Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]

501 points by eeemmmooo 3 years ago | 219 comments

This is an update to my previous post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189717 . Stripe has resolved the issue and everything has been released. I told the contacts at Stripe that I would do a write up about what happened from my point of view to help them understand what happened to me. I figured it would be good to do that write up publicly to help both Stripe and potential Stripe customers understand what happened and how it was resolved.

Summary: Stripe put my accounts in review for a spike in sales on Cyber Monday. Throughout the month we received very little communication from Stripe and had many support chats and calls. Keep in mind that the whole time Stripe was still accepting payments on our behalf on all of these accounts. Each of the chats/calls asked us to upload the same invoices each time for review and gave us vague information that our accounts were being reviewed. Finally out of frustration I posted on HN about my issue. Thanks to @dang for getting a Stripe employee to respond and he was finally able to resolve the issue for me.

Overall this review process was pretty bad. Very little communication and nothing I could really do directly to move things along or get any real information. It took a random Stripe employee to get an email from @dang and post on HN in order to get this issue resolved. I’m lucky because I know about HN and know that Stripe employees frequent the site, but I don’t think HN wants to become the Stripe support forum.

Stripe you can do better. We all know that in order to scale you need to automate pieces of your infrastructure and communication. But, there is a balance between automation and manual review. When someone like me gets caught up in an automated system there needs to be better ways of letting support help that person.

See my comments below for actual details and dates.

cj 3 years ago |

This reminds me of an issue my sister is having with Etsy.

She runs an Etsy store with $1-2 million in annual sales, and her store keeps getting taken down by Etsy's automated copyright infringement system -- which keeps getting triggered by someone submitting fraudulent copyright claims and then immediately asking her to pay $5k/month in exchange for the person to stop submitting the infringement claims (in other words, she's being extorted).

Basically Etsy immediately takes down listings with no human review upon receiving a copyright complaint, which can be used by black hat scammers to extort stores into paying $5k-10k/month in exchange for the black hat to stop submitting fraudulent claims.

It's really astounding that companies build these automated systems that hurt their customers with no humans on standby to resolve these kind of edge cases (false positives).

neilv 3 years ago | |

If this extortion practice isn't a common curse of Etsy stores with her scale of revenue, I wonder whether it might actually be a competitor (who gets the sales and customers whenever her store is down).

hex4def6 3 years ago | | |

That seems unlikely. The legal risk you put yourself in doing that would be easy higher than any gains you could hope to make.

This is likely some callcenter-adjacent scam. They're probably doing this to hundreds of shops, and occasionally get one cave in and pay.

gamblor956 3 years ago | |

That is extortion.

Your sister should contact the FBI, as it is unlikely that she is the scammers' only target, and this crime likely crosses state (or international) borders.

moloch-hai 3 years ago | | |

If it crosses international borders (probably) the FBI is stopped.

Actually the amounts cited are well below the FBI's interest threshold in any case.

MerelyMortal 3 years ago | |

It might be too late now, IDK, but perhaps she could lie and tell the attempted extorer that she already pays another extorter and can't afford to pay two extorters at once, and if they keep taking down their store, she'll tell the extorter that she can no longer pay them because of them and do they want another criminal coming after them?

yarg 3 years ago | |

It's not that astounding. The simple truth is that customers are not valuable enough to warrant human interaction.

Cheap and scalable server time? No problem.

Communication with actual people? Not unless there's an exodus of customers (and even then you're not big enough to matter).

bread90 3 years ago | |

What does she sell on her store?

cj 3 years ago | | |

Laser cut wooden signs. She has a big warehouse in florida with commercial grade laser cutting machines (they started on a Glowforge!)

The products are all custom, e.g. your family's last name laser cut onto wood.

DevX101 3 years ago |

I'm glad your issues were sorted, but I'm uncomfortable with the idea that you need to make a social media post to get a customer service issue resolved. This isn't just stripe. I see this with many other companies on social media. I don't post on Twitter, and I'd rather not put my account details for some service I use in a public forum.

