered
If not, I don't understand otherwise why this would happen.
Even if you don't understand why, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Megacorps wrongfully lock people out of their accounts with no recourse all the time these days. We need a law to the effect of "once your service has more than a million users, if it wouldn't be trivial and painless for them to switch to a competitor of yours, then you can't ban them without due process."
Because mistakes happen? You really think every single entity investigated for fraud or money laundering is guilty?
They are probably doing something wrong or most likely having a very risky business.
Bureaucracies do this kind of thing all the time for opaque and arbitrary reasons that may have absolutely nothing to do with the account holder in question.
I hope it gets sorted out ASAP.
Stripe and others, up your game.
Until then, godspeed crypto, you wasteful dysfunctional mess of a solution.
Can you share more context around avoiding SVB?
that sounds horrible. What do you mean by this ?
I assume by "sweeping" the GC meant transferring funds to a bank outside of PP?
That is why I use multiple bank accounts accounts at different financial institutions, and only some are used for others to send and receive funds, and then I transfer the funds from there to the other bank accounts that others do not know about.
PayPal, Venmo, Stripe, etc -- any service provider that I choose to share bank account (or debit card) numbers with -- gets the information for a small holding account only.
I maintain the balance in that holding account around the level where I'd be "irritated but not affected" if something were to go wrong.
Honestly I just don't trust them to correctly and quickly fix any errors or exposures. So I prefer to avoid the issue altogether.
I already have a "burner" bank account for gym memberships and other non-trusted entities.
Maybe I should take a two-tier approach for business accounts, to "sweep the sweeps," so to speak, and PayPal et al only have access to a business burner.
And most banks that I'm aware of will let existing customers create new accounts with distinct routing/account numbers online.
Not in the US. Especially unique routing numbers. Maybe you mean virtual credit card numbers.
A bank will only have one or a small number of routing numbers.
My point was that most banks will let existing customers open new accounts online. This will create a new routing/account number combination that you can share with the service you don't trust enough to share your primary account with.
You can also add a (new) debit card to the new account, and some providers let you create virtual cards at will. But that's not what I was talking about.
SVB: Used them about 10 years ago for a startup. Didn't go back to them when I started my second business, as I didn't feel like they had many staff or really cared about having me as a customer.
Plus, as I remove all funds instantly, disruption costs me nothing.
If PayPal cares, they can do these things. If you move serious money through them, they should probably care.
If a business is wholly dependent on a particular vendor and that vendor offers additional support, it seems to behoove the business to pay for the additional vendor support.
It's similar to people who complain that they are losing millions of dollars because they can't get Azure support to work with them, but then when asked if they have contacted their account rep confess they don't have an account manager to help them.
Basically paying for additional support is like insurance, you probably won't need it, but if you do you'll be glad you have it.
What can I use to charge a monthly rate for members of my website?
Don't keep 400k cash in stripe, the merchant account is not a damn bank.
So you need to sweep out accounts from both Stripe AND your bank account connected to Stripe.
We could opt not to respond to issues on Hacker News on New Year's Eve—but we do. That's what supporting each and every one of our users looks like in practice.
Nothing has changed from what I wrote on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34037757.
This discussion shouldn’t have to happen here to begin with.
If I had to guess I'd say that the escape room(s) for which you're selling tickets are in some kind of legal trouble and your company as a vendor of tickets to those escape rooms is also being investigated. (It's unclear to me if you're the owner of the corporate entity that owns/runs these escape rooms or if you're simple a ticket seller to various escape rooms, e.g., a "Groupon but for escape rooms".)
Many friends who sell spare computer parts on eBay have had their PayPal accounts frozen over the years, so they've developed a process whereby if they're relying on a payment processor (PayPal for eBay transactions; stripe for other transactions) they will set up a 'cash out to my bank account' process on as often a cadence as possible. Ideally nightly if that's an option. I haven't used Stripe, but does anyone know if there's a setting whereby you can say "punt my Stripe balance over to my bank account every X days"?
