[blaung]

The exact reason your funds are being held is because you have a large amount of chargebacks and that is stated in the notice. This may not be any fault of your own, but your customers for some reason have decided that they want their money back and contacted their credit card issuer to get it back for them.

Stripe, and all merchant processors, play in the financial world. They are doing risk mitigation in case your company can no longer fulfill these chargeback obligations as ultimately they would be on the hook.

I know you are mad at Stripe and understand why. They make it so easy to take payments, but we are in very interesting and different times right now. My industry has been identified as high risk and we have seen rolling holds like this and/or longer payout schedules. A different merchant processor would act the same if put in the similar situation of high chargebacks. The best you can hope for is finding a merchant processor willing to take on more risk for you.

[jacquesm]

Whatever other merchant processor you'd find would likely (1) charge higher fees (2) also implement a rolling reserve (3) kick them off if they have > 1% chargebacks so they don't risk their merchant account.

Keep in mind that the processors are not going to be able to take on more risk than the card companies allow them to. You can not easily get around this in ways that are both feasible and legal at the same time.

One trick I know of was a company that ran a large number of low risk transactions (gas station payments) right along a much lower number of very high risk transactions. This 'blending' lowered the charge back rate to the point that their traffic was acceptable, but in order to get away with this they were mislabeling those purchases, pretending that the high risk payments were also gas purchases.

This is not acceptable to the card companies, they label this transaction laundering and will shut down any merchant account associated with such a scheme.

[blaung]

I'll even add two more to your initial list as these are still somewhat the norm for some merchant processors:

4) Personal guarantee 5) Up-front reserve

[ckdarby]

Extremely doubtful, any of the card schemas would shut this down so fast. Like the moment someone called in the first chargeback.

They're probably a payment aggregator with dynamic descriptors. This would allow them to process the high risk and gas correctly under the proper individual MCC but pool the transaction counts which would allow more chargebacks.

Source: Worked as dev at payment processor with dozens of acquirers, +10M transactions/yr, +$1B payments/yr.

[cutemonster]

> much lower number of very high risk transactions

Were those transactions of a lot more money? Or about the same as the gas payments

[radley]

> because you have a large amount of chargebacks and that is stated in the notice.

To be clear, it just says there was an increase.

Edit: the company provides parking for people going on flights so it's very possible there was a substantial increase in refunds or chargebacks due to COVID.