10 ms·

Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation

259 points by eeemmmooo 4y ago

Stripe is holding over $400,000 in deposits over multiple of my accounts with no explanation. I’ve spent hours on the phone or chat with support and they can’t give me any information. We are still able to sell but can’t get the money out. Support has asked for 2 receipts for each account to review, I have sent them. Then I reach back out and they ask for the same receipts again. It’s crazy. Luckily I have other accounts that are able to cover payroll for now, but they won’t last much longer. Support has been horrible and have not given me any reason why this has happened. The accounts that are restricted are all 5+ years old and have been used nonstop in that time. Anyone know a better way to get this resolved because regular support hasn’t been able to do anything to help or explain what happened.

lizardactivist 4y ago
When your money or revenue is put into an account with a US American payment provider, then the money is theirs, not yours. Any and all reasons and excuses to keep them are fair.
- quesera 4y ago
  This is pointlessly incorrect and unhelpful.
  - lizardactivist 4y ago
    It's helpful if you want to avoid the problem OP and many, many others are experiencing.
    - quesera 4y ago
      So you're going for the "incorrect but helpful" angle? Why not just go for "correct and helpful" instead? It's only a few extra sentences, and comes across much more believably.
  - dang 4y ago
    Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - quesera 4y ago
      You're right. Thanks for all that you do.
whythre 4y ago
Sounds like someone is being investigated to me. Think it might be time to talk to a lawyer and have them make some inquiries ?
- eeemmmooo 4y ago
  Honestly that's the next step. Hoping to not have to involve lawyers. I know Patrick posts on HN a lot, so this is kind of my last hope to getting this done quickly.
  - thfuran 4y ago
    Why would you hope to not involve lawyers in a situation where someone has taken $400,000 from you?
    - jcollins1991 4y ago
      Because one of the most common themes on HN are Stripe complaint posts immediately getting the attention of Edwin? I recall Patrick being more active on product announcements / otherwise positive news. I appreciate their level of reactivity here, and the truth is complaining on HN really does eyeballs on problems where their internal processes seem too broken to help.
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      Because resolving without lawyers is cheaper?
      - thfuran 4y ago
        And swinging round Home Depot to pick up some buckets in the event of a fire is cheaper than funding a fire department, but it's not really the right tool for the job.
        HDThoreaun 4y ago
        I’ve seen more than a couple stripe disputes resolved here. If the problem isn’t urgent, which it somehow seems to not be, this is a fine step.
jonas21 4y ago
Can you provide a link to your business or what you're selling?
- eeemmmooo 4y ago
  Posted on another comment. But we do escape rooms. breakoutgames.com we just use stripe for online bookings. Been customers for 6+ years with stripe consistently.
  - upon_drumhead 4y ago
    I love escape rooms and play them fairly regularly with my friends. I have a hard time imagining how you’ve managed to get 400k held up in stripe. Did you treat them like a bank and didn’t take money out regularly? Or do you just have so many rooms you are booking 400k+ per week? Not that this helps at all, I’m just curious.
    - weaksauce 4y ago
      just doing some ballpark numbers here they look to have an average of 100-120 bucks an hour per room (from 85-185) if you break that down into an average you'd need 4000 bookings a week to get there. they have 30 locations so each location would have to do 133 on average a week or 19 a day to make that kind of weekly thing. 19 a day doesn't seem that hard to pull on average. they have more than one room running at a time. could also be two weeks of cash or it could also be also ancillary stuff like sodas and other refreshments, teeshirts to commemorate a birthday or corporate retreat kinda thing too.
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      OP seems to have had an issue for over a month now. Guessing they haven’t switched off stripe for whatever reason and have multiple locations.
FiloSottile 4y ago
Flagged because we are seeing a lot of these on HN, and they seem to be attempts to fraudulently manipulate customer support, rather than genuine stories.
- eeemmmooo 4y ago
  This is legit. We run escape rooms. Breakoutgames.com and have been Stripe customers for 6+ years on all of these accounts. No issues and low chargebacks. Not sure what triggered this.
  - vermilingua 4y ago
    It might be legit, but that doesn’t change the fact that HN is rapidly becoming the defacto escalation point for failed customer support; and while @dang hasn’t yet set a policy around this, it’s not really in the spirit of the website.
    - eeemmmooo 4y ago
      Well what would you do if it was your $400k when you know that they look here. If this is the only place that the higher ups actually communicate then this is where they need to see the issues with their company.
    - _Microft 4y ago
      Using a side-channel to get your problem solved sounds like legit hacker spirit imo.
    - HDThoreaun 4y ago
      Using HN to contact founders is absolutely the spirit of the site imo
    - dang 4y ago