It's starting to seem like for too many companies, resolving public complaints has become a line item in the marketing budget.

ghoomketu 3 years ago |

> Thanks to @dang for getting a Stripe employee to respond and he was finally able to resolve the issue for me.

I think it's time to add another HN tab called Complaints where we can post complaints for the common culprits like Google, Stripe, Pinboard, etc. It sounds backwards but the amount of people HN has helped over years it must add to millions of dollars to priceless things like getting back your email and photos.

Big kudos to dang and HN for standing up for the average person and being this helpful!

prirun 3 years ago | |

Doesn't seem to me that this would work. Most of the HN audience will not go to the Complaints tab, so the forces of social shaming wouldn't work. The marketing dept only cares about complaints that affect the company's reputation.

droopyEyelids 3 years ago | |

Have we ever seen a complaint for Pinboard?

honoraryfly 3 years ago | | |

Yes, often. It's yet another HN-celebrated startup that turned into a neglected pile of crap:

Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (Dec '22 edition)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34062802

Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (November '22 edition) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398395

Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (August '22 edition)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32580491

etc.

marpstar 3 years ago | | |

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29873306

jcollins1991 3 years ago |

I'd really love to get more insight into the Dec 30 -> Jan 3 time frame, since that's where everything meaningful happened... From the outside it's hard to tell WHY the lower level employees are completely incapable of driving a resolution, whether they're underpaid and apathetic, or if management has crippled them from making any decisions on their own. It's amazing that they don't have better processes in place after seeing HN escalation posts for years on end.

jmacd 3 years ago |

I used to work at one of the big customer service platform vendors. We had some really, really, useful ranking capabilities that would prioritize certain customers based on the data held in a CRM. It was a bit of a pet project of mine. The idea was to calculate weights for customer importance (this can be account size, potential future opportunity size, social media following, tenure, etc) and severity of the problem (in this case, $ amount frozen..) in order to rank the service queue.

It didn't garner nearly the level of interest I thought it should/would. That was over 10 years ago though and the overall integration story probably sounded scarier than it needed to. The pitch was: Deal with big customers with big problems early (and possibly with specialized teams) so that escalations don't dramatically increase costs (they do, and the cost is usually unaccounted for).

phphphphp 3 years ago | |

That’s quite common functionality nowadays but generally if you’re dealing with valuable enterprise relationships that would benefit from tickets ranking higher, you have points of contact available to the client (whether that’s an account manager or similar) outside of impersonal tickets.

I’m sure if you’re a valuable enough stripe client, they’ll have account managers. The problem for Stripe is that we see big numbers ($400k) and they see small numbers ($4k) so our perception of which clients are worth dedicating resources to is unrealistic.

Stripe could do a better job here but I’d be shocked if any big valuable clients have an experience like this, because if someone is driving $100k/year of revenue for Stripe, they’ll be able to get someone on the phone who knows their name and business.

jmacd 3 years ago | | |

I agree on all that. (We had 'Executive Sponsors' and 'Red Accounts' where I was, and they were hugely expensive to manage once they 'went Red').

The issue would be catching things early and managing them cost effectively before they blow up in the public sphere.

unsupp0rted 3 years ago | |

A person with low HN Karma and no obvious social media presence can do a lot of damage to Stripe’s reputation on HN. Or at least a dozen such people in succession can (which is exactly what we got here in recent years).

hn_throwaway_99 3 years ago |

Lots of posts here along the lines of "it's not good when you need to resort to social media shaming to get customer support", but I'll take the contrarian view, or at least explain why this dynamic exists.

The past 20 years has seen an explosion in Internet services, but a fundamental (often unspoken) quality of these services is that they must keep individualized customer support costs very low in order to be profitable. I mean, just look at Google, which has billions of end users. You can argue that Google takes in a ton of money, but it's not hard to see that if every Google user just had a single support call requiring 30 minutes of a support rep's time a year, that Google's profitability would tank (never mind the difficulty in hiring that many reps in the first place).

