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Comment by edwinwee | Hacker News Reader

(Edwin from Stripe here.) Just saw your email. I’m sorry for the trouble—we’re looking into this now.

Thanks so much, Edwin.

Just some feedback from me. Here's email 1, which looks automated: > Our systems recently identified charges that appear to be unauthorized by the customer, meaning that the owner of the card or bank account did not consent to these payments. This means that we can no longer accept payments

Email 2, which feels like a human looked at it: > Thank you for completing our verification process. Unfortunately, after conducting a further review of your account, we’ve determined that we still won't be able to accept payments for xxx moving forward.

Finally email 3, definitely a human: > It looks like some activity on your account was misidentified as unauthorized, causing potential charge declines and the cancellation of your account. This was a mistake on our end, so we've gone ahead and re-enabled your account.

There's a lot of mixed messages here that could lead customers, like myself, to freak out. It feels like there should be a different process. If it wasn't for me reaching out in a bunch of places, I would've been lost as a customer.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go take my heart medication.

These get more and more frightening as you go along. You shut down someone's business and you just casually mention you will re-enable them almost as if it is a favor?

I'm sorry you are going through this.

Welcome to Platform Capitalism.

I wonder how 3x startup founder got into such a vendor lock, having no backup plan in case when a vendor cancels.

Edwin from stripe - is it too much to ask to have an actual human look at the data and make decisions that concern someones finances and earning situations? What does a ‘100B’ startup even mean if you cant even invest in some decent customer care and outreach… looks like nothing was learned from the Robinhood fiasco.

I can't share specifics about OP's account, but four humans reviewed the data (i.e. humans hit send on each of the above emails). This is no excuse, though—verifying the legitimacy of a business while protecting customers from fraudsters is something we don't take lightly. This was a rare case in which we were missing some info—but we want future cases to be increasingly rarer. We're reviewing what happened to prevent something similiar from happening again.

> humans hit send on each of the above emails

Some human might have hit the send button but those emails definitely don't look like they were authored for this specific case as it looks like a generic template email.

Good to see the OP got their issue resolved but I hope someone at stripe implements at least a call back and email reach out before shutting down someone's business in the future. This is a very similar issue with Google where they shut down entire developer accounts without explanation and developers have to create enough shit storm from social media and tech blog posts to get a human to reach out. Droidscript being the most recent well known case:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26956077

Do you intend on going back and reviewing past accounts that were terminated for the same reason?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com