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Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved]
501 points by eeemmmooo on Jan 3, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 219 comments
This is an update to my previous post https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34189717 . 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.

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.

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.

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.

See my comments below for actual details and dates.




This reminds me of an issue my sister is having with Etsy.

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).

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.

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).


If this extortion practice isn't a common curse of Etsy stores with her scale of revenue, I wonder whether it might actually be a competitor (who gets the sales and customers whenever her store is down).


That seems unlikely. The legal risk you put yourself in doing that would be easy higher than any gains you could hope to make.

This is likely some callcenter-adjacent scam. They're probably doing this to hundreds of shops, and occasionally get one cave in and pay.


What legal risk? You're a fly-by-night vendor outside Etsy's jurisdiction who can close up shop and have twelve new corporate entities by tomorrow morning.


It happens on Amazon, there was a post on here about it. I’m not sure they’d want to double dip and demand the hush money in that case, but it seems possible it happens on Etsy too.


That is extortion.

Your sister should contact the FBI, as it is unlikely that she is the scammers' only target, and this crime likely crosses state (or international) borders.


If it crosses international borders (probably) the FBI is stopped.

Actually the amounts cited are well below the FBI's interest threshold in any case.


No, the FBI is not precluded from investigating cross-border crimes. They just have to work with their foreign counterparts on the investigation.

And the amounts cited are not below the FBI's interest threshold; the whole point of my comment is that their are probably other victims, which makes this a larger crime than just the OP's system and probably involves sophisticated or organized criminals. This makes it exactly the kind of crime the FBI loves to investigate.


>If it crosses international borders (probably) the FBI is stopped.

May you share a source for where you heard this information?


FBI has relationships with certain countries. Criminals prefer to use countries they don't. For reasons.


Only 4 countries (Micronesia, North Korea, Palau and Tuvalu) are not participants in INTERPOL, and criminal organizations generally don't operate out of them...


Cooperation by many other countries is sharply limited.


They didn't, they just made it up


It might be too late now, IDK, but perhaps she could lie and tell the attempted extorer that she already pays another extorter and can't afford to pay two extorters at once, and if they keep taking down their store, she'll tell the extorter that she can no longer pay them because of them and do they want another criminal coming after them?


It's not that astounding. The simple truth is that customers are not valuable enough to warrant human interaction.

Cheap and scalable server time? No problem.

Communication with actual people? Not unless there's an exodus of customers (and even then you're not big enough to matter).


What does she sell on her store?


Laser cut wooden signs. She has a big warehouse in florida with commercial grade laser cutting machines (they started on a Glowforge!)

The products are all custom, e.g. your family's last name laser cut onto wood.


I’d love some info on how she grew to that size on Etsy. My partner sells some things on Etsy and has had moderate success but nowhere on that level. Did she use Etsy ads, off platform marketing, or some kind of listing optimization for Etsy search to drive that kind of growth?


From my understanding it's mostly organic, ranking well in Etsy search. I think she does paid ads to boost + supplement, but organic Etsy search is the primary growth channel. Which is also difficult and frustrating because you basically have to get really good at guessing what Etsy's algorithms are, which they change frequently (in other words, SEO but for Etsy). I don't think there's a magic bullet. A lot of trial and error


I want one, care to share a link?


Hesitant to link directly to her store here, but she's on this page!

https://www.etsy.com/search?explicit=1&q=last+name+sign&ref=...


Wonder if it is a font license issue.


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.

It's starting to seem like for too many companies, resolving public complaints has become a line item in the marketing budget.


After 5 days of trying to get my bank account at Revolut unblocked so I could pay my rent with the cash locked up in it, having chatted with maybe 5 representatives, waited for hours each time (their only official contact channel was in-app chat and you had to wait hours for a response), got told "since you are not replying I'm closing this chat" a couple of times in the middle of the night while I was asleep having sent a query hours before, and uploaded requested photos of documents, cards and id... I took someone's advice and posted to their Facebook chat.

The account was unblocked within 20 minutes.

Their social media person miraculously had the ability to ask someone to fix the problem, who miraculously got in touch within a few minutes and pressed the miraculous "fix problem" button in Revolut, which a series of "customer support" agents somehow couldn't do for most of a week.


I had a similar issue with revolut - there is zero ability to contact them if you can't login to your account, after a week of abusing business sign-up to not get any useful response I filed a complaint with the financial regulator, within a few hours of them receiving it they magically called me and resolved it there and then. (I don't have a Twitter account or anything) Also, that complaint will stay on file and guides the regulator when reviewing licenses etc down the road so you should also file them as a matter of course- they would prefer social media because they don't have to answer to authorities about their behaviour.

But either way I don't use them anymore as they're just not reliable in a situation where you might be stranded etc.


Frontline support is oftentimes outsourced to firms like Arise Virtual Solutions [1] and workers typically have very little authority to escalate or fix more complex issues. Social media people usually have channels to marketing and other teams and are explicitly instructed to escalate the "trending" cases

[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...


Well, that's the explanation, and yeah, most people here knew it already.

But every thing with that is wrong. That part in particular "workers typically have very little authority to escalate or fix more complex issues" is a plain and straight refusal to solve any problem the company may cause.


What fascinates me is that companies obsessed with KPIs don't seem to independently count unfixed issues.

Firewalling customer support behind another company or division is okay, but at least make sure you have a parallel feedback mechanism to know how they're doing!

Social media support seems like the shitty version of this, but it's not rocket science to be able to regularly independently audit a random subset of issues by your CSR contractor. Internal audits have been standard practice in similar healthcare scenarios for decades.


Customer support, at a company that is not obsessed with customer support and satisfaction, is typically "check the box". They have to provide some sort of support. It is seen as a cost center rather than as a face of the company. "number of unfixed issues" isn't relevant if you perceive customer support as perfunctory.

As a result, for many companies obsessed with KPIs, the only KPI for customer support is "price". In that lens, they are optimizing.

Obviously this situation is awful for customers.


Granted in practice, but my point is that engineering should care.

If you've got nice insulation from your customers, how do you even know what you built is working?

I've seen too many bizarre real-world failure cases and complex systems-on-systems to trust that my metrics are capturing everything that breaks.


Revolut is a terrible company with an insane CEO exploiting its workers[0][1][2].

There are better alternatives like TransferWise or N26.

[0]: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-employment-coronavir...

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19280131

[2]: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/revolut-trade-unions-labour-...


I'd love to move away from Revolut but neither of those options seem to offer a virtual credit card which is my main use case. Online purchases in US, EUR, GBP etc without having to worry about exchange fees or supported payment methods.


Wise does offer virtual cards as well as a physical one.


Just had a look, looks like you need to first get a physical Wise card in order to get a virtual one (not the case for Revolut), and it's only available in a rather limited number of countries.

https://wise.com/help/articles/5O9VNQR4wt3iXwV0Dmm6zB/how-do...


Depends on the country you’re account is in. I got virtual cards before ever ordering the physical card.

But keep in mind it’s a bank debit card (charge immediately comes off your balance), not a credit card.


I've had experiences with Revolut, too. I only use them for their stocks feature, in which I have shares. Once they're sold, I'll move all the money over to Free trade (which is honestly way better IMO). So, that, along with having a handy backup debit card handy, should I have to max out the ATM limit on my other two cards :-)


In my experience community managers are in the actual offices of the companies whilst support are a 3rd party overseas. So the CM is able to walk to someone's desk and get it fixed while the support can only try and escalate through their system.


Someday it’ll be cheaper to suppress negative views on social media than to address them. Until then I’ll enjoy the good times that come with being able to shame big companies in public.


Twitter Blue Plus - boosts your @ messages sent to verified companies to shame them more effectively.


Based on what you replied to, I thought you were going to say that Twitter Blue Plus allows you to suppress posts written about your company


Twitter Business Pro customers can suppress tweets from Free, Blue, and Blue Plus accounts for a small fee per tweet. However, if you want to suppress tweets from Gold, Platinum, or Platinum Plus accounts then you'll need to reach out to Twitter Enterprise Sales to discuss your needs further.

/s


Yelp already does this. You can pay to have them hide bad reviews. Or, to put a finer point on it, many small companies that refuse to pay Yelp's protection money find their negative reviews much more visible.


Oh no, Yelp never, never, NEVER does anything like that. We actually don't even have control of our site!!!!


That's coming out with Twitter Gold Plus Plus


That’s next weeks plan.


Elon musk was tweeting the other day about a premium option to "nuke" the tweets you dislike. The nuke will be delivered with a SpaceX rocket.