      I guess you can call this a policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745192. The principles that we apply to this kind of thing are clear, but they conflict with each other in this case because Stripe is a YC-funded startup. Basically, these two: - We downweight overly repetitive topics and follow-up posts [1] because repetition goes against the mandate of the site [2] - For major ongoing topics, keep the stories that contain significant new information and downweight the rest [3] conflict with this one: - We moderate less when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story [4] The latter takes precedence, so for years we've downweighted these posts much less when the story is connected to YC. However, they've been proliferating, and when complaints like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189858 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33744053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33744053 start showing up in numbers, that's a community immune response that we have to take care of. So we've recently started downweighting. (Of course none of this is a comment on the OP's situation, which I'm sure is distressing and stressful.) Edit: I got an email with a question that I should clarify. The "major ongoing topic" here is really the "customer support of last resort" category of post in general. It's not Stripe-specific—there are tons of these, like this one from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116361. The trouble is that they're repetitive and usually not intellectually interesting (not to discount how important these situations are to the people caught in them). For this reason and because of the repetitive quality (see [2]), we often downweight these. It's just that when the YC angle gets entwingled into this, there's a constraint on how much we can downweight. That's the aspect I was talking about above. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
gamblor956 4y ago
I checked out your website and noticed you have a non-U.S. location (in addition to your U.S. locations). Whatever triggered the hold is probably related to some sort of international transaction that Stripe has flagged as fraud. I say that from experience with Stripe...
- eeemmmooo 4y ago
  It wasn't on that account though.
  - gamblor956 4y ago
    Having multiple accounts log in from the same IP can also trigger a flag in Stripe's systems. They have a lot of anti-"fraud" triggers.
ciabattabread 4y ago
The last time I saw a post about Stripe holding money, it turned out the guy was selling a car via his cell phone accessories business. So, double check to make sure you didn't do anything stupid.
- yieldcrv 4y ago
  since that wouldn't be illegal if there was no payment processor involved, that doesn't sound like its stripe's role to be involved with stop putting paranoid financial services on a pedestal
  - bpodgursky 4y ago
    Do you think Stripe is doing this just to be a dick? It's because if it turns out to be money laundering, theft, or fraud, Stripe gets shafted financially (best case), and fairly likely FBI agents show up and start asking pointed questions.
    - marcinzm 4y ago
      Stripe is doing what it needs to optimize it's revenue/profits/value which does not mean it's the right or best thing for all it's legitimate customers. Stripe is free to do what it does and we are free to call them out for the pain it causes their customers.
    - yieldcrv 4y ago
      you literally just described putting paranoid financial services on a pedestal most of these things are: - poor company policies masquerading as response to a law but are actually - poor implementations of a - poor legal interpretation
      - bpodgursky 4y ago
        I think it's far more likely a mediocre implementation of a correct legal interpretation of a poor regulatory system.
colesantiago 4y ago
Did you do something bad? like money laundering or create a business that Stripe doesn't allow in their TOS? If not, I don't understand otherwise why this would happen.
- josephcsible 4y ago
  > If not, I don't understand otherwise why this would happen. Even if you don't understand why, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Megacorps wrongfully lock people out of their accounts with no recourse all the time these days. We need a law to the effect of "once your service has more than a million users, if it wouldn't be trivial and painless for them to switch to a competitor of yours, then you can't ban them without due process."
- heavyset_go 4y ago
  > If not, I don't understand otherwise why this would happen. Bureaucracies do this kind of thing all the time for opaque and arbitrary reasons that may have absolutely nothing to do with the account holder in question.
- cortesoft 4y ago
  > If not, I don't understand otherwise why this would happen. Because mistakes happen? You really think every single entity investigated for fraud or money laundering is guilty?
  - colesantiago 4y ago
    It must be really bad if Stripe is holding $400K of your money. They are probably doing something wrong or most likely having a very risky business.
robtaylor 4y ago
All I can help with is an upvote. Payroll = jobs / lives / mortgages / kids / health etc etc affected. I hope it gets sorted out ASAP. Stripe and others, up your game.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- eeemmmooo 4y ago
  Thanks
brnewd 4y ago
Every now and then you get these horror stories. Is it time to round robin between multiple PSP's? I switched to daily payouts to prevent accumulation at the PSP level.
- TAForObvReasons 4y ago
  In the lens of vendor diversification, using multiple providers is good business sense.
sixhobbits 4y ago
It's kind of sad that earlier stripe founders would always watch HN and reply to community members who had issues, but now it is so abused by anyone who has a stripe problem that they don't bother (and as much as I sympathise with small business owners being screwed by BigFin, I can see why as the amount of detail in (and general plausibility of) the Stripe complaints that reach front page HN definitely seem to have vastly deminished)
- TAForObvReasons 4y ago
  Is it "abused by anyone who has a stripe problem" or is stripe support so woefully unresponsive that HN "escalation" is the only way to get a response?
  - eeemmmooo 4y ago
    Yeah I've been trying for a month to go through the regular support channels with this issue and we're still selling via stripe because it's not an easy change to make in the middle of our busiest season of the year. So the money is just piling up with very little communication from Stripe.
- saghm 4y ago
  Do you have any specific criticism of OP's complaint here? It sounds like they've tried to go through normal support channels and have gotten nowhere (e.g. being asked to submit the same documentation multiple times and not getting any new info). Sure, the "amount of detail" might be low compared to an issue that one might receive as official customer support, but what exactly do you think they could be providing here that would be relevant to the readers here? I don't the the fact that they didn't provide account numbers or whatever on a public HN post is surprising, and I don't think it would be reasonable to draw conclusions about whether they provided more specific info in their official communication with customer support. As for plausibility, I don't really see any basis for assuming this claim is more likely to be false than true. As someone who has never used Stripe and as far as I know never interacted with someone who works there, my initial instinct is that OP's question seems more likely to be in good faith than your response.
