From reading through the tweets and also being a backer (meaning I saw the charge from em), it looks like it might be related to people asking their banks to charge back because they saw a charge from “Hero’s Capital” instead of “Flipper inc” (whatever it is lol).<p>That makes sense but I’m a bit surprised at how many people immediately started the charge back process and said it was fraudulent. I looked at my statement, saw the cost matched up with the amount I was to be charged that same day and put two and two together. Flipper might not have alerted to the different name in a timely way, but they sent out a bunch of emails counting down to the day people would be charged.<p>If that is the case, the blame falls mostly on the Flipper folks for the lack of clarity of who would be charging backers. I’d say a there’s a bit of blame on the people charging back w/ fraud claims so quickly, too. The likelihood of your card being used fraudulently for the exact amount you were scheduled to be charged on the expected day is incredibly low.
I'm not familiar with this specific product. But this is really a dark side to SaSS, broadly defined, that I have not seen a good solution to.<p>It's not helpful to have a service provider that can renege on commitments when they take issue with them for whatever reason. In this case, it (based admittedly on limited information) feels like Stripe agreed to something and then later unilaterally just decided that they didn't like it and bailed. There is a certain amount of risk in any contract, and what bothers me about this kind of thing is that providers think they are entitled to all of the upside but none of the downside of the contract. As a small business owner myself, if I committed to do something (including for a company like stripe) I would be on the hook for delivery, even if it turned out to be different than I had planned for (within the agreed scope). Stripe should be held to the same standard.
Whatever other problems they may have, I wonder if they're breaking the 30-day preorder rule. <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/business-guide-ftcs-mail-internet-or-telephone-order" rel="nofollow">https://www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/bus...</a>
im surprised the stripe DID happily collect the shipping fees, then only to freeze the money as soon as the vendor decided to use them? do they always work like this - collect as much as possible just to screw the business over? even me, the backer feels screwed, thats MY money, that i want to pay to the project I decided. Who are you to intervene here?