The company I’ve spent the last 5 years at (just resigned to emigrate) has a rule. If you come across an unhappy customer and don’t do anything, you should be fired. 10k employees, insurance, banking. Nobody moaned because we understand the reasons for it. I embraced it and have escalated many calls.

In a world of indifference, that’s a solid stake in the ground.


A well-known home improvement retailer has a similar rule: you take the time to help anyone with an issue resolve it, or directly hand them off to another employee who can help. No pointing and then ignoring. Or email forwarding and then ignoring.

Granted, everyone is busy and it isn't always followed, but as a guiding organizational foundation one can do a lot worse.


Ours was anywhere. You come across what seems like a frustrated client in a pharmacy, you identify yourself and help. I've helped people who expressed anger at social events. Can't always fix the issue but the company's app has a place for staff to escalate, so it's easy to kickstart the process.


Sadly, this has been a thing for a while. As a T-Mobile customer, at one point, it eventually took me to put a request via Twitter to get the matter resolved in 20 minutes as opposed to previously spending hours on the phone with tech support ( with no results to show for it ). It is, quite frankly, infuriating; especially for a telecom.

edit: I genuinely do not get why it took Twitter referral in my case either ( it was a technical matter of moving one phone number from carrier to another, but do they have their 'A team' for social media only?). Well, did. No idea what Twitter looks like now.


The reason it take a Twitter referral is that the phone reps usually are “subcontractors” that aren’t allowed to do anything. There’s a good chance they have to meet absurd metrics in order not to get fired.

This linked article explains why in many cases a companies phone support can’t do much and is also mistreated.

https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...


Right, they really just function as frustration absorbers more than anything else.


Clearly one of those metrics isn't low wait times. Another is certainly not 99.9% case resolution or escalation.


They have their "A" team on social media, but not the "A" team you are referring to. The marketing department runs social media and they have importance/power, unlike the customer support line you get to call.


I share your frustration with T-Mobile. Now, even the Twitter reps are outsourced.

The basic chat reps <> TForce. If you @TForce on Twitter it's usually quick and easy. IIRC, those reps are domestic.

Porting numbers is a little complex but doable by regular reps.

Source: Used to do tech support at T-Mobile.


Last time I had to speak to my telecom operator, which granted has been a while, Twitter was clearly where business took place. Interactions were always pleasant meeting them in the right place.

Isn't calling them by phone, as if you're still stuck in the 1950s, like showing up at the back door at a restaurant and wondering why you weren't greeted by the host and seated promptly? Maybe the surly dishwasher will eventually notice you standing there, but why would their 'A team' be there waiting for you?


Hmm. It is an interesting question. Personally, this is one of the things I credit Amazon with ( "removing friction","customer obsession" ). Whether I call, chat or send an email, the result is a consistent and decent customer service that can get stuff done ( and where it can't, it can escalate to those that can ).

I am not sure you should equate me signing up for a 3rd party broker not only accepted, but a given. I personally do not believe it is old fashioned to have your business reachable by phone, when things go wrong ( in fact, I am not sure how Google and others have been able to get away with it so far ).

In other words, it is nice that T-Mobile extends their online presence to accommodate social media, but they may want to stick to their core strengths, because this is what I actually pay them for.

In your restaurant example, I go to a restaurant and I am greeted by a pimp, who happens to know Maître d' and can get you a good seat as a result. This is ok for some and I accept some people choose this as their default option. I like to go the actual restaurant ( T-mobile webpage or their call center ).

<< why would their 'A team' be there waiting for you?

Because I am a paying customer. That is why.


> I personally do not believe it is old fashioned to have your business reachable by phone

You can reach them by phone, but it's not the way things are commonly done, so you're going to get suboptimal results. You can also mail them a letter (the snail mail kind), but I expect you'll receive even poorer results than by phone doing so given that it is even less common to conduct business by mail. For better or worse there is only so much time in the day so you have to focus on what works for the 90% common case and just try your best for the remaining 10%.

> Because I am a paying customer. That is why.

You're paying for something, but apparently not phone support, else you would not be a paying customer anymore when they failed to provide what you thought you were paying for. What is in it for them to provide you something that you're not paying for?


<< For better or worse there is only so much time in the day so you have to focus on what works for the 90% common case and just try your best for the remaining 10%.

I did, eventually, and I am voicing my discontent over having to do so.

<< You're paying for something, but apparently not phone support,

I received some support ( as flawed as it was, which reflects poorly on the company ) and that customer service number exists, therefore phone support exists and therefore I ,also apparently, pay for phone support. In other words, I think your argument is flawed.

That said, I think you are wrong in a much grander sense.

The question is not whether I pay for non-existent support. The question is why we allow oligopolies to run amok, because I am fairly certain if more options were available, this run towards the bottom would not be so awful from customer experience perspective, where CEOs are only focused on 'how to squeeze out more out of this rock' with the solution being: "I know. We will let them complain online and use that as our call center. Think of the savings." and NOT "How can we make our service better so that customers don't leave for greener pastures?".

That is the question.


> therefore phone support exists and therefore I ,also apparently, pay for phone support.

My misunderstanding. So, in that case, you got what you think you are paying for and are clearly happy with what you got in return for your money as you continue to pay for it going forward. What's your concern again?

> I am fairly certain if more options were available, this run towards the bottom would not be so awful from customer experience perspective

Perhaps there aren't more options because you're too price sensitive? I'll give you all the top quality telephone support you could ever want for $10,000,000 per year, but I strongly suspect already that your answer is "no thanks". If I had to offer you phone support at the same price as T-Mobile it would be unquestionably worse, not having the economies of scale they have.

Since you are clearly happy with the product they offer, at least given the price they offer it at, how could any other options rise up? Anyone smaller trying to offer an alternative would have to charge more just to provide the same level of support, and a lot more to provide better support. Are you getting out your wallet to see that happen or is this one of those fake rants that "actions speak louder than words" was coined for?


<< you got what you think you are paying for and are clearly happy with what you got in return for your money as you continue to pay for it going forward

I will admit I am mildly concerned I am being willfully misunderstood, which goes against the spirit of HN conversations. I would not characterize me as happy. My issue was resolved, but that issue explicitly could and should have been resolved earlier ( as it clearly could have been ) without the need to of intermediaries in the form of Twitter. And what happens to all those poor folks, who were banned from Twitter? They can't get 'good' support now, because T-Mobile is saving a few bucks? How is that even in the realm of being acceptable business practice?

<< Since you are clearly happy with the product they offer,

It is a stretch and it goes back to my lack of options "rant" above that include oligopoly position in nearly every industry in US. If I had 20 providers to choose from, somehow I do not think we would have this conversation. Instead, I get to choose, who will piss me off the least. That is not happy. That is merely not sufficiently angry yet.

<< "no thanks"

You are right. The price is ridiculous for an individual and most businesses.

<< If I had to offer you phone support at the same price as T-Mobile it would be unquestionably worse, not having the economies of scale they have.

Not necessarily. Virtual providers do exist ( and they don't seem to be doing badly ), but they happen to be running on the same network as the existing oligopolies giving the illusion of choice, which only hides the real issue here.

<< Anyone smaller trying to offer an alternative would have to charge more just to provide the same level of support, and a lot more to provide better support.

Maybe? I certainly had no way to test that proposition. Ever since I was a little boy, there were only a handful of telecoms for some unfathomable reason.

<< Perhaps there aren't more options because you're too price sensitive?

Maybe? What price range are you talking about specifically though? $100 for two lines with some silly 2gb cap? I frankly pay too much as it is compared to similar services in EU ( I can't readily compare to India or China, but I suspect those prices are even lower there ). If I am sensitive to price, it is because I like to get value for the money spent.


> I would not characterize me as happy.

It would be irrational to pay for a service you are unhappy with. Perhaps you mean you are are "unhappy" in the same way that one is "unhappy" to have a $5 BigMac over a $50 steak? Which is to say that the BigMac is good for the price, even if not the best food imaginable.

> If I had 20 providers to choose from, somehow I do not think we would have this conversation.

Just about anyone (with reasonable knowhow) can provide you phone support. If there are fewer than 20 people out there willing to do that for you, I'd be flabbergasted. But they won't work for free, and probably not even for cheap. You've no doubt chosen the bargain basement option provided by T-Mobile because you find it balances the best value for the money. It's not great service, but it is cheap service. It's the $5 BigMac, even if you are really craving $50 steak, but don't want to spend $50 on a meal.