henning 4y ago
Where's the bingo card blogging guy to explain this bullshit away? Gotta hear both sides!
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- eeemmmooo 4y ago
  I'd be happy to hear Stripe's side. So far they have asked for 2 invoices for charges on each account. I've provided them. 2 of our accounts have been released, but the others are still being held. All the charges that they asked for are legitimate bookings. So I don't know what to do about it.
heavyset_go 4y ago
Thanks for posting this, it's good to know that Stripe is like Paypal in that they might just decide to not give you your money, and their uncaring bureaucracy will just waste your time.
- Zuiii 4y ago
  For all its warts and the trouble and waste it causes, I'm still very grateful that crypto exists and I hope that it continues to exist until a real solution to digital cash (where bullshit like this can't happen) pops up. Until then, godspeed crypto, you wasteful dysfunctional mess of a solution.
ilamont 4y ago
Tangential: After hearing so many PayPal horror stories on HN and elsewhere, I do sweeps several times per week. I also stay away from big banks and SVB, using a local bank where the staff know me and can get real answers quickly. Once someone on the bank's staff worked with me in their conference room to troubleshoot a QBO integration issue for my business. Intuit, PayPal, or any other big bank would never have given me that kind of attention.
- quesera 4y ago
  This is harder than it sounds. PayPal can go after swept funds, and there's always a bank at the end of the chain that is more likely to cooperate with another bank and with FinCEN than with you. But the idea is sound! Can you share more context around avoiding SVB?
  - TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
    What is SVB?
    - colesantiago 4y ago
      Silicon Valley Bank
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - algo_trader 4y ago
    > PayPal can go after swept funds that sounds horrible. What do you mean by this ? I assume by "sweeping" the GC meant transferring funds to a bank outside of PP?
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      ACH transfers can be reversed. That is why I use multiple bank accounts accounts at different financial institutions, and only some are used for others to send and receive funds, and then I transfer the funds from there to the other bank accounts that others do not know about.
kneebonian 4y ago
So I've found myself asking this question more and more often on these topics, but I don't really interact with stripe. Does stripe offer paid customer support? Are you paying for it?
- alexaholic 4y ago
  They are paying for the product. Are you suggesting customer support should be paid for separately?
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    If you want premium support then yes you should be for example: one of my clients spent several hundred thousand a year and has a massive part of their operation dependent on AWS, so they also paid for premium support. If a business is wholly dependent on a particular vendor and that vendor offers additional support, it seems to behoove the business to pay for the additional vendor support. It's similar to people who complain that they are losing millions of dollars because they can't get Azure support to work with them, but then when asked if they have contacted their account rep confess they don't have an account manager to help them. Basically paying for additional support is like insurance, you probably won't need it, but if you do you'll be glad you have it.
eeemmmooo 4y ago
Overall I know that Stripe has (most likely) sophisticated systems to deal with account reviews. It is a black box though and once you're in the review system and have given them the information that they ask for, there doesn't seem to be any way to escalate or get any information on ways that we can help the process move forward. I'm not mad at Stripe for reviewing the account. I'm frustrated at the lack of communication and support in working through this process.
TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
Maybe put your email in your profile so people can contact you outside of this HN post.
- eeemmmooo 4y ago
  Thanks. Will do
egberts1 4y ago
A great time to sic the lawyers on Stripe and pronto.
granshaw 4y ago
They are def doing some shady things to juice revenue - ie I had a chargeback which I worked out with the customer and saw proof that the bank dropped it more than a month ago, but Stripe just only marked it as resolved. Was probably purposely sitting on the difference as long as they could
sergiotapia 4y ago
Literally looking for a payment processor for my self-funded startup, I will not use Stripe. It sounds like it's just as risky as Paypal -- and the thought of using Paypal is laughable to me. What can I use to charge a monthly rate for members of my website?
- pxue 4y ago
  Just use stripe... Don't keep 400k cash in stripe, the merchant account is not a damn bank.
  - eeemmmooo 4y ago
    I have automatic daily transfers. This isn't a bank. They have just been building up over the month over my accounts.
  - FrontierPsych 4y ago
    I'm also reading here that you can't leave the money into the bank account that is attached to the stripe account, because Stripe can get back the money from that account. They can automatically put funds in, then they can take them out. So you need to sweep out accounts from both Stripe AND your bank account connected to Stripe.
wnscooke 4y ago
I think this has been posted before. I wonder if everyone's responses are being used to train an AI. Strange.
KomoD 4y ago
Oh, here we go again
smca 4y ago
Can you email me at my HN username @stripe.com? I'm looking into this right now.
- eeemmmooo 4y ago
  sent you an email.
  - smca 4y ago
    Thanks, replied.
- hnarn 4y ago
