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The worst part about these type of cases is not being able to get a straight answer. There is a whole subset of big tech that has taken the "you must be a fraud

by vertis 4y ago

The worst part about these type of cases is not being able to get a straight answer. There is a whole subset of big tech that has taken the "you must be a fraudster therefore we can't unfuck the situation" approach to customer support. It's an arms race with fraudsters that eventually sucks in legitimate businesses.

brk 4y ago
IMO it is not the "you must be a fraudster" logic as much as "we have enough other customers that we can burn you without much worry of repercussions". As much as I hate government intervention in business, it really seems like there needs to be a way to force companies to actually be direct, accessible, and reactive in cases like this. I went through something similar with Venmo randomly locking my account after I received a large-ish payment, and not getting any real action or sense of urgency on their side.
- Buttons840 4y ago
  This seems similar to anti-trust in a way. Taking a wider view of anti-trust, the goal is to keep the market healthy by ensuring there are choices available to consumers; there are no unhealthy monopolies and anti-competitive practices. Well, as a consumer I would like to be able to choose tech products where I can get effective support. Customer support is lacking in some markets, it's not healthy. The anti-trust fix is to bust up a company, but I don't see how that would help here. This is a new economic problem where dominant companies are run by computers and algorithms that serve 95% of the people, but if you're in the unlucky 5% you're screwed.
- bobsmooth 4y ago
  >it really seems like there needs to be a way to force companies to actually be direct, accessible, and reactive in cases like this That's what SLAs/contracts are for.
- vertis 4y ago
  Yeah, I had a trouble with Wise (formerly transferwise), with a rather large payment. The annoying thing was they delayed the payment of the 10% deposit, I sent the contract, approved, and then a month later they held up the balance as well. I still love them. That issue aside they allow me to have a personal and business account in multiple currencies, and don't screw me on the exchange rates.
- aksss 4y ago
  Not to put on too much tinfoil but the government probably benefits from opaque ban processes in large oligopolistic private companies. “It’s private enterprise, sure we may request it periodically but their cooperation is entirely voluntary based on their civic pride.”
- mellavora 4y ago
  I think it is called GDPR in Europe Depending on amounts, small claims in the US might be viable.
- smsm42 4y ago
  > we have enough other customers that we can burn you without much worry of repercussions This. This is a common tune to about 100% of "BigSomething killed my business" stories that appear on HN almost weekly. If you go to BigSomething, you get a polished, automated, convenient, cheap service that would not hesitate to kill you account the moment something looks wrong to any of the robots watching it, and the customer support (the non-robotic kind, I don't count "we are working on it" auto-replies) is not part of the package because it doesn't scale. You have to either accept this as the risk for doing business, or not use BigSomething as you primary or critical vendor.
- naasking 4y ago
  Making competition easier in this space is another way to solve it. If Stripe had 15 competitors all of whom were API compatible so you could switch in 5 minutes, any bad PR would drive customers away in droves. Government has made entry to this space hard which is why there aren't enough competitors, so they're really the source of the problem.
  - borski 4y ago
    Might be time to build an analytics.js equivalent, but for payment processing. A single API lib that you can then use to process payments with Stripe, Braintree, etc.
  - vkou 4y ago
    Government hasn't made entry to this space hard, the banks that Stripe partners with have. Because they don't want to deal with high-risk transactions. They are the gatekeepers here, and Stripe has to bend over backwards to make them happy. They'd much rather burn individual customers, than jeopardize their entire business.
    - naasking 4y ago
      Certain banking regulations make those transactions "high risk".
      - vkou 4y ago
        Some of them are due to government regulations like 'don't launder money' and 'don't process money for illegal activities'. Which are, like, basic operations of society 101 level stuff. Others (adult services) are not due to government regulations, they are there simply there because banks don't want to deal with chargebacks.
        voldacar 4y ago
        The crime of "money laundering" was invented out of nowhere one day. Society predates it by thousands of years.
- whiplash451 4y ago
  Being direct, accessible and reactive at scale when you’re processing billions of dollars of transactions simply is not possible. Stripe and other companies are doing their best, but they are in an arms race with more and more elaborate fraudsters. At planet scale.
  - zht 4y ago
    right a company that makes billions of dollars can't hire more people to staff up their risk/compliance/fraud teams
    - whiplash451 4y ago
      That does not scale with the fraudsters. To have zero situations like OP is describing, Stripe would need to linearly scale its support team with the number of fraudsters, which would make their business simply non-viable. This would be the same as saying: I want zero car accidents on the road, so I'll scale the police headcount linearly with the number of reckless drivers.
- FredPret 4y ago
  This could be a simple regulation - put a burden of proof on the company, and a prescribe escalation process with comment from the customer at each stage.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