> Ever since I was a little boy, there were only a handful of telecoms for some unfathomable reason.

We seem to be flailing around here a lot, but it was made clear to me in the last comment that we're talking about the phone support being paid for. Phone support does not have to work directly for the telecom to interface with the telecom. They can talk to you to find out the problem and then do whatever it takes to get the job done with the carrier afterwards.

How much are you actually willing to pay for that, though? It seems the answer is not much. So why would competition rise up to make no money?

Let's take that further: Why aren't you offering this service to others? Because you realize you won't make any money?


<< It would be irrational to pay for a service you are unhappy with. Perhaps you mean you are are "unhappy" in the same way that one is "unhappy" to have a $5 BigMac over a $50 steak? Which is to say that the BigMac is good for the price, even if not the best food imaginable.

Hmm. No, but at least now I can understand the perspective you seem to be speaking from, which partially explains the disconnect between how we perceive the world. You seem to think I talk about 'hardware support', whereas I am talking something T-Mobile is taking money for ( and that includes.. you know, connecting my call to people I call, routing text messages and data where they belong and respond to appropriate customer queries ). I would like to point out that 'moving number from one provider to the other' shouldn't even need to qualify as customer service, but onboarding, which the company should be doing everything to make sure is as seamless as possible.

I am "unhappy" because my "choice" in the matter of choosing a provider is limited to 3 major competitors in US. I provide myself with the 'support' you seem to suggest. This is explicitly not what we talked about or even a reasonable interpretation of my original complaint. I am 'unhappy', because I buy Big Mac at McDonalds, but upon purchase I am told to go that other store across the street to complete the purchase. How is that reasonable?

<< it was made clear to me in the last comment that we're talking about the phone support being paid for.

Are we? I am not even being difficult here. How is transferring number from one provider to another count as somehow separate 'phone support' and not just some basic initial setup?

<< Why aren't you offering this service to others?

Because when I sell Big Macs, I do not dare to tell people that pay me to go to the store across the street for self-assembly or help with Big Mac assembly. Like fuck man. I sincerely hope you are trolling me now and I am falling for it, because the alternative is that people have been actually convinced that this is an acceptable state of affairs.

edit:

<< How much are you actually willing to pay for that, though?

I already am. That is the point. I purchased a Big Mac and not separate bun combo with an asterisk stating some assembly required. I do not understand how this is somehow not a clear concept.

edit2: In fact, I got a Big Mac with a contract that includes a phone number to call when I need McDonald's help dealing with that Big Mac.

edit3:

<< even if you are really craving $50 steak, but don't want to spend $50 on a meal.

I feel obligated to ask now. What, exactly, is steak in this analogy?

edit4:

You actually got me riled up. Impressive.

From your perspective, should all customer inquiries be outsourced to social media to save businesses some dough?


> From your perspective, should all customer inquiries be outsourced to social media to save businesses some dough?

"Should" requires applying emotion and you cannot participate in a good faith discussion if you bring in emotions.

All we can discuss is what is. If what you are trying to ask is: "Do some businesses only accept inquiries by social media?" I don't know for sure, but expect it happens. I know for certain that there are businesses which do not accept phone calls. There are even more businesses that do not accept inquiries by telegraph. Do any businesses accept inquiries by telegraph?

Like I said, businesses will put the most effort into accommodating the majority of customers where they are found. If that's social media, then social media is where the most effort will be made. Indeed, it stands to reason that a business that is primarily in the business of providing internet service for pocket computers used to access social media will find most of their customers congregating on social media. Other businesses might find that the customers are most likely to come in person. A retirement community might even find that the phone is where the people are. Certainly there is no universal medium here. Each business will be different.

That doesn't mean there won't be some best effort attempts to support customers on the fringes, but there is only so much time in the day and if you lose the customers on the fringes... Oh well? You will never win them all anyway.


<< "Should" requires applying emotion and you cannot participate in a good faith discussion if you bring in emotions.

You are wrong about "should", because the word can and does describe non-emotional states ( not everything is deterministic and requires approximator like should ), but your point about good faith discussion is well taken. In fact, I think I should apologize here. There was no rational reason to be bent out of shape over this. Your argument is solid on the surface assuming what you write is taken at face value.

As a result, I took your advice and took myself away from the keyboard for a little while.

As I considered other things, I realized that you are still not correct despite being instinctively right about the business in general ( it goes where the money is ). You used the example of telegraph and I realized that what is wrong with the argument. Papyrus is older than telegraph and yet it is still used to deliver important messages ( like, say, warrants, summons, complaints ) suggesting it is not a question of age, but of utility. I posit that phone is in the same category as paper, because despite existence of email, telegram, signal, video chats, it has replaced telegraph, but nothing replaced phone yet in terms of barebones connectivity standard(s) that can be used across the globe. Unless we consider mobile phones a different animal, which would not be an unreasonable argument to make.

At end the end of the day, if I need to make a call to the old country and various apps don't work for one reason or another ( not everyone uses - or even can or wants to use - w/e app you use or maybe version is off or multiple other reasons ), calling is the way to go.

<< That doesn't mean there won't be some best effort attempts to support customers on the fringes,

I might accept calling is not default, but calling it a fringe might be mischaracterizing things a tad bit ( unless you have some evidence to prove, calls are indeed a fringe channel ).


> You are wrong about "should", because the word can and does describe non-emotional states

Questions of "how should a company behave?" can only be answered by one's feelings, and feelings require emotions to be formed. There are no rules of business encoded into the universe. Business itself is merely a human construct.

> At end the end of the day, if I need to make a call to the old country and various apps don't work for one reason or another

The modern phone system is built on apps, so if apps are not working for one reason or another the app you call a phone isn't going to work anyway. Long gone are the days of an operator physically connecting copper wires between two locations. The phone system you seem to be imagining no longer exists outside of museums.

> Papyrus is older than telegraph and yet it is still used to deliver important messages

And like I said in another comment, if you used papyrus to request support from your telecom operator, I expect you would receive even worse support than by phone. It's not where they are going to focus their energy because papyrus isn't where the community of customers live. I imagine they would put in some effort to accommodate you, but with only so much time in the day it will pale in comparison to where they put their focus.

> unless you have some evidence to prove, calls are indeed a fringe channel

Like I said, it depends on the business. The phone is unquestionably the primary channel of communication for some businesses when the community of customers primarily live by phone. Other businesses, particularly those close to government, do rely on papyrus as their primary channel of communication. And other businesses see physical presence as their primary channel. Going back to the restaurant, you're going to receive better service walking in the door than you will by phone. No doubt there will be a best effort to provide good service over the phone as well, but the customer who walks in the door is going to get the "A team".

The business of which we speak here is mostly in the business of connecting one's pocket computer to social media, so social media is quite expectedly where the community primarily lives. That doesn't mean they won't put a best effort into other communication channels, but if you want the "A team", you will reasonably go where the people are. Same as with every business.


<< You are wrong about "should", because the word can and does describe non-emotional states >> Questions of "how should a company behave?" can only be answered by one's feelings, and feelings require emotions to be formed. There are no rules of business encoded into the universe. Business itself is merely a human construct."

If that is the case, then everything is emotional. If everything is emotional, in practical sense, designation of 'emotional' does not carry using informational value. It is like calling everything racist.

<< At end the end of the day, if I need to make a call to the old country and various apps don't work for one reason or another >> The modern phone system is built on apps, so if apps are not working for one reason or another the app you call a phone isn't going to work anyway. Long gone are the days of an operator physically connecting copper wires between two locations. The phone system you seem to be imagining no longer exists outside of museums.

I would welcome some schooling on the matter. Do you have some additional insight/resources that could substantiate your claim? I do not exactly doubt you, but, just like with the underpinnings of US airlines, part of me sincerely doubts telecoms moved to, say, react framework to connect phonecalls. I might be wrong, but I would like some additional evidence of that.

<< And like I said in another comment, if you used papyrus to request support from your telecom operator, I expect you would receive even worse support than by phone. It's not where they are going to focus their energy because papyrus isn't where the community of customers live. I imagine they would put in some effort to accommodate you, but with only so much time in the day it will pale in comparison to where they put their focus.

I am not sure if you ever sent a complaint letter to a bank or similar regulated institution. I won't go into too many details, but, if anything, written letter gets a much closer scrutiny. It may be slower, but it does get results ( edit: speaking from experience ).

<< Like I said, it depends on the business.

I am willing to accept it as an argument.


> If that is the case, then everything is emotional.