  While you're at it and looking into things, maybe look into your support organization and have them properly handle these types of issues when they come in through regular channels as well. The fact that people have to use HN to get a hold of someone who cares is ridiculous and does not make Stripe look like a company I'd ever want to do business with.
  - smca 4y ago
    When you introduce elements of risk outside of Stripe's control it can affect how our support team is able to respond. We respect that users will use any channels they are active on to challenge decisions. I'm actively looking into OP's issue and will be in contact with them until it's resolved. We could opt not to respond to issues on Hacker News on New Year's Eve—but we do. That's what supporting each and every one of our users looks like in practice. Nothing has changed from what I wrote on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34037757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34037757.
    - hnarn 4y ago
      If you get better support from a news aggregation site’s comments than you get from official support channels, those support channels are defective. This discussion shouldn’t have to happen here to begin with.
schappim 4y ago
If you're having trouble getting your money back from customer support, why not give ChatGPT[0] a try? Give it a goal of getting your money back at all costs. It just might help you out! [0] https://chat.openai.com https://chat.openai.com
aml702 4y ago
[dead]
lobstersammich 4y ago
I forget where I read it - maybe it was a creative writing exercise somewhere - but the hivemind was tasked with coming up with "a replacement for the car wash in Breaking Bad". Along with the usual suggestion of laser tag (a la Saul Goodman) as a way to launder cash while looking like a legitimate business was the humble escape room. Why? They're high traffic (well, they can _be_ high traffic, on paper), low per-transaction amounts (nothing near the $10,000 reporting threshold). If I had to guess I'd say that the escape room(s) for which you're selling tickets are in some kind of legal trouble and your company as a vendor of tickets to those escape rooms is also being investigated. (It's unclear to me if you're the owner of the corporate entity that owns/runs these escape rooms or if you're simple a ticket seller to various escape rooms, e.g., a "Groupon but for escape rooms".) Many friends who sell spare computer parts on eBay have had their PayPal accounts frozen over the years, so they've developed a process whereby if they're relying on a payment processor (PayPal for eBay transactions; stripe for other transactions) they will set up a 'cash out to my bank account' process on as often a cadence as possible. Ideally nightly if that's an option. I haven't used Stripe, but does anyone know if there's a setting whereby you can say "punt my Stripe balance over to my bank account every X days"? Also, there's a push to use payment processors and 'neobanks' (see below) to basically do parts of the IRS' job for the IRS (or I should say that the government is allowing these private corporations to take on the role of governmental agencies probably in return for campaign finance contributions): - https://www.propublica.org/article/chime https://www.propublica.org/article/chime - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/the-chime-banking-app-has-been-closing-accounts-not-returning-money/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/the-chime-banking-ap... Immigrants, children of undocumented immigrants, the recently incarcerated, the poor, etc. are the Chime customer base. One of the draws with Chime is that you can get your paycheck a few days early, so it's literally a payday lender, but calls itself a "neobank". As digital surveillance increases in the ability to connect transactions across disparate systems I expect these sorts of actions by Stripe, Chime, and other fintech companies to increase in frequency. Sorry I don't have any "here are 5 steps to take to get your account back to normal" guides, but I wish you luck and - like others are suggesting - I would probably retain legal counsel.
ghstcode 4y ago
Stripe support is horrific, good luck mate!
logicalmonster 4y ago
1) The only thing I would suggest for OP is to have some patience and wait for after New Years. Many normal business activities are shutdown or slowed between Christmas-New Years as many key staff for all organizations are basically on vacation. Depending on when this issue started, you might be dealing with some less experienced members of Stripe's staff who might be on duty through Christmas-New Years with the main managers who are able to decide big questions taking a holiday. There might be a question mark about your account, and they really can't do much of anything for you right now other than collect your information and give their report to their managers when they come back. 2) To the people who say that these kinds of stories aren't relevant and shouldn't be posted on HN, I'd strongly disagree for these reasons. > There are many startup founders here who won't ever realize that keeping loads of cash in their payment processor is a bad idea if they don't see these stories. Just because they've been posted in the past doesn't mean that they'll see them now if they're not regularly posted. > This is legitimately an issue that affects peoples' lives: not only many jobs if companies can't make payroll, but actual life/death. I'm sure there's a number of entrepreneurs who have eventually committed suicide because of bad/scummy behavior of tech companies causing them to lose everything they've worked for.
oliwarner 4y ago
$400k and you're only just hassling customer service and HN? I'm not particularly litigious, but I'd be suing by $40k, if only to get a resolution to satisfy my creditors. What's crazier is you're still throwing money into this black hole! You claim imminent insolvency but haven't changed your payment processor. What?
dang 4y ago
Follow-up a few days later: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011 - Jan 2023 (191 comments)
emeril 4y ago
400k is much cheaper than having a lawyer send them a pointed letter/email Further, stop using stripe if you don't like them - I get the impression that most of the stripe complaints on HN are bogus though this could always be a real one

