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Comment by aetherspawn | Hacker News Reader

I got scammed around $3000 because stripe sent me an email saying “payment received”, but it was actually processing, and it was eventually declined.

So I gave away the goods thinking everything was good to go.

When it bounced, I rang up and complained and they did nothing, just shrugged it off.

Story ends like this though: caught the thief with the Stripe IP audit log, police raided his house, found hundreds of other items but I never managed to recoup the loss, because mine was gone. I still think that it was Stripes fault because the UX on the email (even the green banner) made it seem like everything was good to go.

(I routinely tell everyone to avoid Stripe now and go with PayPal, someone from Stripe feel free to reach out and change my mind ..)

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I also ran into issues with Stripe, as their automated systems flagged my business as fraudulent and there was no way to call them or get a fast response.

Ended up switching to these guys in Melbourne, never looked back: https://pinpayments.com

Stripe is a shitty company. They openly discriminate against LGBT-oriented businesses by describing such businesses as "adult services" and withdrawing service. A favourite hangout almost had to close its doors recently due to this crap.

Would you be able to email me at edwin@stripe.com about what happened here?

Hah, is this some type of meta commentary about bad UI/UX in the service industry?

Could you please email me at p.mcgee@meta.com to discuss your UX complaint further?

Could you please have this sentence make you breathe manually?

This seems like a tagging mistake by a model or human tbh than a widespread policy

Do they also discriminate against LGBT-oriented businesses that don't meddle with adult services such as porn and prostitution?

One of those is not like the other. Prostitution is illegal in most places, so I don't have any beef with them avoiding it.

Porn is legal, and should not be discriminated against, but that's beside the point. The business in question was providing 100% legal services for adults, but nothing to do with either porn or prostitution.

Are you saying it is ok to discriminate against a business just because their services are oriented towards adults and not children? If that is the case, then Stripe should also discriminate against "straight" bars and pubs, which is not the case.

No, that's not what I'm saying at all. Okay, let's cut the bullshit. What are these LGBT-oriented businesses exactly? I'm clearly trying to figure out whether being "LGBT-oriented" has anything to do with this decision by Stripe.

It’s almost certainly the case that the parent commenter was referring to a gay bar.

What is a LGBT-oriented business? LGBT is about sexuality, hence...

LGBTQ friendly businesses exist as a supportive space for likeminded individuals. This sort of thing has been around (openly enough) since the 70s.

Could you cite an example?

It's mind blowing that the police responded to your complaint. May we ask how you managed this?

Because I lodged it as site theft (due to them sending a courier to pick it up), and skipped the cyber division.

When I lodged the report (in person at the police station), I was able to find the courier job on Airtasker and provide the police with the phone number of an exec at Airtasker that I reached out to, and with the job ID and the IP address of the organiser who was using card fraud (from Stripe). They took the case straight away because there was a strong witness (the courier) and a strong lead on the organiser due to building IP trace from the telco (a young kid living in their parents basement).

It took them only about 2 weeks to get a permit to raid. The IP trace was essential because they had the courier deliver it to a fake address in a nearby suburb, where they impersonated the householder.

This is nuts, I can’t even do half the stuff you did to make this work but hats off to you for pulling it off!

Hmm, my biggest issue with Stripe was verifying my account while living in one country, while being a national of, and having a company registered in another. Their system just thinks that if your company is in one country, your home address must naturally be as well.

Hm, sorry about this. Could you email me at edwin@stripe.com? Would like figure out what went wrong here.

Holy sh*t - that is horrible and a lot of money. Things like this should be advertised on the Payment company site with big red text. And describe each type of scam and a count of those.

In this particular case, did the card billing address and shipping address match?

If you were selling high dollar electronic items or similar online, in my opinion it would be reckless to not implement that as a firm policy, which is fairly standard with high fraud risk vendors such as for photography equipment.

As a purchaser, I know that I've been on the customer side of this many times, ensuring that whatever small, high value electronic thing that I was purchasing from a certain vendor was being shipped to the address which is also set up for my bank and credit card bill.

I have often purchased items online asking for them to be delivered to my parents' address, or the address of a friend, or my work address. If a site has not offered this option, I would have found another, no doubt about that. So, as a customer, I think it would be reckless to require me to have the same billing and shipping address.

There are plenty of reasons it might not be even possible to ship an item to a billing address! That's a rather absurd policy to enforce.

fairly normal if somebody is buying like, a $5000 camera

Why should that matter? I've had at least one credit card in the past where the billing address was a PO Box, with no option to leave bulky items there. What's wrong with requiring a signature?

Isn’t PayPal pretty notorious for being a good fraud tool because it is so consumer friendly?

PayPal is absolutely 10000 times worse than Stripe, it's ridiculous to recommend them over basically any other payment processing service. They are the worst.

Obviously I don’t know the details of Stripe or your particular transaction, but in general payment systems tend to be extremely eventually consistent. (This is partly for historical reasons, and partly because they’re designed for robust interoperability and so fall back to resolving problems with phone calls between banks.)

Payment providers generally have heuristics to mark transactions as successful when there’s a high chance they’ve been finalized, but unfortunately this sometimes fails. In theory the final arbiter is the court system, but obviously that also has its limitations, as you encountered.

TLDR: It’s annoying, but I’m not sure any other provider would have actually done any better here.

If a payment provider makes definitive statements about the status of a payment they should be required to carry full liability for correctness.

You have convinced me to never use Stripe and I will share this story to people in the future as to why.

Stripe has reinvented check clearing fraud, how wonderful :(

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