Comment by bruce511
3 months ago
Stripe's problem is that they operate inside a global banking framework which is both highly regulated and obsessively monitored.
Problem 2 is that a world of crime, and hence money laundering exists. They're expected, nay required, to detect and prevent that. Which is (of course) nigh impossible.
From your side, as a customer, you are offering only the tiniest amount of value (and obviously this product even less.)
So when you (innocently) indulge in behavior which mimics a money launderer, the system complains. There's no real motivation for a human to set the "this is not a money launderer" flag because they're then on the hook when it turns out you were deliberately setting up the account for money laundering later on.
There is a lesson here. And it's a valuable one to share. Don't purchase your own stuff with your own card. Most payment processors have defined test card numbers for this purpose.
I'm sorry you encountered this issue.
> There is a lesson here. And it's a valuable one to share. Don't purchase your own stuff with your own card. Most payment processors have defined test card numbers for this purpose.
This seems like victim blaming. And although the OP in this case did that, it didn't happen in the rest of the ones I linked.
Also, did you miss this part?
> We're able to continue accepting payments for your business moving forward as long as all future transactions come from customers and not from you.
He kept his end of the bargain, but Stripe didn't keep theirs.
Clearly one can litigate this specific case, and numerous other individual cases.
But equally clearly that approach does not scale. Even more so when this goes into a 'low value customer ' bucket.
Imagine if the list of cases above wasn't 10 cases, but 10 000 cases. How then might your approach to investigating each one be different?
It's easy yo see this case as a simple customer service issue. But in the banking industry it's a lot more complicated than that.
> Imagine if the list of cases above wasn't 10 cases, but 10 000 cases. How then might your approach to investigating each one be different?
That should be Stripe's problem to figure out, and they shouldn't get to punt by saying "guilty until proven innocent".
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