259 points by eeemmmooo 4y ago

lizardactivist 4y ago

When your money or revenue is put into an account with a US American payment provider, then the money is theirs, not yours. Any and all reasons and excuses to keep them are fair.

quesera 4y ago
This is pointlessly incorrect and unhelpful.
- lizardactivist 4y ago
  It's helpful if you want to avoid the problem OP and many, many others are experiencing.
  - quesera 4y ago
    So you're going for the "incorrect but helpful" angle? Why not just go for "correct and helpful" instead? It's only a few extra sentences, and comes across much more believably.
- dang 4y ago
  Please don't respond to a bad comment by breaking the site guidelines yourself. That only makes everything worse. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - quesera 4y ago
    You're right. Thanks for all that you do.

whythre 4y ago

Sounds like someone is being investigated to me. Think it might be time to talk to a lawyer and have them make some inquiries ?

eeemmmooo 4y ago
Honestly that's the next step. Hoping to not have to involve lawyers. I know Patrick posts on HN a lot, so this is kind of my last hope to getting this done quickly.
- thfuran 4y ago
  Why would you hope to not involve lawyers in a situation where someone has taken $400,000 from you?
  - jcollins1991 4y ago
    Because one of the most common themes on HN are Stripe complaint posts immediately getting the attention of Edwin? I recall Patrick being more active on product announcements / otherwise positive news. I appreciate their level of reactivity here, and the truth is complaining on HN really does eyeballs on problems where their internal processes seem too broken to help.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Because resolving without lawyers is cheaper?
    - thfuran 4y ago
      And swinging round Home Depot to pick up some buckets in the event of a fire is cheaper than funding a fire department, but it's not really the right tool for the job.
      - HDThoreaun 4y ago
        I’ve seen more than a couple stripe disputes resolved here. If the problem isn’t urgent, which it somehow seems to not be, this is a fine step.

jonas21 4y ago

Can you provide a link to your business or what you're selling?

eeemmmooo 4y ago
Posted on another comment. But we do escape rooms. breakoutgames.com we just use stripe for online bookings. Been customers for 6+ years with stripe consistently.
- upon_drumhead 4y ago
  I love escape rooms and play them fairly regularly with my friends. I have a hard time imagining how you’ve managed to get 400k held up in stripe. Did you treat them like a bank and didn’t take money out regularly? Or do you just have so many rooms you are booking 400k+ per week? Not that this helps at all, I’m just curious.
  - weaksauce 4y ago
    just doing some ballpark numbers here they look to have an average of 100-120 bucks an hour per room (from 85-185) if you break that down into an average you'd need 4000 bookings a week to get there. they have 30 locations so each location would have to do 133 on average a week or 19 a day to make that kind of weekly thing. 19 a day doesn't seem that hard to pull on average. they have more than one room running at a time. could also be two weeks of cash or it could also be also ancillary stuff like sodas and other refreshments, teeshirts to commemorate a birthday or corporate retreat kinda thing too.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    OP seems to have had an issue for over a month now. Guessing they haven’t switched off stripe for whatever reason and have multiple locations.

FiloSottile 4y ago

Flagged because we are seeing a lot of these on HN, and they seem to be attempts to fraudulently manipulate customer support, rather than genuine stories.

eeemmmooo 4y ago
This is legit. We run escape rooms. Breakoutgames.com and have been Stripe customers for 6+ years on all of these accounts. No issues and low chargebacks. Not sure what triggered this.
- vermilingua 4y ago
  It might be legit, but that doesn’t change the fact that HN is rapidly becoming the defacto escalation point for failed customer support; and while @dang hasn’t yet set a policy around this, it’s not really in the spirit of the website.
  - eeemmmooo 4y ago
    Well what would you do if it was your $400k when you know that they look here. If this is the only place that the higher ups actually communicate then this is where they need to see the issues with their company.
  - _Microft 4y ago
    Using a side-channel to get your problem solved sounds like legit hacker spirit imo.
  - HDThoreaun 4y ago
    Using HN to contact founders is absolutely the spirit of the site imo
  - dang 4y ago
    I guess you can call this a policy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745192. The principles that we apply to this kind of thing are clear, but they conflict with each other in this case because Stripe is a YC-funded startup. Basically, these two: - We downweight overly repetitive topics and follow-up posts [1] because repetition goes against the mandate of the site [2] - For major ongoing topics, keep the stories that contain significant new information and downweight the rest [3] conflict with this one: - We moderate less when YC or a YC-funded startup is part of a story [4] The latter takes precedence, so for years we've downweighted these posts much less when the story is connected to YC. However, they've been proliferating, and when complaints like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189858 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189858 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33744053 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33744053 start showing up in numbers, that's a community immune response that we have to take care of. So we've recently started downweighting. (Of course none of this is a comment on the OP's situation, which I'm sure is distressing and stressful.) Edit: I got an email with a question that I should clarify. The "major ongoing topic" here is really the "customer support of last resort" category of post in general. It's not Stripe-specific—there are tons of these, like this one from a few days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116361 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116361. The trouble is that they're repetitive and usually not intellectually interesting (not to discount how important these situations are to the people caught in them). For this reason and because of the repetitive quality (see [2]), we often downweight these. It's just that when the YC angle gets entwingled into this, there's a constraint on how much we can downweight. That's the aspect I was talking about above. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=%22significant%20new%20information%22%20by%3Adang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so... [4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20%22less%2C%20not%20more%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