So all these services invest a ton into automated support and systems to ensure the vast majority of users never need support from a real human. That usually works well, except when you get some of these edge cases, and, very importantly, these edge cases are usually the worst when the customer behavior, while totally legit, "looks" pretty similar to malicious usage.

So, in that case, I'm glad that these back-channel avenues still exist when someone gets stuck in the machine. I wish there were a better alternative, but I really am at a loss to think what that could be. The social media channel essentially acts as a filter, as only things that are real problems are likely to get upvotes or lots of visibility. A trade off for users being able to get tons of value for (relatively) very cheap prices is that the "tail end" of support requests is usually pretty nightmarish.

smca 3 years ago |

Evan, thanks for taking the time to write this up. I helped resolve your particular issue on NYE and I’m acutely aware of how painful it’s been.

I broadly agree with a lot of your statements. The lack of clear communication and the repetitive requests for information during the review process isn’t good. We’re working on striking the right balance between giving good users relevant information without giving bad actors a roadmap to defraud Stripe. And we need clear channels to escalate when users need to. While I’m happy your issue was resolved, the process isn’t where it should be yet.

johnhaddock 3 years ago | |

John here from Stripe (I lead our Risk product area). As OP noted, we try to spot unexpected spikes in processing volume, which are often associated with risky activity. In this case, that was in error — we were too fast to act and (much) too slow to unwind. In particular, we erred in not taking congruent action across OP’s related accounts. We’re working on a fix for this. I’m following up with OP to make sure we fully digest this one, so that it doesn’t happen again.

Since I came onboard in Sept, the team has made a lot of progress (e.g., mistaken actions like this one are down by 75%), but we have a lot more planned to further improve. We’re always on the look out for additional examples of mistaken action - please email me at jhaddock@stripe.com so I can take a look.

iam-TJ 3 years ago | | |

In a former business I had several 'customer advocates' who were tasked with representing customers to internal teams. Difficult/complex/delayed issues could be escalated to the advocates by customer support.

I view customer support as a marketing opportunity via goodwill and word of mouth.

Accounting for customer support as a debit against the marketing budget is an incentive to prevent incidents.

In another comment I asked the OP if it could have helped if they were able to notify ahead of time of expected spikes in turnover (due to marketing initiatives, etc.) that could be factored into the risk management equation.

paps17 3 years ago | | |

If Stripe doesn't acknowledge they made a mistake, one could say mistakes are down 100%.

It's tough to track metrics like that.

eeemmmooo 3 years ago | |

Thanks for your help. Especially on New Years Eve. My goal was always to try to find someone at Stripe that could help me get through the automated process churn and you were very helpful in that. It was not to slam Stripe overall because you all have been very good to us for years. Which is also why I’m trying to be as fair as I can be to both sides and also why I didn’t just jump to lawyer calling levels etc. I knew eventually Stripe would do the right thing. Just figuring out how to make that happen was the hard part.

throwawayapples 3 years ago |

Are there any real alternatives to Stripe?

Obviously Adyen if you're in EU, PayPal/Braintree, etc, but Stripe is really the big kahuna.

What about building your own with Authorize.net? Are there any old-school gateways like that left out there that are still independent?

(can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)

thdc 3 years ago |

I find it saddening how many tales of customer support not being able to resolve issues hit the internet, followed by the issue being resolved by going through other avenues or after "threats" of bad publicity or not being resolved at all.

I wonder if the possible future demise of Twitter will, in some ways, exacerbate this issue as Twitter is (one of) the largest public speaking squares where you can hold companies accountable for this kind of problem.

fortituded0002 3 years ago |

> I told the contacts at Stripe that I would do a write up about what happened from my point of view to help them understand what happened to me. I figured it would be good to do that write up publicly to help both Stripe and potential Stripe customers understand what happened and how it was resolved.

Sucks that you had to get to this point, but thank you for taking the time to do this and being rational about it. Being able to review what went sideways is invaluable for big companies and complex processes on their end. Having customer input can really help push things in the right direction for everyone (including existing and future customers).