For all practical purposes the state of the world is encoded into the universe. Relaying that state does not require emotion to carry into the message. If I exclaim 1+1=2, what emotion can you extract from that? The motivation for suggesting that 1+1=2 requires emotion to be present internally, but those emotions do not leak into the information presented.

> Do you have some additional insight/resources that could substantiate your claim?

I guess? https://www.history.com/news/rise-fall-telephone-switchboard...

I'm not sure what you're looking for, exactly.

> part of me sincerely doubts telecoms moved to, say, react framework to connect phonecalls.

If you use the phone app on your pocket computer, it very well could be using the React (React Native) framework. In the real world more likely it uses the OS's native APIs directly, but indeed React Native is just a thin layer above that anyway so the distinction is flimsy.

But yes, modern switching is also done in software. The phone is just another service that rides on the same network as all of these other services that we're talking about. Ultimately, what's really so different between Twitter and a phone call other than the exact bit arrangement that goes down the wire?

> I am not sure if you ever sent a complaint letter to a bank or similar regulated institution.

We are talking about support, not complaint. Those are very different letters.

> but, if anything, written letter gets a much closer scrutiny.

Particularly when the government is involved, no question. We already established earlier that the community that is government tends to live by paper. Once again, the "A team" lives where the people are. Even if Twitter is the best place for support, if you sent a complaint by Twitter it would be more likely be ignored because that's not where the regulators live. Like the recurring theme continues to tell, the most effort is put into where the people are...


<< I am not sure if you ever sent a complaint letter to a bank or similar regulated institution. > We are talking about support, not complaint. Those are very different letters.

Are you suggesting I should sent a complaint about the support to TMobile to get it in line with my expectations? That I can do.

<< For all practical purposes the state of the world is encoded into the universe. Relaying that state does not require emotion to carry into the message. If I exclaim 1+1=2, what emotion can you extract from that? The motivation for suggesting that 1+1=2 requires emotion to be present internally, but those emotions do not leak into the information presented.

I will need to sleep on that. Something feels off about the argument, but I can't put a finger on it.

<< Ultimately, what's really so different between Twitter and a phone call other than the exact bit arrangement that goes down the wire?

If it is all just 'pipes' and phones and Twitter is in the same category, then the difference is that it is a different company. That is more of a reason for customer to not be happy over contracting with company A, but being directed to unrelated company B for actual service.


> Are you suggesting I should sent a complaint about the support to TMobile to get it in line with my expectations?

As before, "should" cannot be answered in good faith, but a request for support ("Can you help me with my problem?") is very different to a complaint ("You have not resolved my problem."). People are going to do what they are going to do, but traditionally people will request support first and file a complaint only after that request failed to achieve resolution. Have you first requested support for the problem you have with support?

> If it is all just 'pipes' and phones and Twitter is in the same category, then the difference is that it is a different company.

And different companies go to where their particular customers live. If customers live on social media, social media is where the company will place their effort. That doesn't mean there won't be any effort to try and help others in other places, but there is only so much time in the day.


I think I will bow out. We are going in circles without a clear way to reconcile differing views. Lets agree to disagree.


Where do our views actually differ?

My only takeaway from all this is that you don't like the way things are with respect to how T-Mobile conducts support. That cannot be disagreed with. What you claim is your opinion can only be taken for what it is.

How would one even begin to disagree with that? "No, that's not your opinion! You actually feel this." I have no way to actually prove that assertion, leaving it to be an illogical statement and a bad faith response.


<< I have no way to actually prove that assertion, leaving it to be an illogical statement and a bad faith response

And that is your opinion. The response was a bona fide response, but I am no longer inclined to indulge this sophistry. You are wrong even in the summary itself. I provided reasons and rationale for why a given opinion is held and your response was to indicate that it is 'wrong opinion to hold, because A', which itself is just an opinion. In short, our views differ, because you hold an opinion that I hold the wrong opinion.

It is impossible to argue with that and so I will not spend more time on this thread.

Fare well.


Twitter was clearly where business took place... Isn't calling them by phone, as if you're still stuck in the 1950s

You're using Twitter like you're still stuck in 2008? All the cool kids are on Vazpe32shaau! If you aren't reaching out to customer service on Vazpe32shaau, then you're not worth having as a customer!


> You're using Twitter like you're still stuck in 2008?

That's approximately the timeframe when I last had to speak to my telecom operator, yes. Like I said in the previous comment, it's been a while.

I wouldn't expect that to be where business is conducted in 2023. The world certainly doesn't stand still. You can stand still if you wish, I guess, but don't expect everyone else to cater to that choice.

Don't get me wrong, I like banging out morse code on the telegraph as much as anyone, but if you don't get the desired results from it at some point you have to look inward.


One of the things I think about is the difference between shame and guilt. I've heard the difference described as shame being about failing other people's standards, while guilt is about failing your own.

I think many companies don't have much in the way of internal standards. As long as the revenue graph goes up and to the right, few will question anything. But they do have PR teams that recognize the brand as valuable. So unfortunately what we have left is shaming them via social media.


Public shaming and social media managers are probably more flexible than customer support, if it even exists, (i.e. they can forward a complaint to the right people).

I'm sure there is a solution to better solve these 'problems' that pop up but not something high on the list for most places to pursue.


Making the post is not enough, you also have to get it to the front page of Reddit or HN


Yep. I had an issue with Apex Legends and after the support channel failed me I attempted to engage with Respawn users on Reddit/Twitter when my post got 5 upvotes. Ignored on all accounts.

It feels criminal to have some automated system remove your access to a paid application with no recourse, but that's modern Customer Service it seems.


If this is the way things are going, then there should be some kind of influencer types with large clout who can bring up these sort of cases on behalf of an anonymous party.

Imagine having no real social media footprint or even a bad reputation with lots of downvoted posts. How are you supposed to resolve your issues when a company has decided no one would give a shit about you if you complained? You need someone to vouch for you and help you hold their feet to the fire, you need an individual who will tell your story to an audience that is too expensive to disappoint.


If this is the way things are going, then there should be some kind of influencer types with large clout who can bring up these sort of cases on behalf of an anonymous party.

These have existed in newspapers for at least a half a century.

There's a nationally-syndicated travel expert who does nothing but travel customer service with plenty of name-and-shame.


Customer support is a liability and every large company will allocate absolutely minimal possible resources to any liability.

This of course can backfire via social media into negative reputation and some repeated bad behaviors can landslide into class action.

But large companies are willing to accept such risk and will continue such pattern.


$400,000 in withheld funds is not the sort of thing you should just place on the back burner and ignore while your client fumes. It is business malpractice, the sort of thing you could get sued over and be penalized heavily for, if not merely lose your customers and blacken your reputation everywhere. Businesses that do not resolve problems like this in less than twenty four hours deserve to go out of business.


The great thing about holding $400,000 of your customer's money is that that's $400,000 they can't spend on suing you.


Absolutely not true. There are many lawyers that will take cases on a "no win, no fee" basis.

Clearly Stripe was in breach in this circumstance, and courts look dimly on that kind of behaviour.


There's this other thing where instead of posting your Complaint to HN you can file your Complaint in a court of law, it's kind of like an analog version of Zendesk that every company has to use.


And it takes a thousand times as long and infinitely more money than posting a complaint online.


Small claims court is pretty good if it’s available to you and most disputes probably fit within the limits. These courts deal with corporate malfeasance quite a bit so they’ve likely seen it before. They’ll often penalize the offending company with 2x+ damages and if the company still won’t pay you can get a bailiff to come with you to go impounding assets. They use fire sale prices to offset the debt so it costs the company way more to let you walk off with assets than it does to cut you a check. So usually by that stage they relent and pay you your judgement.


In the UK you couldn't claim $400k through small-claims, it is limited to £10k. Is it that high in the US?

You also can't get 2x damages, or a fast process!


Small claims is definitely less than $400k. In Texas the limit is $20k.

It probably doesn't really matter though. Your contact with Stripe probably requires arbitration but that isn't necessarily a bad thing either.

Check out:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31567673


Do you still technically have a contract with Stripe after they've suspended access to your funds?

I'd assume yes, but it seems weird to have a contract still in force with a company who refuses to do business with you...


You can literally claim 'breach of contract' and force them to perform under the contract. Stripe can stop further processing under the contract by all past actions until their notice of termination is going to be under the contractual terms as prior agreed upon.


> if it’s available to you and most disputes probably fit within the limits


> Thanks to @dang for getting a Stripe employee to respond and he was finally able to resolve the issue for me.

