[smca]

(I work at Stripe) As jmillikin points out below, this particular complaint has been repeatedly posted about Stripe on both Reddit and HN, with slight modifications to the claimed business.

Publicly represented facts are not always reliable. As a rule, we won’t comment on specific user cases for privacy reasons. However, as a trend, we’ve seen an uptick in HN posts requesting we release funds held.

We review every case posted here and, since summer, have confirmed in almost every case that the activity was fraudulent.

We know that confirming we're looking into cases here provides more incentive for bad actors to post. We wish that weren’t the case, but we do pay attention to both internal case reviews and to public forums where users post about having a bad day (or, in some cases, profess to be having a bad day).

We do not hold any user funds for any reason other than fraud prevention.

We do not own Reddit (or other) accounts that are used to downvote users genuinely looking for help.

We do show up on Hacker News, Twitter, Reddit, or via email to help good actors who need better help and post there as a means of last resort.

The above does not absolve us of any responsibility. We can make mistakes, and those can be acutely painful to legitimate users. But we do endeavour to help those that need help.

[noduerme]

It's not just this complaint or similar ones, though. What recourse does a merchant have if you freeze funds and don't provide a reason or don't immediately put them in touch with a human? Stripe generally appears to misrepresent itself as a payment gateway when in fact it takes on merchants and bundles their payments as its own. Then you apparently sever connection with any merchant that might raise a flag with the bank, without giving a clear reason. This isn't "unfortunate" other than in the sense that it's unfortunate someone would be stupid enough to hinge their business on the mistaken belief that your company actually processed credit card payments.

[411111111111111]

I'm not affiliated with stripe nor have I've ever used their services for payments. I did work for another payment providers before however.

> It's not just this complaint or similar ones, though. What recourse does a merchant have if you freeze funds and don't provide a reason or don't immediately put them in touch with a human?

The reason seems to have been provided, which is fraud suspicion. Stripe can't be expected to unfreeze the suspect money until this suspicion is cleared, which might take anything from hours to months, depending on the case. What kind of recourse do you think the payment providers can provide in this scenario?

[matiasfernandez]

> We do not hold any user funds for any reason other than fraud prevention.

Ah yes, the things we do for "fraud prevention". I get that regulations might have Stripe's hands tied, but to say that the users posting their frustrations with frozen payouts are almost always fraudulent is a straight up lie. They might have triggered "fraud prevention" flags imposed by regulations on your system, but the majority are not fraudulent themselves (including me, who's had payouts frozen multiple times by both Stripe and Shopify, which I assume uses Stripe as a backend). We keep getting flagged and then "ok'd" by you guys almost twice each year. It's incredibly frustrating.

[ldarby]

Given this story from yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34021944 it's easy to believe these stories about companies having awful support departments that can only be contacted via social media side-channels.

Can you post anything public to confirm Stripe's department isn't like that?

[smca]

You don't need to backchannel your requests to reach a human at Stripe. If you reach out over chat, email, or by requesting a callback, you reach a human 100% of the time.

When you introduce elements of risk (fraudulent actors who might try to game our processes) or situations outside of the control of Stripe (high rate of chargebacks from your customers) it can change things. Those situations typically end up on HN or on Twitter. We respect that users can/will try all available channels to have a decision reversed and so we respond to or read every complaint.

This isn't just marketing speak. If you have a Stripe account, you can navigate to support.stripe.com/contact right now and speak to someone. Chat is near instantaneous (which has been an almighty task by the teams involved), email takes a little longer, and, if you request a call it takes three minutes (as of this moment in time). If you're a developer, we also staff a Discord channel for more technical questions.

It's an incredibly complex system to provide support at scale to all Stripe users 365 24x7. We support millions of businesses and all types of integrations.

As someone who ran a business on Stripe before I joined Stripe, I would feel much more comfortable trying to get through to someone here than at other larger orgs.