(FYI: not affiliated with Stripe. Just glad to see people pushing things forward in a way that is not only productive but can have positive impact on people.)

puntofisso 3 years ago |

What scares me is that there's very little in terms of user rights, and where entire businesses depend on it, things might get very bad very quickly.

It's not just Stripe by the way: I had my own issue with PayPal (luckily, not very serious as I only had $8 in the account): https://puntofisso.medium.com/paypal-closed-my-account-with-.... And, famously here in the UK, Richard Davey had the same with a high street bank, HSBC: https://medium.com/@photonstorm/hsbc-is-killing-my-business-....

Most of these incidents are caused by entirely misplaced anti-fraud regulation, which is based on assumptions that come from a different era in which transaction were mostly national, mostly predictable, mostly referring to a set of easy-to-understand products and services.

I wonder if what we need is to advocate for new policies and regulations with our respective national legislators.

zackmorris 3 years ago |

I wish there was an online proxy service that acted as a mediator between consumers and vendors. Instead of signing up with Stripe, PayPal, Google, etc directly, we'd sign up with the proxy and pay a small fee (maybe 1/4%) to handle any disputes. That way if/when grievances get ignored, the proxy could do things like withhold payment from the other customers until the situation gets resolved.

Ideally, no payment would ever get withheld. The proxy would maintain its own support database and build workflows for the most common disputes. So something like this situation would no longer happen, because they'd have the solution on file from any previous customers who went through it. Kind of like Stack Overflow for disputes, except internal so that customers don't have to deal with it. Vendors could even get access to the database to have better internal controls and avoid the snafus that lead to bad press like this.

Otherwise I just worry that every insanely great web company will inevitably turn into the next monopoly and we'll never get free of resorting to HN and lawyers.

chihuahua 3 years ago | |

And what happens when this proxy gets hit with the inevitable torrent of fraud attempts? Either it pretends there is no fraud and gets wiped out. Or it attempts to detect fraud, and responds by freezing accounts etc. Sometimes there are false positives. Now we're back to square 1.

zackmorris 3 years ago | | |

I guess I have a blind spot around subterfuge, so I honestly don't really know all of the ways that fraud could occur.

But I think stuff like materiality comes into play. If 99% of customers are honest but 1% cheat, then even a high amount of fraud from bad players may not affect the bottom line much. The fee would probably be something like 3-4 times expenses to make up for losses like that.

Also the proxy would be in addition to the vendor's fraud checks.

In this scenario, maybe the $400k vendor freeze happens towards the end of the month, and the proxy stops its monthly payment from the other customers until it's resolved. So the ticket gets top priority at the vendor and they either release the funds or give the proxy evidence of fraud.

The big risk there might be getting tied up in court so all payments freeze. So maybe the proxy would withhold a percentage instead of the whole. There's probably math for managing that risk. Writing this out, it feels like people have been down this road, so there's probably a term for this whole evolution, maybe escrow or something.

jpmattia 3 years ago |

Let's face it: Customer support is viewed as a cost center.

Until there is some negative financial consequence associated with inadequate customer support, there will be no improvement, so plan accordingly.

fnordpiglet 3 years ago |

I would note that in a fraud investigation or other sorts of investigations of malfeasance in financial crimes a lack of communication is a key component. Communications provide information to the fraudster about which they can plan around the investigation or deceive it. It also provides a direct vector for social engineering. I’m not saying it’s all good or any commentary on the stripe issue, but from my work in this space it’s sometimes not about customer service but about investigating a possible financial crime - which financial services companies are on the hook for. It’s not the police’s job to KYC, AML, or other investigations - it’s the companies job, and if they do a bad job of it or do it in a way a regulator finds easily compromised, they are the ones liable.

ryandrake 3 years ago |

I guess the question I'm left with is: Are you going to continue using Stripe? Because if so, then it looks like nobody learned anything and the business has little reason to change, having not even lost the unfairly-treated customer over it.

eeemmmooo 3 years ago | |

We are reviewing our options.