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.

Big kudos to dang and HN for standing up for the average person and being this helpful!


Doesn't seem to me that this would work. Most of the HN audience will not go to the Complaints tab, so the forces of social shaming wouldn't work. The marketing dept only cares about complaints that affect the company's reputation.


Have we ever seen a complaint for Pinboard?


Yes, often. It's yet another HN-celebrated startup that turned into a neglected pile of crap:

Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (Dec '22 edition)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34062802

Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (November '22 edition) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33398395

Ask HN: What Happened to Pinboard (August '22 edition)? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32580491

etc.


https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29873306


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.


Last time I had to fight a company's customer support over them owing money to me (admittedly a couple of orders of magnitude less than OP), it was a mix of "It's someone else's fault, call them" and "Computer says no". Customer support is friendly, cheerful, and are trained to at least act sad that customer is having trouble. Lots of "I'm sorry that you are having trouble but I can't..."

Most companies' customer support seems to center around: 1. frustrate the customer with a long phone tree quest, hoping the customer goes away without figuring out and invoking the magic button sequence that takes them to a human, and 2. once the customer reaches a person, shower customer with empathy and politeness but do not solve their problem, hoping they just go away in frustration.

Customer support can generally only do "happy path" things that you can do on the web site yourself. Pay your bill? Sure thing. Read to you your account information? Of course. Fish your account out of purgatory because of a one in a million edge cases causing some sloppy code to divide by zero? No chance in hell. "I'm so sorry you are having that issue, let me please forward you to someone else..."


Remember that most companies don't really trust their support employees to behave honestly. There are often thousands of them, and the turnover is high, and the opportunity for an employee to credit $1000 to their mates account and then not show up to work again is rather high.

I think that's why support employees aren't given very many controls to override the way the system works...


Sure, but these are low-paid jobs with no agency. Of course turnover is high. If customer service were a priority companies could figure out how to build a trustworthy workforce.


> If customer service were a priority companies could figure out how to build a trustworthy workforce.

This is 100% accurate, in my experience. You even gave the answer in your first sentence:

> these are low-paid jobs with no agency.

If they weren't low-paid jobs with no agency, a lot of trust and retention would follow, almost like magic. (Of course there would still be people who abuse or mess up the intended system; that's why you have internal business controls and vetting.)

A long time ago, I worked overnight customer support for a very large ISP, via an outsourcing company. On the overnight shift, there was no distinction between technical support and billing because call volumes were so much lower. Also because of being on the overnight shift, we had much greater authority to make account adjustments and fixes because the employees who worked directly for the ISP didn't want to be woken up in the middle of the night to approve requests. All we needed was a second coworker to sign off. Oh, and we got paid a 25% differential for the shift.

People would actively try to move onto the overnight shift. Our group inside the outsourcing company had the lowest turnover rate by far and was helped by one year our overnight shift had zero turnover. Two of my coworkers even declined being promoted to daytime lead so they could stay working overnights.

Yes, the pay was good even though the hours were not so great, but the autonomy was better. We were treated like adults; we didn't even have a technical support script because no one from the ISP had come to officially train us so we weren't "allowed" to use the script in the knowledge repository. We had access to the billing tools that would tell us why an account was in a certain state and so we could actually fix, or at least tell the customer about, problems instead of offering them a "trouble ticket" and a "one-time credit of $15 for your issue."

It was amazing and I'm often sad that our industry has forgotten that humans are the point of all of this.


You may find this article has an interesting look at how many companies do their phone support. It really explains how the service got to be so awful.

https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...


The cost of fraud far exceeds the cost of losing one customer. The cost of losing dozens of customers costs more than prioritising someone’s issue.

I have no insider knowledge of Stripe but I find it entirely plausible that Stripe will forever have cases like this. Serious fraud could cost Stripe hundreds of thousands, potentially even millions, and so there will always be cases that are out of the ordinary and don’t fit into the already defined processes. If you’re a low level employee, you do not want to take decisive action that costs Stripe a million dollars.

Stripe grows, fraud grows. Fraud is a cat and mouse game: the question should be, is Stripe effectively solving previously encountered problems? Given how much Stripe has grown, and how relatively consistent the number of complaints are, I’d say Stripe is doing a very good job.

I am sure Stripe could do a better job at handling these cases that fall through the cracks, but that’s a separate issue, because it ultimately comes down to having someone to take accountability and ownership of the risk. A month turnaround on this is totally reasonable.


> A month turnaround on this is totally reasonable.

But it was only resolved because of a post on HN. I would agree with you if Stripe actually had a way to escalate and resolve issues without making public posts on social media. Without HN's help, this issue would not have been fixed.

I get that stripe doesn't trust whatever subcontractor they use to answer the phones. But that person should be able to say "Yeah, shits fucked, I'll escalate the ticket to someone who can actually help".


Yeah I agree. There wasn't much more information for me to provide there that would be helpful. I pretty much had the same conversation the whole time. I explained the issue. They reached out (supposedly) to the review team who just told them it's under review. They asked me to upload the same invoices again. Then said they'll let me know. It just seemed like no one in that chain was able to actually do anything.


I can't see Stripe giving front line employees the ability to resolve Risk Management issues.

From the Risk Management employee's perspective, nobody gets in trouble for saying "no". Saying "no", or outright rejecting an account is the safe move for job security. And so, support tickets into these departments languish for absurd amount of times (months) at many companies.


My guess is that they're measured in replies per hour instead of in resolutions per month.

From my past experiences, it's clear they don't even bother to understand what I wrote. Reading comprehension is zero, which seems to indicate a strong disincentive to actually comprehending and helping.


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.

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).


That’s quite common functionality nowadays but generally if you’re dealing with valuable enterprise relationships that would benefit from tickets ranking higher, you have points of contact available to the client (whether that’s an account manager or similar) outside of impersonal tickets.

I’m sure if you’re a valuable enough stripe client, they’ll have account managers. The problem for Stripe is that we see big numbers ($400k) and they see small numbers ($4k) so our perception of which clients are worth dedicating resources to is unrealistic.

Stripe could do a better job here but I’d be shocked if any big valuable clients have an experience like this, because if someone is driving $100k/year of revenue for Stripe, they’ll be able to get someone on the phone who knows their name and business.


I agree on all that. (We had 'Executive Sponsors' and 'Red Accounts' where I was, and they were hugely expensive to manage once they 'went Red').

The issue would be catching things early and managing them cost effectively before they blow up in the public sphere.


A person with low HN Karma and no obvious social media presence can do a lot of damage to Stripe’s reputation on HN. Or at least a dozen such people in succession can (which is exactly what we got here in recent years).


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.

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 very 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).

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, very importantly, these edge cases are usually the worst when the customer behavior, while totally legit, "looks" pretty similar to malicious usage.

So, in that case, I'm glad 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.


> I wish there were a better alternative, but I really am at a loss to think what that could be.

(This is a general comment; not directed at Stripe with whom I personally have had no dealings needing support.)

It's simple. If you can't provide useful customer service, then you can't provide a service at all. Similarly if you can't scale professionally, then in reality you can't (and shouldn't) scale at all.

Tech scales, and customer bases scale, but the real world doesn't scale with it. Professionals with morals, and standards, and pride in what they do, should self-limit their business to what they can realistically handle. And that includes the greedy behemoths across all of tech. If they truly cared about their customers they would accept that there is a limit to how many they can provide quality support for, and artificially restrict their own growth until they've ironed out enough issues that they can release the tap and scale a little bit more.

Of course financial imperatives beat both professionalism and pride in how the company operates, so that never happens.

There's no technical fix. There's no financial fix. There's probably no legal fix either. It needs an attitude fix.


Your argument basically boils down to "companies shouldn't be greedy", so I'm going to have to throw it onto the "not a realistic solution" bucket. But I also don't believe the moral lines are as clear cut as you would like to make them.

The issue is that the vast majority of users receive excellent service, at a historically extremely low cost. The problems always arise at these edge cases where legitimate human behavior is often indistinguishable from malicious behavior without further information. But if a company decides to go with the solution of "we're not going to scale unless we have 100% of all these edge cases covered", that company would long be out of business from competition who is able to offer a lower priced product with better support for 99.9% of users.

This type of problem is essentially the same as classic externality issues, and after reading some of the other responses to my comment, I think the only way this can be solved is with government intervention requiring some level of responsiveness so that there is a level playing field for all companies.


You're right in it not being a realistic solution. It's a shame, but I'm not naive.

