The accounts that are restricted are all 5+ years old and have been used nonstop in that time. Anyone know a better way to get this resolved because regular support hasn’t been able to do anything to help or explain what happened.
Can you share more context around avoiding SVB?
SVB: Used them about 10 years ago for a startup. Didn't go back to them when I started my second business, as I didn't feel like they had many staff or really cared about having me as a customer.
that sounds horrible. What do you mean by this ?
I assume by "sweeping" the GC meant transferring funds to a bank outside of PP?
So, double check to make sure you didn't do anything stupid.
stop putting paranoid financial services on a pedestal
It's because if it turns out to be money laundering, theft, or fraud, Stripe gets shafted financially (best case), and fairly likely FBI agents show up and start asking pointed questions.
We could opt not to respond to issues on Hacker News on New Year's Eve—but we do. That's what supporting each and every one of our users looks like in practice.
Nothing has changed from what I wrote on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34037757.
If not, I don't understand otherwise why this would happen.
Even if you don't understand why, it shouldn't come as a surprise. Megacorps wrongfully lock people out of their accounts with no recourse all the time these days. We need a law to the effect of "once your service has more than a million users, if it wouldn't be trivial and painless for them to switch to a competitor of yours, then you can't ban them without due process."
Bureaucracies do this kind of thing all the time for opaque and arbitrary reasons that may have absolutely nothing to do with the account holder in question.
Because mistakes happen? You really think every single entity investigated for fraud or money laundering is guilty?
They are probably doing something wrong or most likely having a very risky business.
Even if you know you've done nothing wrong (but of course audit your transaction history to make sure), you'll want to have an appropriate lawyer ready.
What can I use to charge a monthly rate for members of my website?
Don't keep 400k cash in stripe, the merchant account is not a damn bank.
So you need to sweep out accounts from both Stripe AND your bank account connected to Stripe.
I say that from experience with Stripe...
If a business is wholly dependent on a particular vendor and that vendor offers additional support, it seems to behoove the business to pay for the additional vendor support.
It's similar to people who complain that they are losing millions of dollars because they can't get Azure support to work with them, but then when asked if they have contacted their account rep confess they don't have an account manager to help them.
Basically paying for additional support is like insurance, you probably won't need it, but if you do you'll be glad you have it.
Not that this helps at all, I’m just curious.
Until then, godspeed crypto, you wasteful dysfunctional mess of a solution.
I hope it gets sorted out ASAP.
Stripe and others, up your game.
Update: Stripe is holding over $400k of mine with no explanation [resolved] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34233011 - Jan 2023 (191 comments)
I'm not particularly litigious, but I'd be suing by $40k, if only to get a resolution to satisfy my creditors.
What's crazier is you're still throwing money into this black hole! You claim imminent insolvency but haven't changed your payment processor. What?
2) To the people who say that these kinds of stories aren't relevant and shouldn't be posted on HN, I'd strongly disagree for these reasons.
> There are many startup founders here who won't ever realize that keeping loads of cash in their payment processor is a bad idea if they don't see these stories. Just because they've been posted in the past doesn't mean that they'll see them now if they're not regularly posted.
> This is legitimately an issue that affects peoples' lives: not only many jobs if companies can't make payroll, but actual life/death. I'm sure there's a number of entrepreneurs who have eventually committed suicide because of bad/scummy behavior of tech companies causing them to lose everything they've worked for.
Further, stop using stripe if you don't like them - I get the impression that most of the stripe complaints on HN are bogus though this could always be a real one
If I had to guess I'd say that the escape room(s) for which you're selling tickets are in some kind of legal trouble and your company as a vendor of tickets to those escape rooms is also being investigated. (It's unclear to me if you're the owner of the corporate entity that owns/runs these escape rooms or if you're simple a ticket seller to various escape rooms, e.g., a "Groupon but for escape rooms".)
Many friends who sell spare computer parts on eBay have had their PayPal accounts frozen over the years, so they've developed a process whereby if they're relying on a payment processor (PayPal for eBay transactions; stripe for other transactions) they will set up a 'cash out to my bank account' process on as often a cadence as possible. Ideally nightly if that's an option. I haven't used Stripe, but does anyone know if there's a setting whereby you can say "punt my Stripe balance over to my bank account every X days"?
Also, there's a push to use payment processors and 'neobanks' (see below) to basically do parts of the IRS' job for the IRS (or I should say that the government is allowing these private corporations to take on the role of governmental agencies probably in return for campaign finance contributions):
- https://www.propublica.org/article/chime
- https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/07/the-chime-banking-ap...
Immigrants, children of undocumented immigrants, the recently incarcerated, the poor, etc. are the Chime customer base. One of the draws with Chime is that you can get your paycheck a few days early, so it's literally a payday lender, but calls itself a "neobank". As digital surveillance increases in the ability to connect transactions across disparate systems I expect these sorts of actions by Stripe, Chime, and other fintech companies to increase in frequency.
Sorry I don't have any "here are 5 steps to take to get your account back to normal" guides, but I wish you luck and - like others are suggesting - I would probably retain legal counsel.
