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.
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).
This is likely some callcenter-adjacent scam. They're probably doing this to hundreds of shops, and occasionally get one cave in and pay.
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.
Actually the amounts cited are well below the FBI's interest threshold in any case.
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).
It's starting to seem like for too many companies, resolving public complaints has become a line item in the marketing budget.
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.
But either way I don't use them anymore as they're just not reliable in a situation where you might be stranded etc.
[1] https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...
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-...
In a world of indifference, that’s a solid stake in the ground.
Granted, everyone is busy and it isn't always followed, but as a guiding organizational foundation one can do a lot worse.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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..."
I think that's why support employees aren't given very many controls to override the way the system works...
https://www.propublica.org/article/meet-the-customer-service...
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.
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".
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.
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.
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).
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.
The issue would be catching things early and managing them cost effectively before they blow up in the public sphere.
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.
(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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's tough to track metrics like that.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Paddle.
More expensive than some, but they become the Merchant of Record and handle sales taxes / VAT / GST / etc. in many countries for you.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Until there is some negative financial consequence associated with inadequate customer support, there will be no improvement, so plan accordingly.
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 think like 5+ years back chargebacks and credit card fraud was like 0.5% or less for us…
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.
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".
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
I am a reporter and I cover law enforcement & crime. Are you willing to provide more information about this?
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
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