Your main comment though is about requiring 100% fixes before scaling. I specifically said "until they've ironed out *enough* issues that they can release the tap and scale a little bit more" which is not the same thing, so I'm not actually advocating what is implied. I suspect I'm closer to what you yourself are saying in that argument than perhaps I made clear (sorry).

With that said, I see all this as part of a larger problem. The examples of YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook come to mind. They are terrible at moderation, and the reason is that the default approach is to automate these aspects due to the scale involved.

And I think that's wrong for the same reason as my original comment - if you cannot moderate at scale you shouldn't scale. The annoying thing is that they can moderate at scale, but to do that they would need to employ more humans. Which they won't do.

An awful lot of what is wrong in tech is down to the willingness to scale purely by automation and not with humans, consequences be damned.

Again, though, I'm not naive about the chances of it ever being otherwise.


> I wish there were a better alternative, but I really am at a loss to think what that could be.

Figure out what it costs to have whoever is looking at the HN issues look at them and just charge that much for a executive VIP support request.

Like, if I’ve got $400k locked up and CS stuck in a loop I’d happily drop $200 to have someone that actually has the power to talk to people and get the ball rolling on fixing stuff look at my request.

I hate the idea that if or when I fall into one of those cracks that I may not have curated a large enough social media presence to actually have it resolved. I’d love if I could just, y’know, pay for services instead.

Being willing to put some money down on it should help filter only for people that are serious and expect a ROI from the support ticket (e.g., people knowing they're committing fraud likely won't) and even if it doesn't it directly funds the support so if people want to pay you to waste your time and tell them no... well, no real loss.


I like the idea in general, but any fraudsters would gladly pay quite a lot to have a chance of getting their hands on $400k. They can work out the ROI just as well as a legit customer. So the anti fraud aspect doesn’t ring true to me.


I think the money shouldn't go directly to the company. This incentivizes them to keep their processes terrible.

Publicizing it on HN seems more effective, and provides incentive for the companies to fix their processes, lest they be continually shamed.

The problem is, it doesn't really scale as a method of resolving significant customer issues.


> I wish there were a better alternative, but I really am at a loss to think what that could be.

The alternative is to empower customer support reps to look up the cause of a problem. This would not affect general operations when everything is running smooth, but would solve the case where clueless reps keep asking for the same documents and can't follow through or actually do anything.

What you're describing is how modern tech companies have eliminated support level 1.

But if that was the plan, it should be followed by making all the remaining reps level 2 and giving them the proper tools and training to do their job.


I'd be ok with this if it were a tradeoff that I was choosing to make. Stripe withholding $400k can end a business. Google locking me out of my account can upend my life. I'd like to be able to pay the premium required to ensure that if an algorithm flags my account, I'm not going to be spending days banging my head against a wall trying to talk to a person who can straighten it out.


The fact that a company has the power the screw up your life to the point you need to give them money is too much power for a company to have. It's like your bank making you pay to resolve fraud against you


Except in this case, the user was actually talking to customer support, so was already taking up their time. It's one thing to have zero customer support, like Google; I can see that saving money (though it's a shitty practice IMO). But if there is a CS dept and you are talking to reps but they're not solving your problem, wouldn't it be better to actually solve the problem instead of repeatedly spending time not solving it?


I worked at a Very Large Financial Company, doing a lot of internal automation type stuff. The cost per customer interaction was very high (we didn't really outsource many things on that side due to regulations needing Series 6/7/etc). Sending mail, receiving a piece of mail, getting a phone call from a customer, all of those really cost a lot of money, and reducing those volumes, and lowering the cost were a huge driver for us. Once you include overhead and stuff, its not unreasonable that a call center employee (especially a skilled one) is costing $50+ an hour. So someone that sends in a piece letter instead of a webform, and then calls and talks for 30 minutes, that might have cost $30-50 to process all of that. It adds up fast.


But doesn’t it take up more time (and hence money) to have a customer not be helped and keep emailing/chatting/calling/mailing repeatedly? Wouldn’t fixing the problem in the first place reduce overall costs?


You could argue that because this is a liability issue, something that drains our collective efficiency, and isn't a profit center for any business, that it should be regulated by the government to some degree.

The CFPB for what it's worth has at least somewhat solved the predatory nature of certain banking practices, I've heard plenty of stories of threats to escalate to the CFPB getting real results for customers.


This is a pretty intriguing contrarian view. I recall fielding many such inquiries during my Google days.

Of course, ideally every company (and organization) would offer fantastic customer service in every situation. In a world where that doesn't always happen, having an additional safety valve can be helpful for customers and companies alike.

If something is eye-catching enough that a newspaper would report on it, or it would get traction on HN or social media, that's worth the time to dig deeper and investigate what happened. Again, it's not the optimal way to triage issues, but it's better than ignoring outside feedback entirely.


google is free though, stripe users pay for every single transactions.


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.

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.


John here from Stripe (I lead our Risk product area). As OP noted, we try to spot unexpected spikes in processing volume, which are often associated with risky activity. In this case, that was in error — we were too fast to act and (much) too slow to unwind. In particular, we erred in not taking congruent action across OP’s related accounts. We’re working on a fix for this. I’m following up with OP to make sure we fully digest this one, so that it doesn’t happen again.

Since I came onboard in Sept, the team has made a lot of progress (e.g., mistaken actions like this one are down by 75%), but we have a lot more planned to further improve. We’re always on the look out for additional examples of mistaken action - please email me at jhaddock@stripe.com so I can take a look.


In a former business I had several 'customer advocates' who were tasked with representing customers to internal teams. Difficult/complex/delayed issues could be escalated to the advocates by customer support.

I view customer support as a marketing opportunity via goodwill and word of mouth.

Accounting for customer support as a debit against the marketing budget is an incentive to prevent incidents.

In another comment I asked the OP if it could have helped if they were able to notify ahead of time of expected spikes in turnover (due to marketing initiatives, etc.) that could be factored into the risk management equation.


Stripe knows this, when they were smaller the founder used to reply to threads like this or patio11 who they hired (but he just wrote that he is no longer there!).

Makes me wonder what's going on in there post-layoff, the business model is sound and they are market leader. No pressure too IPO quickly in the down market


If Stripe doesn't acknowledge they made a mistake, one could say mistakes are down 100%.

It's tough to track metrics like that.


Thanks for your help. Especially on New Years Eve. My goal was always to try to find someone at Stripe that could help me get through the automated process churn and you were very helpful in that. It was not to slam Stripe overall because you all have been very good to us for years. Which is also why I’m trying to be as fair as I can be to both sides and also why I didn’t just jump to lawyer calling levels etc. I knew eventually Stripe would do the right thing. Just figuring out how to make that happen was the hard part.


Are there any real alternatives to Stripe?

Obviously Adyen if you're in EU, PayPal/Braintree, etc, but Stripe is really the big kahuna.

What about building your own with Authorize.net? Are there any old-school gateways like that left out there that are still independent?

(can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)


There are literally hundreds of payment gateways/processors available in the US.

Stripe is like the Heroku of payment gateways -- great to start up quickly, great business, very profitable... but customers need to be very wary of various lock in strategies, and generally plan to have multiple providers as the business scales.


Not sure why Square is never mentioned. I use them for my book sales. They work with Woocommerce and my fulfillment warehouse scrapes the orders three times a day. While my experience with Stripe for my SaaS product has been great I don't like that they hold on to funds for ten days. Square transfers the money the same or the next day.


Adyen can be used beyond the EU[0] and they’re quite reasonable as well. Covers the majority of commerce areas globally

[0]: https://www.adyen.com/knowledge-hub#pago_local


I've been using Authorize.net for years. Can't imaging using some service that can hold my money hostage. While Authorize.net is "old-school", it is flexible and you are in control. Remind me again why people use Stripe?


It's now owned by VISA. :(


Is unfortunate - but doesn't change my positive points


The is also Mollie [0] if you're in Europe. It's more comparable to Stripe than Adyen if you're just accepting payments in my experience.

[0] https://mollie.com


> Obviously Adyen if you're in EU

Though they have "call us" so I’m thinking it’s only for big businesses.

> one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain

Yes, depending on the chain that results in expensive fees, and then there’s the whole wait for validations which makes it not so instant.

> What if you don't want to go through an exchange?

If you want to convert it to a proper currency, you’ll either have to do that, or something like localbitcoin.


