This is not hard. The thing we want is the confidence that if something goes wrong we'll be able to talk to someone who can help sort it out.
The uncertainty is the problem. You are not doing a good job of making me feel like you understand that.
Not affiliated with Stripe in any way, but I used to work on payment fraud detection on a comparable scale. I'd say this describes ~90% of the cases that I saw that got traction on social media with a good sob story. Many of them were egregiously misrepresented to the point where it was obvious that they were trying to run a scam and use public pressure to get some result that they clearly didn't deserve. It's quite frustrating in those cases where your model says they're 99% fraud, your domain experts who actually investigated the issue say it's 100% fraud, and your privacy/legal/strategy policy prevents you from just responding with "this is BS and here's why".
Can't you just offer paid, guaranteed support? People will gladly pay for it.
If I wanted to charge people on the internet right now I would go with Authorize, even though I've used Stripe in the past and had good experiences. Now my understanding is that I pay for the convenience of the better API etc. with the inconvenience of being unable to talk to a human that can make decisions if something goes wrong, unless I get sufficient upvotes/retweets.
Surely that is even more important with a business critical payment provider?
I’ll forgive a lot if that is in place.
Many commenters in this thread are saying OP's account was frozen because of suspected fraud/money laundering. If that's true, what would "responsive support without scripted responses and black hole email addresses" entail?
The standard line in cases like this (whether it's a frozen payments account, a rejected app, or a suspended social media account) is that you can't tell someone what rule they broke, because this gives too much informative feedback to actual malicious actors about how they got caught. I call bullshit. Until someone can demonstrate that this is an actual problem, I will believe it to be a fake problem, purely an excuse used by giant companies to justify their systematically hostile (and cheap) approach to customer service.
If a payment processor suspects money laundering, it's illegal for them to tell the business that. Under anti-money-laundering legislation, this is considered a crime called "tipping off": https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470685280.ch...
(Disclaimer: Used to work at Stripe, but not on this particular area. Not an expert on either the law or Stripe's policies.)
Cut the crap, please. Have the CEO step in and stop your broken automated flags. Put real humans in the appeals process and give them meaningful powers. Stop giving people the run around, and stop posting meaningless fluff.
No offence, but you're doing a bad job.
It's not in the community interest to drive away people who are posting about their work. For most of us, our work is what we know the most about—so that would be a strict loss of interesting discussion.
The complainer can also misrepresent the case, while Stripe cannot disclose how they see it. Making any assumptions about service quality on that base is not wise.
If it was just about executing I’m sure they would have done that by now.
What you call “wishy washy” is what I read as him laying out the problems on a high level.
That assumes the OP's problem deserves to be solved. We have no way of knowing that unfortunately, as there's non trivial chance OP did something not quite kosher knowingly or unknowingly.
Just because the person you're talking to is a representative of a scolded vendor does not give you the right to be a jackass.
On the topic of Stripe and these kinds of incidents more broadly, there’s a lot to say, but here are a few pieces of context that are probably relevant:
- We are a giant distributed bounty system for people to find interesting and scalable ways to defraud us.
- We’ve seen significant upticks in certain kinds of fraud over the past couple of months. When businesses default, Stripe takes on the loss. It’s worth noting that certain kinds of fraud, like card testing, can also have significant collateral costs for legitimate Stripe businesses, and our systems and processes are not only to protect Stripe itself.
- We are far from oblivious to the harm that mistakes in our systems can cause. (I interact with a lot of these cases personally.) One of my highest priorities is creating better appeals flows for when we’re wrong.
- We’ve shipped 7 substantial improvements just in the last 10 days that should meaningfully reduce the occurrence of false positives.
- Publicly-described facts of specific cases don’t always match the actual facts. Stripe is sometimes just wrong. (We made some mistakes that I feel bad about in one recent case and we ended up bringing the company’s founders to an all hands last week to make sure we learned as much as possible.) But users do also sometimes publicly misrepresent what’s going on. We’re also restricted by privacy rules to not share specifics in those cases.
- Stripe works with millions of businesses and we see all kinds of “rare” failure modes fairly frequently. (Disputes between staff at a business, business impersonation, businesses that start legitimate and go bad, and so on.)
- I’m working on a post to share some of our broader philosophy + policy changes that I hope to publish before the end of this year. In that, I’m also hoping we can share some relevant metrics. If HNers have any suggestions for things that might be useful to see covered (though obviously certain things can’t be publicly disclosed), feel free to suggest them.
Ultimately, we work hard to be worthy of the trust of businesses across the internet, and my personal mandate (supported by many others, from our cofounders down) is to find effective new ways of making mistakes less likely. “Uniformly good support at scale, in a highly adversarial environment, with very financially-motivated actors” is not easy, but I’m pretty confident that we can make a lot of progress.
It goes without saying we're working on a review of OP situation. I’m happy to take general questions as well. You can also always reach me directly at jhaddock@stripe.com.