sovietmudkipz 3 years ago |

Emotionally speaking (and assuming $400k is a significantly higher sales target than normal), what was it like to see the business success before you realized there was a lock on your accounts? What was it like after realizing the locks?

eeemmmooo 3 years ago | |

Well luckily for us we are big enough to be able to handle this, but a lot of smaller companies aren't able to. These are 6+ year old accounts that have been very steady, so it wasn't like we just opened our Stripe account last month and started doing large volume. Overall it was very frustrating and time wasting. That's the main thing. I was confident that we didn't do anything wrong and that we would get it figured out eventually. But, other people might not have the ability to wait as long as we were able to. We definitely had a couple accounts go negative before we loaned money into that accounts though.

honoraryfly 3 years ago |

Did they give any explanation of exactly why they had temporarily stolen your $400,000?

That's what would worry me the most after it's been resolved, just how arbitrary and opaque and uncommunicative their whole process is.

I wonder how many other people they've screwed over with this terrible approach to customer service. We'll probably never know, it's not something they're likely to be transparent about.

I'm very glad you went public with this to show the unapologetically uncooperative underbelly of such a well-marketed darling of the payment services space.

sdwr 3 years ago | |

I'm guessing the risk on Stripe's side is that OP (or someone else!) is using a bunch of stolen credit cards to make purchases. If there are a lot of chargebacks, Stripe's on the hook for that.

eeemmmooo 3 years ago | | |

Yeah this. I'm actually not upset with Stripe that put our accounts into review. We did have a big sale spike and I can see how that would warrant a review. My issue is with the speed and communication of the whole process.

soco 3 years ago | | |

Whatever tripped their alarm, not offering customer support for reviewing it is disgraceful. And this is the complaint here: their automated support scripts which send the user to /dev/null.

looping__lui 3 years ago | | |

High-risk businesses have like 14 day payout period, no? So what’s the risk?

I think like 5+ years back chargebacks and credit card fraud was like 0.5% or less for us…

auggierose 3 years ago |

It seems to me Stripe et al. use social media as a filter: If somebody posts their complaints here in the open, it is much more likely not to be their fault / due to shady stuff, but instead probably Stripe's fault. If instead you contact them through normal channels, then they don't have this filter, and will need to spend much more resources on cases where Stripe got it right in the first place.

I don't like it, but until there is a law against it or customers vote with their feet, seems to be a valid business strategy.

moloch-hai 3 years ago | |

Main problem is that companies not guilty of cutting off communication and, in effect, stealing from customers, get no favorable publicity.

When these happen, we should see posts from people using competitors saying, "we have problems at Z with frequency X that get resolved in time Y".

dylan604 3 years ago | |

Maybe it should be the opposite where Support Tickets make the post public to social media like Venmo does with their transactions.

ivanstojic 3 years ago |

Seeing stories like this makes me very averse to the idea of running a business myself.

I don’t mind the idea of trying and failing because the market isn’t there or my execution sucks, but trying and having my earnings be trapped in an algorithmic black hole with no customer support - no thank you. I don’t think there’s any other kind of business interaction that works in this way.

Eg, I can’t imagine one day waking up to my electric company unplugging my house and refusing to talk to me ever again.

lol768 3 years ago |

> But, there is a balance between automation and manual review. When someone like me gets caught up in an automated system there needs to be better ways of letting support help that person.

This keeps happening, again and again. It's not just Stripe, Google is a huge offender when it comes to automated decision-making and next-to-no human support when it inevitably goes wrong.

GDPR explicitly requires that companies provide a right to human intervention to data subjects, and this is the sort of regulation that needs adopting in other jurisdictions:

> The data subject shall have the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.

> In the cases referred to in points (a) and (c) of paragraph 2 [explicit consent given/necessary for contract], the data controller shall implement suitable measures to safeguard the data subject's rights and freedoms and legitimate interests, at least the right to obtain human intervention on the part of the controller, to express his or her point of view and to contest the decision.

miohtama 3 years ago | |

In the case of finance, anti-money laundering laws triump GDPR.