gamblor956 4y ago

I checked out your website and noticed you have a non-U.S. location (in addition to your U.S. locations). Whatever triggered the hold is probably related to some sort of international transaction that Stripe has flagged as fraud. I say that from experience with Stripe...

eeemmmooo 4y ago
It wasn't on that account though.
- gamblor956 4y ago
  Having multiple accounts log in from the same IP can also trigger a flag in Stripe's systems. They have a lot of anti-"fraud" triggers.

ciabattabread 4y ago

The last time I saw a post about Stripe holding money, it turned out the guy was selling a car via his cell phone accessories business. So, double check to make sure you didn't do anything stupid.

yieldcrv 4y ago
since that wouldn't be illegal if there was no payment processor involved, that doesn't sound like its stripe's role to be involved with stop putting paranoid financial services on a pedestal
- bpodgursky 4y ago
  Do you think Stripe is doing this just to be a dick? It's because if it turns out to be money laundering, theft, or fraud, Stripe gets shafted financially (best case), and fairly likely FBI agents show up and start asking pointed questions.
  - marcinzm 4y ago
    Stripe is doing what it needs to optimize it's revenue/profits/value which does not mean it's the right or best thing for all it's legitimate customers. Stripe is free to do what it does and we are free to call them out for the pain it causes their customers.
  - yieldcrv 4y ago
    you literally just described putting paranoid financial services on a pedestal most of these things are: - poor company policies masquerading as response to a law but are actually - poor implementations of a - poor legal interpretation
    - bpodgursky 4y ago
      I think it's far more likely a mediocre implementation of a correct legal interpretation of a poor regulatory system.

colesantiago 4y ago

Did you do something bad? like money laundering or create a business that Stripe doesn't allow in their TOS? If not, I don't understand otherwise why this would happen.

josephcsible 4y ago
> If not, I don't understand otherwise why this would happen. Even if you don't understand why, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Megacorps wrongfully lock people out of their accounts with no recourse all the time these days. We need a law to the effect of "once your service has more than a million users, if it wouldn't be trivial and painless for them to switch to a competitor of yours, then you can't ban them without due process."
heavyset_go 4y ago
> If not, I don't understand otherwise why this would happen. Bureaucracies do this kind of thing all the time for opaque and arbitrary reasons that may have absolutely nothing to do with the account holder in question.
cortesoft 4y ago
> If not, I don't understand otherwise why this would happen. Because mistakes happen? You really think every single entity investigated for fraud or money laundering is guilty?
- colesantiago 4y ago
  It must be really bad if Stripe is holding $400K of your money. They are probably doing something wrong or most likely having a very risky business.

robtaylor 4y ago

All I can help with is an upvote. Payroll = jobs / lives / mortgages / kids / health etc etc affected. I hope it gets sorted out ASAP. Stripe and others, up your game.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
eeemmmooo 4y ago
Thanks

brnewd 4y ago

Every now and then you get these horror stories. Is it time to round robin between multiple PSP's? I switched to daily payouts to prevent accumulation at the PSP level.

TAForObvReasons 4y ago
In the lens of vendor diversification, using multiple providers is good business sense.

sixhobbits 4y ago

It's kind of sad that earlier stripe founders would always watch HN and reply to community members who had issues, but now it is so abused by anyone who has a stripe problem that they don't bother (and as much as I sympathise with small business owners being screwed by BigFin, I can see why as the amount of detail in (and general plausibility of) the Stripe complaints that reach front page HN definitely seem to have vastly deminished)

TAForObvReasons 4y ago
Is it "abused by anyone who has a stripe problem" or is stripe support so woefully unresponsive that HN "escalation" is the only way to get a response?
- eeemmmooo 4y ago
  Yeah I've been trying for a month to go through the regular support channels with this issue and we're still selling via stripe because it's not an easy change to make in the middle of our busiest season of the year. So the money is just piling up with very little communication from Stripe.
saghm 4y ago
Do you have any specific criticism of OP's complaint here? It sounds like they've tried to go through normal support channels and have gotten nowhere (e.g. being asked to submit the same documentation multiple times and not getting any new info). Sure, the "amount of detail" might be low compared to an issue that one might receive as official customer support, but what exactly do you think they could be providing here that would be relevant to the readers here? I don't the the fact that they didn't provide account numbers or whatever on a public HN post is surprising, and I don't think it would be reasonable to draw conclusions about whether they provided more specific info in their official communication with customer support. As for plausibility, I don't really see any basis for assuming this claim is more likely to be false than true. As someone who has never used Stripe and as far as I know never interacted with someone who works there, my initial instinct is that OP's question seems more likely to be in good faith than your response.

henning 4y ago

Where's the bingo card blogging guy to explain this bullshit away? Gotta hear both sides!