Also, there's a push to use payment processors and 'neobanks' (see below) to basically do parts of the IRS' job for the IRS (or I should say that the government is allowing these private corporations to take on the role of governmental agencies probably in return for campaign finance contributions):
- https://www.propublica.org/article/chime
Immigrants, children of undocumented immigrants, the recently incarcerated, the poor, etc. are the Chime customer base. One of the draws with Chime is that you can get your paycheck a few days early, so it's literally a payday lender, but calls itself a "neobank". As digital surveillance increases in the ability to connect transactions across disparate systems I expect these sorts of actions by Stripe, Chime, and other fintech companies to increase in frequency.
Sorry I don't have any "here are 5 steps to take to get your account back to normal" guides, but I wish you luck and - like others are suggesting - I would probably retain legal counsel.
2) To the people who say that these kinds of stories aren't relevant and shouldn't be posted on HN, I'd strongly disagree for these reasons.
> There are many startup founders here who won't ever realize that keeping loads of cash in their payment processor is a bad idea if they don't see these stories. Just because they've been posted in the past doesn't mean that they'll see them now if they're not regularly posted.
> This is legitimately an issue that affects peoples' lives: not only many jobs if companies can't make payroll, but actual life/death. I'm sure there's a number of entrepreneurs who have eventually committed suicide because of bad/scummy behavior of tech companies causing them to lose everything they've worked for.
I'm not particularly litigious, but I'd be suing by $40k, if only to get a resolution to satisfy my creditors.
What's crazier is you're still throwing money into this black hole! You claim imminent insolvency but haven't changed your payment processor. What?
Further, stop using stripe if you don't like them - I get the impression that most of the stripe complaints on HN are bogus though this could always be a real one
Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011 - Jan 2023 (191 comments)
If the extinguisher did not work, and you tried 5min, these 5min are lost.
One letter can become several with a multitude of billable hours and services.
OP said: > Honestly that's the next step. Hoping to not have to involve lawyers.
My understanding is that OP was hoping to communicate with support and get access to their accounts without paying for a lawyer - as that would be preferable with a cost of ~0$
All three of us appear to agree - If that doesn't work definitely time for a lawyer
Even if you know you've done nothing wrong (but of course audit your transaction history to make sure), you'll want to have an appropriate lawyer ready.
And you can be held in jail before a trial anyway, so the comparison just isn't relevant.
No argument to your larger point though: freezing funds can be devastating and applied carelessly!
Both this and CAF violate basic constitutional pillars like not depriving you of life/liberty/assets without due process.
You'd be right if corporations decided to do that on their own, but the anti-money-laundering law says that corporations have to do that.
Read enforcement actions by the government. There will be a financial institution with tens or hundreds of thousands of customers and the government will use them failing to find three suspicious customers as a basis for enormous fines (https://www.fincen.gov/sites/default/files/enforcement_action/2021-12-16/CBOT_Enf_Action_121621_508%20_FINAL.pdf is a good example). Another thing you'll find if you read enforcement actions is that the government barely even cares what was illegal or not - they fine institutions for not reporting "suspicious" activity (without themselves investigating whether it was legal or not).
The government could care less if you lost access to your money if it means they have more control over the financial system. The tiniest gain of control is worth it for the bureaucracy even if it means locking hundreds of thousands of people out of their savings.
The question that naturally comes to my mind is, shouldn't corporations who are acting on behalf of government be bound by the same rules as government.
And there is plenty of legal precedent (and justification) for freezing funds in advance of charging.
This line of argument is a dead end.
Allowing access to those funds for your defense is not automatic.
Sometimes a judge will partially ease restrictions. And of course a lawyer will be provided for you. :-/
It's reasonable on the surface of things, but mistakes can be devastating. The US legal system often fails to handle the "mistake" case well, despite some intended protections.
The government is welcome to charge and deprive, then provide a speedy trial to that end.
That’s not what is happening though and you know it, they know it, their collaborators know it. Everyone involved here deserves jail time, and in a just world they will see it.