If you as a financial institution suspect money laundering by your client i.e. a spike in transaction volume, you as a financial institution have an unlimited time to not to reply, can freeze the assets and cannot be held responsible for any inconvenience. Even suspecting money laundering is enough, you do not need to have an evidence. In fact it is opposite and it is a criminal offensive to tip off anyone about AML issues. The law is very one sided.

https://www.mondaq.com/cyprus/privacy-protection/1008074/gdp...

soco 3 years ago | |

I imagine once you're locked out of the account whatever that is, relying on GDPR will mean getting a lawyer and all that - by no means a quick or cheap way to sort out your problem. GDPR will only be helpful after applying enough fines and lost processes, finally forcing Google/Stripe/etc to rethink their support strategy. Which means continuous hassle for today's customers and blaming GDPR for being "toothless" (blame set usually by the same people which claim the invisible hand would sort it out automagically).

mytailorisrich 3 years ago | |

Of course none of that applies if the Stripe account belongs to a business as opposed to an individual.

csmpltn 3 years ago |

Why not file a police report for the theft of 400k USD?

zie 3 years ago |

If you are doing any sort of volume on CC's you should setup your own merchant agreement with a bank, and do your own CC processing. That way you are not beholden to Stripe(or any other) CC processing merchant agreement.

Yes, the paperwork is misery and it's a process, but one should do it anyway. This gives you a much, much better chance of not having issues like this and if/when issues DO come up, you have a legal agreement in place and a large bank used to dealing with them in a timely manner, with real humans that can fix stuff, if even only temporarily.

Also, you can always go back to doing transactions with Stripe as a backup if need be.

rchaud 3 years ago |

> It took a random Stripe employee to get an email from @dang and post on HN in order to get this issue resolved.

Most Stripe stories I've seen on HN seem like customer support requests rather than links. Perhaps they should acquire Hacker News and position it as a premium support channel, where you can reach actual employees instead of dealing with the sphinx-like inscrutability of rank and file CSR responses.

maxgashkov 3 years ago |

Update is valuable, but I'm surprised there is no word on you looking for another payment processor. I do realize it's a painful process from the integration & KYC bullshit perspectives, but I'd be looking for alternatives after experience like this.

Also, it's good that Stripe deservedly gets bad publicity for shit like this, but nothing will really change unless they start losing paying customers.

thebiglebrewski 3 years ago |

Not surprised to hear about this at all. Stripe's customer support seems completely powerless most of the time to do anything about anything complicated at all until you start yelling at them, a huge change from 4 - 5 years ago.

Makes me sad to resort to that but I just don't know what to do anymore. Stripe, can you build a better escalation system if anyone there is listening?

adamsmith143 3 years ago |

>I’m lucky because I know about HN and know that Stripe employees frequent the site, but I don’t think HN wants to become the Stripe support forum.

Lost count of the number of threads like this. What a terrible experience it must be for other Stripe users who can't catch a Collison brother's attention on HN.

asah 3 years ago |

I'm not sure this is news: access to live support from your operational partners is crucial to... operations.

AFAICT, this has always been true, and it's why I recommend all COOs build strong relationships with their supply chain partners and distribution channels.

blindriver 3 years ago |

It's obvious Stripe doesn't have any alerts or observability to catch situations like this, when customers are in this obviously bad state.

Hopefully they fix this and add the proper metrics so that this can be caught and handled by customer support before it turns into a problem.

eeemmmooo 3 years ago |

Nov 28: Cyber Monday my business had a sale that spiked our revenue on that day. I believe this is what kicked off this whole thing. I believe that Stripe has automated systems in place to put accounts into review when something like this happens. I have no problem with that, and understand there are anti money laundering laws that they need to abide by.

Nov. 29: I received an email from Stripe that 6 of our accounts were under review and payouts were paused. I filled out the forms asking for more information immediately.