elliekelly 4y ago
I hate seeing comments like this because Stripe’s hands are tied here. Anytime a bank or payment processor has frozen or shut down an account and you’re getting stonewalled it’s almost guaranteed to be an AML related issue and it’s against the law for them to tip a customer off that their account is being or might be investigated for suspicious activity. This isn’t Stripe deciding that you’re a fraudster and so you’re undeserving of help. This is Stripe doing business in compliance with the law. I’m not saying that makes it acceptable but if you’re upset about the behavior described in this post call your Senators and Representative to complain about the Bank Secrecy Act and the USA PATRIOT Act; they’re to blame for this sort of frustrating non-response.
- vertis 4y ago
  Sure, and my experience is outside finance (more spam and fraud prevention). Even if it is government under the hood you have to know what you're accused of. Not American so I doubt the US political system is interested in hearing from me, but I agree that's the only way of solving the deeper AML problems.
  - elliekelly 4y ago
    > Even if it is government under the hood you have to know what you're accused of. This is exactly why the whole process is suspect. The government farms out the policing of certain financial crimes onto the financial institutions as a prerequisite for operating the business. If the government came along and froze your bank account you’d have a right to ask why and a right to get some answers. But instead the government pawns the responsibility off onto businesses and then prohibits those businesses from telling you why. And so the BSA and Patriot Act effectively allow the government to take your property and take away your right to confront the government about why they took your property. And it’s all on merely a vague suspicion of misconduct. No proof whatsoever. I can’t help but laugh at the irony— the federal government laundering their otherwise unconstitutional activities through the banks.
    - abigail95 4y ago
gamblor956 4y ago
It's the YCombinator startup way: scale large enough so that you don't have to worry about customer complaints until they threaten to go public and generate enough press to cause real damage. But in all seriousness, being a YCombinator startup is now a big red flag outside of the VC-funded bubble. My current employer, and the previous one, have strict no-YC policy for SaaS due to numerous issues with previous YC companies. And these are both tech-friendly/tech-adjacent companies. It's even worse at stodgier companies; an executive sees "Stripe froze my payments" and that's what they remember when a Stripe salesman tries to pitch them on using stripe for their online store. Stripe is quickly becoming Google, in the bad way: it's a name people are learning to avoid, and if that hits critical mass they're dead.
- pc86 4y ago
  This is the first I've heard about a "no-YC policy for SaaS" outside of my own employer (after three back-to-back horrible experiences) but glad to see it's catching on. As executives and purchasing managers get more tech-aware I think we're going to see an increase in due diligence into who is running companies, who their investors are, what other companies they've invested in, etc. Brands like YC will end up getting punished (and all their portfolio companies, by extension) for the bad actors.
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    At which point YC will come up with an algorithm to evaluate companies and blackhol certain companies without warning or process and we'll see HN posts "YC just blackholes my business!" but on Reddit, since they won't be able to post here.
    - pc86 4y ago
      And the inevitable calls for HN to be made a public utility.
btilly 4y ago
The problem is that Stripe has identified you as possibly being a fraudster. Any information that they give you about what they suspect and why is information that a real fraudster could use next time to try and evade the detection algorithms. It is like this with virtually any security system. Adding feedback you can use for debugging also makes the system much easier to compromise.
- donmcronald 4y ago
  How many fraudsters are maintaining a business relationship for 6 years? 6 years! And the OP doesn't even get a courtesy phone call before termination. That's messed up.
  - btilly 4y ago
    The answer is, "A lot more than you think." One of the attacks that fraudsters have developed is to buy businesses to use their accounts for fraud. That going out with a fraudulent bang is better than trying to run a marginal business.
    - bigiain 4y ago
      Ha! Clearnet exit scams. Kinda an obvious thing in retrospect. Of _course_ somebody was going to try it.
shitlord 4y ago
Part of what makes these situations so frustrating is that there's no due process, and there are significant ramifications to your livelihood. You aren't told what you're being accused of, you have no way to contest the allegation, and you might lose your entire business over a clerical mistake.
sli 4y ago
"Let the fires burn." Onboarding new customers looks better and gets more funding than maintaining quality for existing customers, so they just don't care.

by vertis 4y ago

brk 4y ago

IMO it is not the "you must be a fraudster" logic as much as "we have enough other customers that we can burn you without much worry of repercussions". As much as I hate government intervention in business, it really seems like there needs to be a way to force companies to actually be direct, accessible, and reactive in cases like this. I went through something similar with Venmo randomly locking my account after I received a large-ish payment, and not getting any real action or sense of urgency on their side.

