[HN Gopher] Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explana...
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Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation
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.
Author : eeemmmooo
Score : 171 points
Date : 2022-12-30 20:31 UTC (2 hours ago)
| sergiotapia wrote:
| 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?
| FiloSottile wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Using HN to contact founders is absolutely the spirit of
| the site imo
| dang wrote:
| I guess you can call this a policy:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33745192.
|
| The principles for this kind of thing are clear, but
| conflict with each other 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 than we would if the
| story weren't connected to YC. However, they've been
| proliferating, and when complaints like
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189858 and
| 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. 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=tru
| e&que...
|
| [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=fal
| se&so...
|
| [3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=fal
| se&so...
|
| [4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=fal
| se&qu...
| eeemmmooo wrote:
| Thanks @dang. Let me know if there is anything that I
| should change with this post. I'm trying to stick to
| facts and not get too emotional with this post. I'm sure
| that Stripe has automated things in place and we got
| caught up in them. I don't really have an issue with
| that. I'm trying to provide them with whatever they need
| to show we are legit, but right now the communication
| from their support hasn't given me any way to do that.
| dang wrote:
| I'm writing to some contacts at Stripe. If you want to
| send a note to hn@ycombinator.com with permission to pass
| on your email address, I can do that as well.
| eeemmmooo wrote:
| Thank you very much @dang
| eeemmmooo wrote:
| sent you an email. thanks again.
| eeemmmooo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Using a side-channel to get your problem solved sounds like
| legit hacker spirit imo.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| manipulating customer support to actually providing customer
| support seems pretty genuine to me, regardless of the reasoning
| eeemmmooo wrote:
| +1
| voganmother42 wrote:
| Sounds like an amusing homebrew for shadowrun: Heist, grift,
| or socially engineer your way to customer support.
| ilamont wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| ilamont wrote:
| I'm more concerned with PayPal denying me access to my
| account, preventing me from _attempting_ to move funds out,
| or disabling integration with my business that prevents
| customers from completing payments. Yes, reversing a sweep
| that already happened would be bad, but it 's the other stuff
| that worries me more, along with the lack of proper support
| for such cases which are true emergencies for small
| businesses.
|
| SVB: Used them about 10 years ago for a startup. Didn't go
| back to them when I started my second business, as I didn't
| feel like they had many staff or really cared about having me
| as a customer.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| What is SVB?
| colesantiago wrote:
| Silicon Valley Bank
| [deleted]
| algo_trader wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| This is very interesting and something I'd like to
| replicate. Can you give an example of a typical
| transaction? For instance, after you withdraw say $10,000
| from Stripe or PayPal to Bank, do you the transfer
| $10,000 from Bank A to Bank B?
| quesera wrote:
| I'm not the GP, and I'm not a nefarious actor for whom
| the strategy has been tested, but this is similar to my
| personal approach:
|
| PayPal, Venmo, Stripe, etc -- any service provider that I
| choose to share bank account (or debit card) numbers with
| -- gets the information for a small holding account only.
|
| I maintain the balance in that holding account around the
| level where I'd be "irritated but not affected" if
| something were to go wrong.
|
| Honestly I just don't trust them to correctly and quickly
| fix any errors or exposures. So I prefer to avoid the
| issue altogether.
| ilamont wrote:
| Thanks for sharing that.
|
| I already have a "burner" bank account for gym
| memberships and other non-trusted entities.
|
| Maybe I should take a two-tier approach for business
| accounts, to "sweep the sweeps," so to speak, and PayPal
| et all only have access to a business burner.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| PayPal will (for $2) mail you a check. And while they do not
| allow you to remove the last bank account attached to your
| account, you can just close that bank account. I did that. I
| sweep from PayPal by requesting a check. I wish them luck
| stealing from me. They have NO access to any valid bank
| accounts of mine.
| quesera wrote:
| This is probably a smart approach, although there may be a
| ToS stipulation about requiring active bank/debit
| information which could lead to account disruptions if they
| notice.
| granshaw wrote:
| 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
| eeemmmooo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Maybe put your email in your profile so people can contact you
| outside of this HN post.
| eeemmmooo wrote:
| Thanks. Will do
| lizardactivist wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| This is pointlessly incorrect and unhelpful.
| lizardactivist wrote:
| It's helpful if you want to avoid the problem OP and many,
| many others are experiencing.
| quesera wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| quesera wrote:
| You're right.
|
| Thanks for all that you do.
| gamblor956 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| It wasn't on that account though.
| ciabattabread wrote:
| 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.
| eeemmmooo wrote:
| We've been selling escape room online bookings on these
| accounts for 5+ years and nothing has changed.
| weaksauce wrote:
| did anything change on the volume?
| eeemmmooo wrote:
| This is our busiest time of the year. But it is our busiest
| time of the year every year. So if they have systems that
| are smart enough to see trends then our accounts shouldn't
| be that far off from past years.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| egberts1 wrote:
| A great time to sic the lawyers on Stripe and pronto.