Dec 1: I received another set of emails asking for invoices for 2 transactions for each account for their review. One of the other admins on the account emailed those invoices back to Stripe within about 2 hours of the receipt of the requests. The invoices were sent from another email address alias that wasn’t his Stripe account address, so support asked him to change his official stripe account email address and confirm it then they would authenticate the invoices. He followed their instructions and the invoices were apparently accepted, but there was no confirmation email. Logging into the accounts there was a message that the accounts were under review, but no more information was needed from us at the time.

Dec 16: After no communication for 2 weeks on our reviews, I reached out to stripe via Chat. Spending over an hour on chat explaining the issue. Stripe support asked for the same 2 invoices for each account that were send previously. I uploaded them all into the upload link provided by stripe support. After over an hour the chat was moved to email.

Dec 20: Received an email from Stripe support in response to the 12/16 chat thread that they have reviewed my account and had released payouts. I logged into Stripe expecting all 6 accounts to be released, but found that it was only released for 1 account. In response I asked for information on why we were flagged and got no real answer.

Dec 21: Asked for update on other 5 accounts status. I was told that they were still under review.

Dec 24: Received another email in the same 12/16 chat thread that we had payouts re-enabled. I logged into Stripe and found 1 more account was re-enabled. No indication in the email which account they were communicating about.

Dec 27: I had Stripe support call me and I spent close to 2 hours on the phone with them. It seemed like we were starting all over again. All he could say is that the accounts were under review and he reached out to the team reviewing my accounts and hadn’t heard back yet. Then he asked me to upload the same invoices for the affected accounts a 3rd time. No resolution at the end of the call.

Dec 27: I was getting desperate because Stripe support wasn’t giving me any good information and it didn’t seem like things were moving forward quickly. So I tweeted to Stripe about the issue and they asked to DM them. I did, and they gave me a generic response about looking into the issue. No resolution or further contact that day.

Dec 30: After no resolution I decided to try other social media platforms. I posted on Reddit on r/Stripe about the issue. I was asked to email Stripe at heretohelp@stripe.com. I did, but never received a response from that email. I also emailed Patrick@stripe.com since someone on r/Stripe told me to try that (No response).

Dec 30: I also decided to post on HN about the issue. I knew from past Stripe stories that Patrick and Edwin frequented HN, so I figured it couldn’t hurt. This is what eventually solved the issue. @dang asked me to email him and he would send some info on to people at Stripe that he knew and maybe someone would be able to help. Not long after emailing someone from Stripe commented asking me to email them. I did and he was able to expedite my review.

Dec 30: While I was writing my HN post I was also on chat with Stripe for over an hour. No new information. They were basically trying to shut down the chat with me until I sent them the HN story and showed that it was getting some traction. Then they started working on my issue again and trying to communicate with more people. No resolution.

Dec 31: Stripe employee from the HN post emailed and told me that they completed the review of my accounts and re-enabled payouts on the remaining 4 accounts. I was also finally able to get some information from Stripe that most likely the spike of sales on Cyber Monday is what started the review process.

Jan 3: I have confirmed that all of my accounts are now receiving payouts again.

moralestapia 3 years ago | |

As is the case with this kind of threads, it's quite embarrassing (for Stripe) that HN is their customer support outlet.

Just as HN is great for showing up stuff and building brand awareness, the opposite is true as well; for me, at least, every time I see issues like this it erodes my perception of Stripe and makes me a bit averse of using their services.

bytehowl 3 years ago | | |

There's no better way to make companies fix your issues than publicly dragging them through the mud.

I had a relatively minor issue with a paid battle pass in Paladins, a F2P game by Hi-Rez. After they had stonewalled me for over a month, until the battle pass itself ran out, I tried to stir up a shitstorm on like 5 relevant subreddits. My post failed to really take root on most of them, but it got to frontpage of the Nintendo Switch sub. My issue got resolved within a couple of hours.

hn_throwaway_99 3 years ago | | |

And the alternative is??