Buttons840 4y ago
This seems similar to anti-trust in a way. Taking a wider view of anti-trust, the goal is to keep the market healthy by ensuring there are choices available to consumers; there are no unhealthy monopolies and anti-competitive practices. Well, as a consumer I would like to be able to choose tech products where I can get effective support. Customer support is lacking in some markets, it's not healthy. The anti-trust fix is to bust up a company, but I don't see how that would help here. This is a new economic problem where dominant companies are run by computers and algorithms that serve 95% of the people, but if you're in the unlucky 5% you're screwed.
bobsmooth 4y ago
>it really seems like there needs to be a way to force companies to actually be direct, accessible, and reactive in cases like this That's what SLAs/contracts are for.
vertis 4y ago
Yeah, I had a trouble with Wise (formerly transferwise), with a rather large payment. The annoying thing was they delayed the payment of the 10% deposit, I sent the contract, approved, and then a month later they held up the balance as well. I still love them. That issue aside they allow me to have a personal and business account in multiple currencies, and don't screw me on the exchange rates.
aksss 4y ago
Not to put on too much tinfoil but the government probably benefits from opaque ban processes in large oligopolistic private companies. “It’s private enterprise, sure we may request it periodically but their cooperation is entirely voluntary based on their civic pride.”
mellavora 4y ago
I think it is called GDPR in Europe Depending on amounts, small claims in the US might be viable.
smsm42 4y ago
> we have enough other customers that we can burn you without much worry of repercussions This. This is a common tune to about 100% of "BigSomething killed my business" stories that appear on HN almost weekly. If you go to BigSomething, you get a polished, automated, convenient, cheap service that would not hesitate to kill you account the moment something looks wrong to any of the robots watching it, and the customer support (the non-robotic kind, I don't count "we are working on it" auto-replies) is not part of the package because it doesn't scale. You have to either accept this as the risk for doing business, or not use BigSomething as you primary or critical vendor.
naasking 4y ago
Making competition easier in this space is another way to solve it. If Stripe had 15 competitors all of whom were API compatible so you could switch in 5 minutes, any bad PR would drive customers away in droves. Government has made entry to this space hard which is why there aren't enough competitors, so they're really the source of the problem.
- borski 4y ago
  Might be time to build an analytics.js equivalent, but for payment processing. A single API lib that you can then use to process payments with Stripe, Braintree, etc.
- vkou 4y ago
  Government hasn't made entry to this space hard, the banks that Stripe partners with have. Because they don't want to deal with high-risk transactions. They are the gatekeepers here, and Stripe has to bend over backwards to make them happy. They'd much rather burn individual customers, than jeopardize their entire business.
  - naasking 4y ago
    Certain banking regulations make those transactions "high risk".
    - vkou 4y ago
      Some of them are due to government regulations like 'don't launder money' and 'don't process money for illegal activities'. Which are, like, basic operations of society 101 level stuff. Others (adult services) are not due to government regulations, they are there simply there because banks don't want to deal with chargebacks.
      - voldacar 4y ago
        The crime of "money laundering" was invented out of nowhere one day. Society predates it by thousands of years.
whiplash451 4y ago
Being direct, accessible and reactive at scale when you’re processing billions of dollars of transactions simply is not possible. Stripe and other companies are doing their best, but they are in an arms race with more and more elaborate fraudsters. At planet scale.
- zht 4y ago
  right a company that makes billions of dollars can't hire more people to staff up their risk/compliance/fraud teams
  - whiplash451 4y ago
    That does not scale with the fraudsters. To have zero situations like OP is describing, Stripe would need to linearly scale its support team with the number of fraudsters, which would make their business simply non-viable. This would be the same as saying: I want zero car accidents on the road, so I'll scale the police headcount linearly with the number of reckless drivers.
FredPret 4y ago
This could be a simple regulation - put a burden of proof on the company, and a prescribe escalation process with comment from the customer at each stage.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