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
eeemmmooo 4y ago
I'd be happy to hear Stripe's side. So far they have asked for 2 invoices for charges on each account. I've provided them. 2 of our accounts have been released, but the others are still being held. All the charges that they asked for are legitimate bookings. So I don't know what to do about it.

heavyset_go 4y ago

Thanks for posting this, it's good to know that Stripe is like Paypal in that they might just decide to not give you your money, and their uncaring bureaucracy will just waste your time.

Zuiii 4y ago
For all its warts and the trouble and waste it causes, I'm still very grateful that crypto exists and I hope that it continues to exist until a real solution to digital cash (where bullshit like this can't happen) pops up. Until then, godspeed crypto, you wasteful dysfunctional mess of a solution.

ilamont 4y ago

Tangential: After hearing so many PayPal horror stories on HN and elsewhere, I do sweeps several times per week. I also stay away from big banks and SVB, using a local bank where the staff know me and can get real answers quickly. Once someone on the bank's staff worked with me in their conference room to troubleshoot a QBO integration issue for my business. Intuit, PayPal, or any other big bank would never have given me that kind of attention.

quesera 4y ago
This is harder than it sounds. PayPal can go after swept funds, and there's always a bank at the end of the chain that is more likely to cooperate with another bank and with FinCEN than with you. But the idea is sound! Can you share more context around avoiding SVB?
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago
  What is SVB?
  - colesantiago 4y ago
    Silicon Valley Bank
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- algo_trader 4y ago
  > PayPal can go after swept funds that sounds horrible. What do you mean by this ? I assume by "sweeping" the GC meant transferring funds to a bank outside of PP?
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    ACH transfers can be reversed. That is why I use multiple bank accounts accounts at different financial institutions, and only some are used for others to send and receive funds, and then I transfer the funds from there to the other bank accounts that others do not know about.

kneebonian 4y ago

So I've found myself asking this question more and more often on these topics, but I don't really interact with stripe. Does stripe offer paid customer support? Are you paying for it?

alexaholic 4y ago
They are paying for the product. Are you suggesting customer support should be paid for separately?
- kneebonian 4y ago
  If you want premium support then yes you should be for example: one of my clients spent several hundred thousand a year and has a massive part of their operation dependent on AWS, so they also paid for premium support. If a business is wholly dependent on a particular vendor and that vendor offers additional support, it seems to behoove the business to pay for the additional vendor support. It's similar to people who complain that they are losing millions of dollars because they can't get Azure support to work with them, but then when asked if they have contacted their account rep confess they don't have an account manager to help them. Basically paying for additional support is like insurance, you probably won't need it, but if you do you'll be glad you have it.

eeemmmooo 4y ago

Overall I know that Stripe has (most likely) sophisticated systems to deal with account reviews. It is a black box though and once you're in the review system and have given them the information that they ask for, there doesn't seem to be any way to escalate or get any information on ways that we can help the process move forward. I'm not mad at Stripe for reviewing the account. I'm frustrated at the lack of communication and support in working through this process.

TedDoesntTalk 4y ago

Maybe put your email in your profile so people can contact you outside of this HN post.

eeemmmooo 4y ago
Thanks. Will do

egberts1 4y ago

A great time to sic the lawyers on Stripe and pronto.

granshaw 4y ago

They are def doing some shady things to juice revenue - ie I had a chargeback which I worked out with the customer and saw proof that the bank dropped it more than a month ago, but Stripe just only marked it as resolved. Was probably purposely sitting on the difference as long as they could

sergiotapia 4y ago

Literally looking for a payment processor for my self-funded startup, I will not use Stripe. It sounds like it's just as risky as Paypal -- and the thought of using Paypal is laughable to me. What can I use to charge a monthly rate for members of my website?

pxue 4y ago
Just use stripe... Don't keep 400k cash in stripe, the merchant account is not a damn bank.
- eeemmmooo 4y ago
  I have automatic daily transfers. This isn't a bank. They have just been building up over the month over my accounts.
- FrontierPsych 4y ago
  I'm also reading here that you can't leave the money into the bank account that is attached to the stripe account, because Stripe can get back the money from that account. They can automatically put funds in, then they can take them out. So you need to sweep out accounts from both Stripe AND your bank account connected to Stripe.

wnscooke 4y ago

I think this has been posted before. I wonder if everyone's responses are being used to train an AI. Strange.