I'm not suggesting there are no alternatives to Stripe, but I am suggesting I'd be doubtful to think that there are other companies that don't also have painful customer service snafus.

fillskills 3 years ago | |

Reading between the lines, it looks like: 0. Stripe for some legal reason cannot explain in detail why some transaction is 'flagged' 1. The information Stripe asked for was not enough to reach a decision. 2. Stripe team members dont know how or what to communicate when they dont have a clear decision. 3. Customer is stuck in limbo.

xhkkffbf 3 years ago | |

That was a waste of many people's time. I feel a bit sorry for the customer support reps who just spun their wheels in the mud and couldn't come up with a resolution. It's clearly a broken system they're working within. (And it goes without saying that I feel very sorry for the customers on the receiving end of this stonewalling.)

salawat 3 years ago | |

Hrrrm. Interesting.

I wonder if they hit some unspoken of limit whereby they had to provide extra diligence to a bank/creditor to justify the large movement of funds? Or if something about you having 6 seperate accounts had something to do with it. The inability to get a timely resolution likely had something to do with the review team having decreased availibility during the holidays (remember, they probably work hard and have families too, and may have been on vacation or operating at a significantly lower throughput).

I can confirm most places do a horrible job at maintaining customer relationship history, and actually making it readily available to customer service. Furthermore, customer service tends to be just a dispatch point, after an async message is sent, it tends to be the norm that they by default will ask if there's anything else they can do, and if not, on to the next caller/customer.

I've started to push more places toward engaging in synchronous issue resolution for high value issues, as it gets a lot more awkward and has a bigger organizational blast radius when process is so dysfunctional someone external to the organization has to excavate in house communication channels to get an issue resolved.

Far too many places have abandoned customer service/Quality Assurance as high priority operational mandates. The success metric as of late is number of customers who haven't been pissed off enough to leave, thus are still profittable due to willingness to accept our cheapo subpar offering. Not actually happy customers.

If I worked there, y'all woulda been a case study for my group, if it's any comfort.

soco 3 years ago | |

Is having a spike of sales on Cyber Monday such an unusual situation? How many Stripe accounts get locked on Cyber Monday, Black Friday...?

lamontcg 3 years ago | | |

There are pretty clearly a bunch of middle managers at Stripe making decisions around policies (gutting the ability of workers to actually get work done without excessive oversight) and staffing (running right to the bone for most of the year) which are not sufficient to handle Q4 processing.

And they're probably making a nearly conscious decision that a HN thread like this every now and then is acceptable amounts of bad PR. They'll probably do this to someone else again next year.

It would be nice if "doing a good job" was a core competency of what management culture in the US strived for, but that just isn't the actual game. It is all about maximizing profit for this quarter/year.

djbebs 3 years ago | |

Will you be moving away from stripe after this?

tsukikage 3 years ago | | |

Where could they move to that is any better? HN has regular posts like these for all the major payment processors.

avargas 3 years ago | | |

I honestly would. This isn't the first time.

eole666 3 years ago |

Stripe seems really expensive with poor support... Apparently they take more than 1.4% of your earning. For $400K, it's more than 11 200$. With that money you could hire a developer for a month or two and make him/her create a payment platform adapted to your needs and under your control.

haliskerbas 3 years ago | |

I'm not sure who would be willing to build a PCI, AML, KYC, compliant payment service that can accept credit and debit cards from most countries, for $11k USD.

eole666 3 years ago | | |

Well you're right, if you create it from scratch. I was rather thinking about creating a simple payment handling module centralizing your bank's own pro platform and other things like paypal, apple pay ... etc

cryptoegorophy 3 years ago |

That’s what you get for hating on PayPal, with them you get a dedicated manager once you reach a certain volume and you can resolve any question without any issues or delays.

throw10920 3 years ago |

Why[1] am[2] I[3] not[4] surprised[5] in[6] the[7] slightest[8]?[9]

Stripe even ghosts people in their job interviews[10].

I've only been on HN for a few years, but I repeatedly see people having horror stories with Stripe like this. Are there really no acceptable alternatives?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522784

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9738717

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30535572

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261868

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712023

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34035581

[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870886

[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264