I worked for a startup where we had to take credit card payments. The first bank we dealt with let us sign up for a merchant account, even knowing the kind of

I worked for a startup where we had to take credit card payments. The first bank we dealt with let us sign up for a merchant account, even knowing the kind of business we were in would require 'cashing out' winnings, without batting an eye. Then in the first weekend with our shiny new merchant account [1] we racked up 5 figures in sales and they froze the account. They said they suspected fraud. It was an insane hassle to get people their money back. I assume the guy got a commission for signing us up; no loss to him if the merchant account didn't actually work for us. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ Later on we found another way to pay people out, and signed up with a better merchant account that has redundancy,[2] i.e. it is backed by two merchant accounts behind the scenes, so we can switch to another one if one of them get's 'upset.' Credit card merchant accounts can be shut down on you for any reason at any time, we've learned, leaving a complicated mess to sort out. [1][2] After a considerable amount of development work to integrate with their API.