> (can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)

Yes, there are quite a few of them. For smaller sums KYC is usually not needed. No exchange needed either - as a customer you just send crypto to the payment address they give you, and as a merchant you receive your funds (minus some fee) in either fiat or crypto. No exchange needed in either case. As a merchant you obviously need to do KYC regardless of the amount received.

I know of Bitpay and ForumPay, but there are others too.

EDIT: depending on the currency the blockchain fees can be very low (or very high), so it pays to do your homework.


> (can one do payments in the 10-100$ USD range on the blockchain? What if you don't want to go through an exchange?)

No, you can't because there's no dollars on the blockchain, only varying degrees of unregistered and unregulated money market fund ranging from something fairly reasonable (USDC) to the Reserve Primary Fund that broke the buck in 2008 (USDT, UST).

To send dollars you have to go through an exchange - well two, actually.

BitPay is an exchange. They just sell crypto on behalf of the merchant and send them the actual money. This is the point where you'd run into AML/KYC/etc issues. Getting money on and off exposes you to massive counterparty risk that could just leave you a creditor in the Bahamas.

You have to combine blockchain fees, exchange fees, forex risk, counter-party risk and legal/compliance risk - plus all blockchain transactions have to be reported with their cost basis on your taxes. If you're trying to do it 'right' you will pay wildly more for anything on the blockchain because decentralization is significantly less efficient.


Actually the payment is made in crypto (BTC, ETH, also USDT if you so desire) and the fiat is paid out to the merchant. Obviously there is some exchange somewhere in the back, but neither merchant nor custumer are interacting with it.

EDIT: I won't be dragged into discussion about crypto. GGP asked about option, I gave one. Do your homework and don't believe random HN posters (which goes for both of us). Over and out.


That's what I said, I think?

> They just sell crypto on behalf of the merchant and send them the actual money.

Did I misunderstand? If so, my bad.

[edit] BitPay is actually fascinating because they publish their merchant breakdown, or at least they used to. It's overwhelmingly all prepaid gift cards, "internet" and VPN. And the share has shifted more and more towards prepaid gift cards. [1]

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1142527/bitpay-payments-...


> What if you don't want to go through an exchange?

You don't need an exchange to take payments, but you will need to trade the currency into fiat at one point, either through an exchange or an OTC trade.


There are alternatives, but you will find support horror stories about all of them. Unless they're very new, maybe. Certainly PayPal/Braintree is no refuge from this sort of madness.


> Are there any real alternatives to Stripe?

Paddle.

More expensive than some, but they become the Merchant of Record and handle sales taxes / VAT / GST / etc. in many countries for you.


Revolut


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.

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.

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).

(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.

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): https://puntofisso.medium.com/paypal-closed-my-account-with-.... And, famously here in the UK, Richard Davey had the same with a high street bank, HSBC: https://medium.com/@photonstorm/hsbc-is-killing-my-business-....

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.

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.

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.

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.


And what happens when this proxy gets hit with the inevitable torrent of fraud attempts? Either it pretends there is no fraud and gets wiped out. Or it attempts to detect fraud, and responds by freezing accounts etc. Sometimes there are false positives. Now we're back to square 1.


I guess I have a blind spot around subterfuge, so I honestly don't really know all of the ways that fraud could occur.

But I think stuff like materiality comes into play. If 99% of customers are honest but 1% cheat, then even a high amount of fraud from bad players may not affect the bottom line much. The fee would probably be something like 3-4 times expenses to make up for losses like that.

Also the proxy would be in addition to the vendor's fraud checks.

In this scenario, maybe the $400k vendor freeze happens towards the end of the month, and the proxy stops its monthly payment from the other customers until it's resolved. So the ticket gets top priority at the vendor and they either release the funds or give the proxy evidence of fraud.

The big risk there might be getting tied up in court so all payments freeze. So maybe the proxy would withhold a percentage instead of the whole. There's probably math for managing that risk. Writing this out, it feels like people have been down this road, so there's probably a term for this whole evolution, maybe escrow or something.


Let's face it: Customer support is viewed as a cost center.

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.


We are reviewing our options.


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?


Well luckily for us we are big enough to be able to handle this, but a lot of smaller companies aren't able to. These are 6+ year old accounts that have been very steady, so it wasn't like we just opened our Stripe account last month and started doing large volume. Overall it was very frustrating and time wasting. That's the main thing. I was confident that we didn't do anything wrong and that we would get it figured out eventually. But, other people might not have the ability to wait as long as we were able to. We definitely had a couple accounts go negative before we loaned money into that accounts though.


Did they give any explanation of exactly why they had temporarily stolen your $400,000?

That's what would worry me the most after it's been resolved, just how arbitrary and opaque and uncommunicative their whole process is.

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.

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.


I'm guessing the risk on Stripe's side is that OP (or someone else!) is using a bunch of stolen credit cards to make purchases. If there are a lot of chargebacks, Stripe's on the hook for that.


Yeah this. I'm actually not upset with Stripe that put our accounts into review. We did have a big sale spike and I can see how that would warrant a review. My issue is with the speed and communication of the whole process.


1. Were you expecting or able to forecast a likely spike due to marketing activities?

2. Could it have helped if Stripe/random payment processor had a way for you to indicate you expect a sales spike and a specific contact route?

Possibly only available to accounts with a cyclic transaction history (multi-year).


Whatever tripped their alarm, not offering customer support for reviewing it is disgraceful. And this is the complaint here: their automated support scripts which send the user to /dev/null.


High-risk businesses have like 14 day payout period, no? So what’s the risk?

I think like 5+ years back chargebacks and credit card fraud was like 0.5% or less for us…


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.

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.


Main problem is that companies not guilty of cutting off communication and, in effect, stealing from customers, get no favorable publicity.

When these happen, we should see posts from people using competitors saying, "we have problems at Z with frequency X that get resolved in time Y".


Maybe it should be the opposite where Support Tickets make the post public to social media like Venmo does with their transactions.


Seeing stories like this makes me very averse to the idea of running a business myself.

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.

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.

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.

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:

> 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.

> 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.


In the case of finance, anti-money laundering laws triump GDPR.

If you as a financial institution suspect money laundering by your client i.e. a spike in transaction volume, you as a financial institution have an unlimited time to not to reply, can freeze the assets and cannot be held responsible for any inconvenience. Even suspecting money laundering is enough, you do not need to have an evidence. In fact it is opposite and it is a criminal offensive to tip off anyone about AML issues. The law is very one sided.

https://www.mondaq.com/cyprus/privacy-protection/1008074/gdp...


I imagine once you're locked out of the account whatever that is, relying on GDPR will mean getting a lawyer and all that - by no means a quick or cheap way to sort out your problem. GDPR will only be helpful after applying enough fines and lost processes, finally forcing Google/Stripe/etc to rethink their support strategy. Which means continuous hassle for today's customers and blaming GDPR for being "toothless" (blame set usually by the same people which claim the invisible hand would sort it out automagically).


Of course none of that applies if the Stripe account belongs to a business as opposed to an individual.


Why not file a police report for the theft of 400k USD?


I've seen local law enforcement not bother to investigate high-five- to low-six-figures of thefts from break-ins at multiple offices over a couple-week span by a single crew whose van was caught on camera complete with license plates at more than one of the offices. The cops didn't care.

This was not in one of the cities that allegedly isn't prosecuting crimes anymore, and was before any of that or the defund movement or what have you, and I'm in a red state. I suspect the people who complain about that stuff as if it's new and caused by recent action have just never interacted with the police before—I have plenty of other examples of their not caring to do any amount of investigation of crimes against individuals, too, no matter what evidence is already at hand, going back decades. And zero examples of their actually investigating anything.

This kind of nuisance report you're suggesting wouldn't go anywhere.


I'm genuinely wondering why this isn't something one can do in a situation like this...

Filing a report when your money is stolen from you is a very logical step to take. Whether or not the police will "deal with it" is an entirely different manner.

Some cases get dropped, and others take years to handle - but what are your other options? To go around writing sob stories on random internet blogs? To beg for the attention of strangers online?

Having a formal police report filed documenting a clear timeline of what happened from your point of view, is about exercising your civil rights to protect your property. It's also useful for insurance purposes, for example.


If you're dealing with a financial institution, odds are they're covered in these cases by anti-fraud laws or provisions in your contract/service-agreement anyway. I expect the cops would roll their eyes and tell you to go away unless you want to risk a false-report charge. They probably see a lot of people trying to file reports against institutions for often-bad reasons and don't have much patience for it. On top of that, they usually don't give a shit even when it's a genuine complaint—the only reason to even go to them is to get (heh, around here, purchase, even) a police report for insurance, if that applies.


