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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
by 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 agoThis 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 agoYeah, 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 agoNot 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 agoI 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 agoMaking 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 agoMight 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 agoGovernment 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 agoCertain banking regulations make those transactions "high risk".
- vkou 4y agoSome 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 agoThe crime of "money laundering" was invented out of nowhere one day. Society predates it by thousands of years.
- whiplash451 4y agoBeing 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 agoright a company that makes billions of dollars can't hire more people to staff up their risk/compliance/fraud teams
- whiplash451 4y agoThat 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 agoThis 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.