| colesantiago wrote:
| 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.
| cortesoft wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _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.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > 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."
| robtaylor wrote:
| 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.
| eeemmmooo wrote:
| Thanks
| [deleted]
| brnewd wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| In the lens of vendor diversification, using multiple providers
| is good business sense.
| whythre wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Why would you hope to not involve lawyers in a situation
| where someone has taken $400,000 from you?
| denimnerd42 wrote:
| A lawyer will run through 400k quite quickly so yeah he
| should be prepared but..
| nerdbert wrote:
| That's like 6 months of an associate's time at a high
| billing rate. We are talking about sending a letter or
| making a phone call here.
| thewataccount wrote:
| Because lawyers cost > $0 ?
| thfuran wrote:
| How much does not having access to their money cost? I
| bet also >$0.
| thewataccount wrote:
| If your option is either lose $400,000 or pay for a
| lawyer - you're of course right that you want to get a
| lawyer.
|
| OP said: > Honestly that's the next step. Hoping to not
| have to involve lawyers.
|
| My understanding is that OP was hoping to communicate
| with support and get access to their accounts without
| paying for a lawyer - as that would be preferable with a
| cost of ~0$
|
| All three of us appear to agree - If that doesn't work
| definitely time for a lawyer
| jcollins1991 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Because resolving without lawyers is cheaper?
| thfuran wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| blairbeckwith wrote:
| Using a fire extinguisher on a small flame before it
| grows in to needing the fire department seems like a
| reasonable approach.
| chrisandchris wrote:
| Still, one should still call the firefighters _before_
| using the extinguisher.
|
| If the extinguisher did not work, and you tried 5min,
| these 5min are lost.
| quesera wrote:
| Yes. "Freeze funds and do not communicate to customer" is
| basically AML response 101.
|
| Even if you know you've done nothing wrong (but of course
| audit your transaction history to make sure), you'll want to
| have an appropriate lawyer ready.
| josephcsible wrote:
| How are anti-money-laundering laws that require that
| treatment constitutional? Didn't
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coffin_v._United_States
| establish innocent-until-proven-guilty? Isn't this at least
| as bad as civil forfeiture?
| quesera wrote:
| Financial restrictions are not the same as incarceration.
|
| And you can be held in jail before a trial anyway, so the
| comparison just isn't relevant.
|
| No argument to your larger point though: freezing funds
| can be devastating and applied carelessly!
| newZWhoDis wrote:
| They're not, but unconstitutional law can exist and even
| become precedent for decades before a court with the
| stones comes along to overturn it.
|
| Both this and CAF violate basic constitutional pillars
| like not depriving you of life/liberty/assets without due
| process.
| mbg721 wrote:
| "We can't allow normal constitutional rights because
| racketeers are too smart. Also, everyone is a racketeer."
| orbz wrote:
| Note that this is a corporation not releasing funds, not
| the government so the constitution doesn't apply. In this
| case it would be the terms of service which likely calls
| out this as a possibility.
| Y_Y wrote:
| But the constitution applies to the law and the law
| applies to the company. They can't do whatever they want
| just because they aren't the government.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Note that this is a corporation not releasing funds,
| not the government so the constitution doesn't apply.
|
| You'd be right if corporations decided to do that on
| their own, but the anti-money-laundering law says that
| corporations have to do that.
| quesera wrote:
| Deprivation of _access_ to property is not quite the same
| as deprivation of property.
|
| And there is plenty of legal precedent (and
| justification) for freezing funds in advance of charging.
|
| This line of argument is a dead end.
| mbg721 wrote:
| In the context of banking, I would call it at least a
| dirty-trick. If you're saying "How can you pay a lawyer
| if you cannot...speak???", then you're not the good-guy.
| quesera wrote:
| The contextual assertion is that the frozen funds were
| obtained by non-lawful process.
|
| Allowing access to those funds for your defense is not
| automatic.
|
| Sometimes a judge will partially ease restrictions. And
| of course a lawyer will be provided for you. :-/
|
| It's reasonable on the surface of things, but mistakes
| can be devastating. The US legal system often fails to
| handle the "mistake" case well, despite some intended
| protections.
| mbg721 wrote:
| The US legal system doesn't care very much if it's those
| specific dollars or other dollars that have a dirty
| history. If, God forbid, I'm ever arrested for something,
| I don't trust those "intended protections" very much.
| sixhobbits wrote:
| 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)
| saghm wrote:
| 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.
| TAForObvReasons wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| henning wrote:
| Where's the bingo card blogging guy to explain this bullshit
| away? Gotta hear both sides!
| [deleted]
| eeemmmooo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| kneebonian wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| They are paying for the product. Are you suggesting customer
| support should be paid for separately?
| kneebonian wrote:
| 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.
| jonas21 wrote:
| Can you provide a link to your business or what you're selling?
| eeemmmooo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
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