elliekelly 4y ago

I hate seeing comments like this because Stripe’s hands are tied here. Anytime a bank or payment processor has frozen or shut down an account and you’re getting stonewalled it’s almost guaranteed to be an AML related issue and it’s against the law for them to tip a customer off that their account is being or might be investigated for suspicious activity. This isn’t Stripe deciding that you’re a fraudster and so you’re undeserving of help. This is Stripe doing business in compliance with the law. I’m not saying that makes it acceptable but if you’re upset about the behavior described in this post call your Senators and Representative to complain about the Bank Secrecy Act and the USA PATRIOT Act; they’re to blame for this sort of frustrating non-response.

vertis 4y ago
Sure, and my experience is outside finance (more spam and fraud prevention). Even if it is government under the hood you have to know what you're accused of. Not American so I doubt the US political system is interested in hearing from me, but I agree that's the only way of solving the deeper AML problems.
- elliekelly 4y ago
  > Even if it is government under the hood you have to know what you're accused of. This is exactly why the whole process is suspect. The government farms out the policing of certain financial crimes onto the financial institutions as a prerequisite for operating the business. If the government came along and froze your bank account you’d have a right to ask why and a right to get some answers. But instead the government pawns the responsibility off onto businesses and then prohibits those businesses from telling you why. And so the BSA and Patriot Act effectively allow the government to take your property and take away your right to confront the government about why they took your property. And it’s all on merely a vague suspicion of misconduct. No proof whatsoever. I can’t help but laugh at the irony— the federal government laundering their otherwise unconstitutional activities through the banks.
  - abigail95 4y ago

gamblor956 4y ago

It's the YCombinator startup way: scale large enough so that you don't have to worry about customer complaints until they threaten to go public and generate enough press to cause real damage. But in all seriousness, being a YCombinator startup is now a big red flag outside of the VC-funded bubble. My current employer, and the previous one, have strict no-YC policy for SaaS due to numerous issues with previous YC companies. And these are both tech-friendly/tech-adjacent companies. It's even worse at stodgier companies; an executive sees "Stripe froze my payments" and that's what they remember when a Stripe salesman tries to pitch them on using stripe for their online store. Stripe is quickly becoming Google, in the bad way: it's a name people are learning to avoid, and if that hits critical mass they're dead.

pc86 4y ago
This is the first I've heard about a "no-YC policy for SaaS" outside of my own employer (after three back-to-back horrible experiences) but glad to see it's catching on. As executives and purchasing managers get more tech-aware I think we're going to see an increase in due diligence into who is running companies, who their investors are, what other companies they've invested in, etc. Brands like YC will end up getting punished (and all their portfolio companies, by extension) for the bad actors.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  At which point YC will come up with an algorithm to evaluate companies and blackhol certain companies without warning or process and we'll see HN posts "YC just blackholes my business!" but on Reddit, since they won't be able to post here.
  - pc86 4y ago
    And the inevitable calls for HN to be made a public utility.

btilly 4y ago

The problem is that Stripe has identified you as possibly being a fraudster. Any information that they give you about what they suspect and why is information that a real fraudster could use next time to try and evade the detection algorithms. It is like this with virtually any security system. Adding feedback you can use for debugging also makes the system much easier to compromise.

donmcronald 4y ago
How many fraudsters are maintaining a business relationship for 6 years? 6 years! And the OP doesn't even get a courtesy phone call before termination. That's messed up.
- btilly 4y ago
  The answer is, "A lot more than you think." One of the attacks that fraudsters have developed is to buy businesses to use their accounts for fraud. That going out with a fraudulent bang is better than trying to run a marginal business.
  - bigiain 4y ago
    Ha! Clearnet exit scams. Kinda an obvious thing in retrospect. Of _course_ somebody was going to try it.

shitlord 4y ago

Part of what makes these situations so frustrating is that there's no due process, and there are significant ramifications to your livelihood. You aren't told what you're being accused of, you have no way to contest the allegation, and you might lose your entire business over a clerical mistake.

sli 4y ago

"Let the fires burn." Onboarding new customers looks better and gets more funding than maintaining quality for existing customers, so they just don't care.