As for chargebacks, customers really win even if there are voice recordings etc? Quite possibly, yes. This is where all the apparently reasonable arguments ab

As for chargebacks, customers really win even if there are voice recordings etc? Quite possibly, yes. This is where all the apparently reasonable arguments about payment processors holding reserves to protect against chargebacks break down. With most payment schemes, including cards, there is absolutely nothing that requires the decision-making process for a chargeback or similar claim to be fair or evidence-based. The organisations making the decision are not independent, they are typically the bank, card issuer or other payment service that wants to keep its customer happy. Fortunately, my own businesses have extremely low chargeback rates, but of the few we've had over the years, it has been a 50/50 shot even in almost identical circumstances whether we'll win the dispute. That remains true even when we had a mountain of evidence showing that it was a legitimate charge and the customer themselves was happy to confirm that, for example if they'd had a card stolen and duly cancelled it, and their card company had then automatically charged back all the recent transactions, including genuine recurring subscription payments like ours. In all such cases, it cost us far more for the time to collect and submit the evidence than any money we got back even if we won the dispute, so we have since adopted a default policy of not even contesting chargebacks. For low-value transactions, it costs more to fight than to just take the punishment, which tells you how one-sided the system is. If anyone here from Stripe or any other payment service wants to argue that the reserve scheme is reasonable and necessary to protect their business, I invite them to also push for chargeback disputes to be decided independently by neutral parties, and to publish statistics on card issuers or other customer-side payment services they encounter showing how often each is a source of disputes and how often any such disputes are ruled in their customer's favour. Then at least merchants would have some chance to protect themselves against potentially abusive actors within the industry by not accepting those payments in the first place if they wish. If payment services like Stripe still saw unusually high rates of reversed transactions under those conditions and wanted to hold a reserve accordingly, at least it could then be done on a transparently reasonable basis, instead of based on arbitrary criteria and unilateral decision-making, inevitably prompting angry articles and subsequent discussions like this. And then since it would be transparently reasonable, the merchant-side payment services would have no reason not to publish statistics on any reserves they impose as well, allowing merchants to compare payment services and move away if the one they were using was unnecessarily aggressive in this area.