KomoD 4y ago

Oh, here we go again

smca 4y ago

Can you email me at my HN username @stripe.com? I'm looking into this right now.

eeemmmooo 4y ago
sent you an email.
- smca 4y ago
  Thanks, replied.
hnarn 4y ago
While you're at it and looking into things, maybe look into your support organization and have them properly handle these types of issues when they come in through regular channels as well. The fact that people have to use HN to get a hold of someone who cares is ridiculous and does not make Stripe look like a company I'd ever want to do business with.
- smca 4y ago
  When you introduce elements of risk outside of Stripe's control it can affect how our support team is able to respond. We respect that users will use any channels they are active on to challenge decisions. I'm actively looking into OP's issue and will be in contact with them until it's resolved. We could opt not to respond to issues on Hacker News on New Year's Eve—but we do. That's what supporting each and every one of our users looks like in practice. Nothing has changed from what I wrote on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34037757 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34037757.
  - hnarn 4y ago
    If you get better support from a news aggregation site’s comments than you get from official support channels, those support channels are defective. This discussion shouldn’t have to happen here to begin with.

schappim 4y ago

If you're having trouble getting your money back from customer support, why not give ChatGPT[0] a try? Give it a goal of getting your money back at all costs. It just might help you out! [0] https://chat.openai.com https://chat.openai.com

aml702 4y ago

[dead]

lobstersammich 4y ago

I forget where I read it - maybe it was a creative writing exercise somewhere - but the hivemind was tasked with coming up with "a replacement for the car wash in Breaking Bad". Along with the usual suggestion of laser tag (a la Saul Goodman) as a way to launder cash while looking like a legitimate business was the humble escape room. Why? They're high traffic (well, they can _be_ high traffic, on paper), low per-transaction amounts (nothing near the $10,000 reporting threshold). If I had to guess I'd say that the escape room(s) for which you're selling tickets are in some kind of legal trouble and your company as a vendor of tickets to those escape rooms is also being investigated. (It's unclear to me if you're the owner of the corporate entity that owns/runs these escape rooms or if you're simple a ticket seller to various escape rooms, e.g., a "Groupon but for escape rooms".) Many friends who sell spare computer parts on eBay have had their PayPal accounts frozen over the years, so they've developed a process whereby if they're relying on a payment processor (PayPal for eBay transactions; stripe for other transactions) they will set up a 'cash out to my bank account' process on as often a cadence as possible. Ideally nightly if that's an option. I haven't used Stripe, but does anyone know if there's a setting whereby you can say "punt my Stripe balance over to my bank account every X days"? Also, there's a push to use payment processors and 'neobanks' (see below) to basically do parts of the IRS' job for the IRS (or I should say that the government is allowing these private corporations to take on the role of governmental agencies probably in return for campaign finance contributions): - https://www.propublica.org/article/chime https://www.propublica.org/article/chime - https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/the-chime-banking-app-has-been-closing-accounts-not-returning-money/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/the-chime-banking-ap... Immigrants, children of undocumented immigrants, the recently incarcerated, the poor, etc. are the Chime customer base. One of the draws with Chime is that you can get your paycheck a few days early, so it's literally a payday lender, but calls itself a "neobank". As digital surveillance increases in the ability to connect transactions across disparate systems I expect these sorts of actions by Stripe, Chime, and other fintech companies to increase in frequency. Sorry I don't have any "here are 5 steps to take to get your account back to normal" guides, but I wish you luck and - like others are suggesting - I would probably retain legal counsel.

ghstcode 4y ago

Stripe support is horrific, good luck mate!

logicalmonster 4y ago

1) The only thing I would suggest for OP is to have some patience and wait for after New Years. Many normal business activities are shutdown or slowed between Christmas-New Years as many key staff for all organizations are basically on vacation. Depending on when this issue started, you might be dealing with some less experienced members of Stripe's staff who might be on duty through Christmas-New Years with the main managers who are able to decide big questions taking a holiday. There might be a question mark about your account, and they really can't do much of anything for you right now other than collect your information and give their report to their managers when they come back. 2) To the people who say that these kinds of stories aren't relevant and shouldn't be posted on HN, I'd strongly disagree for these reasons. > There are many startup founders here who won't ever realize that keeping loads of cash in their payment processor is a bad idea if they don't see these stories. Just because they've been posted in the past doesn't mean that they'll see them now if they're not regularly posted. > This is legitimately an issue that affects peoples' lives: not only many jobs if companies can't make payroll, but actual life/death. I'm sure there's a number of entrepreneurs who have eventually committed suicide because of bad/scummy behavior of tech companies causing them to lose everything they've worked for.

oliwarner 4y ago

$400k and you're only just hassling customer service and HN? I'm not particularly litigious, but I'd be suing by $40k, if only to get a resolution to satisfy my creditors. What's crazier is you're still throwing money into this black hole! You claim imminent insolvency but haven't changed your payment processor. What?

dang 4y ago

Follow-up a few days later: Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011 - Jan 2023 (191 comments)

emeril 4y ago

400k is much cheaper than having a lawyer send them a pointed letter/email Further, stop using stripe if you don't like them - I get the impression that most of the stripe complaints on HN are bogus though this could always be a real one