> "I expect the cops would roll their eyes and tell you to go away"

Maybe they will, and maybe they won't - but surely it's a dialogue worth having once you've exhausted all other options? I'd imagine that the specifics truly matter, and depending on the severity of the case you could be allowed to file a report?


> I've seen local law enforcement not bother to investigate high-five- to low-six-figures of thefts from break-ins at multiple offices over a couple-week span by a single crew whose van was caught on camera complete with license plates at more than one of the offices. The cops didn't care.

I am a reporter and I cover law enforcement & crime. Are you willing to provide more information about this?


in what jurisdiction would you file that police report? if you are not in the same town as their offices, where are the local police going to go to "investigate"?

this is clearly a matter across state lines, so it's an FBI issue. at least get your LEA correct when making non-sense posts like this. it's the least you could do. I don't even know if FBI is the correct agency either though, so there's that bit of info from some rando on the interwebs


> "in what jurisdiction would you file that police report?"

If I had to guess? File it in your state and it'll get routed from there. Or how about you literally ask the police this exact question?

> "at least get your LEA correct when making non-sense posts like this"

I think you're over complicating this, but you sound like you might know better so...

The police is a sensible starting point, from which you as a citizen should get better guidance on next steps. There may be other mechanisms in the US government that are more appropriate here (ie. FBI, or FinCEN, IRS, etc).


I think the point is that there is no indication of a crime. Your local police will just laugh. Maybe suggest you talk to a lawyer about possible law suits or maybe a complaint with your state's AG.

However, you'll find in your ToS contract that they tell you they can/will suspend your account for suspicion of fraud or other activities. Just because they suck at explaining themselves is not a crime according to the law. Otherwise, so many companies would be breaking the law.

It's so easy to react emotionally to things when they affect your livelihood, but rarely does that actually help the situation.


> "I think the point is that there is no indication of a crime."

Inexplicably being denied access to your own funds without being told what's going on or when the issue will be resolved could be an indication of a crime. I'm not saying it is a clear indication, but I'm not denying the possibility either.

There can be any number of hypothetical reasons for the situation being the way it is, and you can't exclude ones which are clearly criminal in nature (say somebody hacked their account and emptied it for funds). You should also draw parallels to other service providers (hospitals, universities, etc).

> "It's so easy to react emotionally to things when they affect your livelihood"

What other choice do you have in such a situation? This person exhausted every option they had, only to eventually get the help they needed by randomly reaching out to internet strangers. If it wasn't for this, who knows how long they would remain locked out of their account without any visibility into what's going on? Meanwhile, their business would be hurting, creating a cascading effect.

Filing a police report in such a situation isn't "reacting emotionally".


Calling the police is totally an emotional response.

You made a business contract with a company. In that contract, they stipulate that under certain circumstances they will hold your money. What is a problem is the company is completely full of shit in how they handle these situations. They are "protecting themselves" from your account potentially being some sort of fraud. This is all automated with zero to little human involvement which creates potential for lots of false positives. During these cases, the company is 100% at fault for being cheap ass bastards that show zero sympathy towards users.

This is not something for local police to be involved. The disconnect seems to be emotional vs logical.


> "Calling the police is totally an emotional response."

We're going around in circles, but all I'll say is that you could say that about anything. And yet people sometimes end up in prison for stealing candy.

If people won't file reports - all deterrence is lost, and there won't be any incentive for the other side to change. If the mechanism exists, why not use it?


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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dec 21: Asked for update on other 5 accounts status. I was told that they were still under review.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Jan 3: I have confirmed that all of my accounts are now receiving payouts again.


As is the case with this kind of threads, it's quite embarrassing (for Stripe) that HN is their customer support outlet.

Just as HN is great for showing up stuff and building brand awareness, the opposite is true as well; for me, at least, every time I see issues like this it erodes my perception of Stripe and makes me a bit averse of using their services.


There's no better way to make companies fix your issues than publicly dragging them through the mud.

I had a relatively minor issue with a paid battle pass in Paladins, a F2P game by Hi-Rez. After they had stonewalled me for over a month, until the battle pass itself ran out, I tried to stir up a shitstorm on like 5 relevant subreddits. My post failed to really take root on most of them, but it got to frontpage of the Nintendo Switch sub. My issue got resolved within a couple of hours.


And the alternative is??

I'm not suggesting there are no alternatives to Stripe, but I am suggesting I'd be doubtful to think that there are other companies that don't also have painful customer service snafus.


We had a great experience w/ Fastspring: https://fastspring.com/

It has been a few years though since we sold the company. Super easy to set up, super reliable. Never had any issues w/ them.


Funny.

As soon as I read your comment I went there, I clicked on "I'd like to speak with someone" on their chat popup and have been waiting for that all morning, i.e. they don't seem to care much.


Reading between the lines, it looks like: 0. Stripe for some legal reason cannot explain in detail why some transaction is 'flagged' 1. The information Stripe asked for was not enough to reach a decision. 2. Stripe team members dont know how or what to communicate when they dont have a clear decision. 3. Customer is stuck in limbo.


That was a waste of many people's time. I feel a bit sorry for the customer support reps who just spun their wheels in the mud and couldn't come up with a resolution. It's clearly a broken system they're working within. (And it goes without saying that I feel very sorry for the customers on the receiving end of this stonewalling.)


Hrrrm. Interesting.

I wonder if they hit some unspoken of limit whereby they had to provide extra diligence to a bank/creditor to justify the large movement of funds? Or if something about you having 6 seperate accounts had something to do with it. The inability to get a timely resolution likely had something to do with the review team having decreased availibility during the holidays (remember, they probably work hard and have families too, and may have been on vacation or operating at a significantly lower throughput).

I can confirm most places do a horrible job at maintaining customer relationship history, and actually making it readily available to customer service. Furthermore, customer service tends to be just a dispatch point, after an async message is sent, it tends to be the norm that they by default will ask if there's anything else they can do, and if not, on to the next caller/customer.

I've started to push more places toward engaging in synchronous issue resolution for high value issues, as it gets a lot more awkward and has a bigger organizational blast radius when process is so dysfunctional someone external to the organization has to excavate in house communication channels to get an issue resolved.

Far too many places have abandoned customer service/Quality Assurance as high priority operational mandates. The success metric as of late is number of customers who haven't been pissed off enough to leave, thus are still profittable due to willingness to accept our cheapo subpar offering. Not actually happy customers.

If I worked there, y'all woulda been a case study for my group, if it's any comfort.


Is having a spike of sales on Cyber Monday such an unusual situation? How many Stripe accounts get locked on Cyber Monday, Black Friday...?


There are pretty clearly a bunch of middle managers at Stripe making decisions around policies (gutting the ability of workers to actually get work done without excessive oversight) and staffing (running right to the bone for most of the year) which are not sufficient to handle Q4 processing.

And they're probably making a nearly conscious decision that a HN thread like this every now and then is acceptable amounts of bad PR. They'll probably do this to someone else again next year.

It would be nice if "doing a good job" was a core competency of what management culture in the US strived for, but that just isn't the actual game. It is all about maximizing profit for this quarter/year.


Will you be moving away from stripe after this?


Where could they move to that is any better? HN has regular posts like these for all the major payment processors.


I honestly would. This isn't the first time.


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.


I'm not sure who would be willing to build a PCI, AML, KYC, compliant payment service that can accept credit and debit cards from most countries, for $11k USD.


Well you're right, if you create it from scratch. I was rather thinking about creating a simple payment handling module centralizing your bank's own pro platform and other things like paypal, apple pay ... etc


Most of those processing fees get paid out to the card issuer. Square has a good breakdown here: https://squareup.com/payments/our-fees

You're not getting away from those fees, no matter what backend system you're using to process cards. How do you think credit cards make money on those reward programs?


I'd wager the idea behind this isn't to avoid fees but to avoid being swept up in automated systems where they don't care to resolve because even at $400k, you're still "small fish" and you have to reach out to the admin of a industry forum just to get your issue resolved.


Yep, but at least you get payment on your bank account directly.. And for Apple pay, PayPal or things like that I imagine if it's done using stripe on top of that, fees of each platform add up with stripe fees ? Or maybe not ?


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]

Stripe even ghosts people in their job interviews[10].

I've only been on HN for a few years, but I repeatedly see people having horror stories with Stripe like this. Are there really no acceptable alternatives?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32854528

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522784

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9738717

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30535572

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32261868

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712023

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34035581

[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18870886

[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29387264




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