This is an update to my previous post <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189717" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189717</a> . 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>See my comments below for actual details and dates.
This reminds me of an issue my sister is having with Etsy.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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).
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.<p>It's starting to seem like for too many companies, resolving public complaints has become a line item in the marketing budget.
> Thanks to @dang for getting a Stripe employee to respond and he was finally able to resolve the issue for me.<p>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.<p>Big kudos to dang and HN for standing up for the average person and being this helpful!
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.
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.<p>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).
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.<p>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 <i>very</i> 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).<p>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, <i>very importantly</i>, these edge cases are usually the worst when the customer behavior, while totally legit, "looks" pretty similar to malicious usage.<p>So, in that case, I'm <i>glad</i> 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.
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.<p>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.
Are there any real alternatives to Stripe?<p>Obviously Adyen if you're in EU, PayPal/Braintree, etc, but Stripe is really the big kahuna.<p>What about building your own with Authorize.net? Are there any old-school gateways like that left out there that are still independent?<p>(can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)
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.<p>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.
> 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.<p>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).<p>(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.)
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.<p>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): <a href="https://puntofisso.medium.com/paypal-closed-my-account-with-no-explanation-it-could-happen-to-you-6ff0ba4ea95f" rel="nofollow">https://puntofisso.medium.com/paypal-closed-my-account-with-...</a>. And, famously here in the UK, Richard Davey had the same with a high street bank, HSBC: <a href="https://medium.com/@photonstorm/hsbc-is-killing-my-business-piece-by-piece-d7f5547f3929" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@photonstorm/hsbc-is-killing-my-business-...</a>.<p>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.<p>I wonder if what we need is to advocate for new policies and regulations with our respective national legislators.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
Let's face it: Customer support is viewed as a cost center.<p>Until there is some negative financial consequence associated with inadequate customer support, there will be no improvement, so plan accordingly.
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.
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.
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?
Did they give any explanation of exactly why they had temporarily stolen your $400,000?<p>That's what would worry me the most after it's been resolved, just how arbitrary and opaque and uncommunicative their whole process is.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
Seeing stories like this makes me very averse to the idea of running a business myself.<p>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.<p>Eg, I can’t imagine one day waking up to my electric company unplugging my house and refusing to talk to me ever again.
> 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.<p>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.<p>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:<p>> 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.<p>> 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.
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.<p>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.<p>Also, you can always go back to doing transactions with Stripe as a backup if need be.
> It took a random Stripe employee to get an email from @dang and post on HN in order to get this issue resolved.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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.<p>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?
>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.<p>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.
I'm not sure this is news: access to live support from your operational partners is crucial to... operations.<p>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.
It's obvious Stripe doesn't have any alerts or observability to catch situations like this, when customers are in this obviously bad state.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Dec 21: Asked for update on other 5 accounts status. I was told that they were still under review.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>Jan 3: I have confirmed that all of my accounts are now receiving payouts again.
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.
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.
Why[1] am[2] I[3] not[4] surprised[5] in[6] the[7] slightest[8]?[9]<p>Stripe even ghosts people in their <i>job interviews</i>[10].<p>I've only been on HN for a few years, but I <i>repeatedly</i> see people having horror stories with Stripe like this. Are there really no acceptable alternatives?<p>[1] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522784" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522784</a><p>[3] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9738717" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9738717</a><p>[4] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30535572" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30535572</a><p>[5] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261868" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261868</a><p>[6] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011</a><p>[7] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712023" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712023</a><p>[8] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34035581" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34035581</a><p>[9] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870886" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870886</a><p>[10] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264</a>