It sucks this happened to you, but like with all the PayPal hate stories, I notice you're very careful not to describe what type of business you operate.
> They know exactly who our customers are and what services we offer, and have approved it as such.
which sounds like you offer services out of the ordinary.
It's not much to go on but it's all we have.
For example, selling video game digital products like a strategy guide is benign, but gaming industry is ripe with fraud so most processors will give you shit if you're in the gaming niche, let alone (non-crypto) digital currencies, crypto, health products, non-snakeoil supplements, etc.
Source: I used to run adult websites which is considered 'high risk' and also these days responsible for overseeing 1M/m in CC processing for a state agency.
Creating a new account on here to potentially get support is just plain wrong, and needs dealing with IMO. Should never hit the front page.
Also consider that if the situation continues your pissed-off downstream customers will ID you sooner or later.
Think about how they can accept 100+ currencies without a relationship with some dodgy central banks in developing countries.
There are absolutely items on that list for political reasons.
> Guns, gunpowders, ammunitions, weapons, fireworks and other explosives. Peptides, research chemicals, and other toxic, flammable and radioactive materials
Why does the payment processor get to dictate whether I can run a defense ordnance company or run a scientific chemical supplies store?
Some of this stuff needs to be challenged in the court or regulated so that payment processor has no say whatsoever in whatever their belief system says about legitimacy of a business.
Because they have the legal right to do so? They could ban companies run by redheads, if they like. As long as they're not discriminating based on very specific sets of criteria established by law, they get to choose who they do business with.
The government requiring private citizenry to associate with everyone who wishes to associate with them seems like a very dark path to go down.
It is entirely legal in the United States to discriminate against redheads, or people whose names start with B, or Hacker News users, or people who enjoy skiing.
Under 29 CFR § 1606.1, national origin is defined as but not limited to: An individual's, or his or her ancestor's, place of origin; or because an individual has the physical, cultural or linguistic characteristics of a national origin group.
If a future Court ever decides hair color denotes national origin, fall back to a different example of your choosing; people with tattoos, Mac users, viola players.
Also, what's your evidence that some payment processors don't handle porn because of government pressure, rather than just natural market forces? I had a friend who did tech for a porn company, and from what he says, even a well-run porn company has much higher rates of chargebacks (e.g., next-day regrets and "no honey I don't know what that charge is") and fraud (stolen cards, fraudulent affiliate program participants).
It is also very common.
They can be proved to be incorrect, for exmpale if they refer into their own ToS, which is public information and binding. And then some legal expert says that this is not how it goes and it ends up into court, because customer sees risks being lower.
If they made a mistake or there was a software failure, it is bad PR.
If they ban someone for some specific reason but not someone else, there will be drama.
It is very beneficial to just say nothing.
In most cases, you will not be given details if fraud is suspected. The reason being that companies don't want to tell fraudsters how they got caught.
The real culprits here are the people trying to violate the TOS, plus everybody's desire for cheap services and easy onboarding. The historical alternative was very expensive setup (e.g., spend a few years building a relationship with your local bank branch manager and establishing a financial track record). Making it easy to get started means that most problems will show up down the road, and the lower merchant costs means less money to pay for smart people to carefully untangle the truly dodgy from accounts that just look that way.
I get that, but I don't see how actually telling people what term of service was violated gives too much leverage to the bad guys.
I have seen way to many stories about people claiming to have been banned for no reasons from services (online video games are a popular one) before it is revealed the ban was 100% legitimate, to take any new story like this at face value.
I made a mistake out of inexperience, was refused the chance to correct that mistake, and all of my PayPal accounts -- including my PERSONAL account that I had had for years -- were banned because they were started by a person (me) who had an account frozen or banned. Is that a legitimate enough story?
PayPal had banned me because I was under 18 when I opened my account, they then allowed me to open a new one (right after this one got suspended) and it has been working fine without any issue since then (10 years+).
Stop doing shady stuff.
If PayPal requires an SSN or EIN, why do they even allow you to create an account without one?
The guy can't keep his story straight for 3 lines on HackerNews, he is obviously doing stuff that he shouldn't and using his PayPal in a sketchy manner.
One year ago this month, Twitter permanently suspended a 340,000-follower account for “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.” The owner of that account, the former New York Times reporter and vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson, responded with a lawsuit demanding reinstatement. . . .
. . . Earlier this summer, Twitter put Berenson’s account back online, noting that “the parties have come to a mutually acceptable resolution.” Berenson wasted little time in calling out mainstream media for failing to cover the “pathbreaking settlement” that led to his return. . . .
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/08/alex-...
How many companies using Stripe have had multiple conversations about the TOS? I would guess it’s a minority. Not a topic anyone is usually excited to talk about.
They can determine up front if it violates the TOS
They can notify the customer of the SPECIFIC violation IN DETAIL, and what can be done to cure it, and provide time to do so.
They can deny access to the transaction instead of nuking the entire business for some algorithmic flag.
The Stripes and PayPals of the world do NONE of this. Instead, they act like they accept almost all businesses, get them dependent on that piece of infrastructure, then willfully trash the business on a whim.
I completely agree with you that how these companies handle these issues is completely wrong, if not fraudulent.
However, by a long series of deliberate actions, Stripe has made it irrelevant to the fact that they are now deliberately, unilaterally, and with zero notice whatsoever shutting down that biz' critical infrastructure.
They could have, and should have as a part of KYC compliance, already figured out what type of business it is. If they failed at that, then fine, give them 60 days notice to find other infrastructure. Stripe is taking its OWN FAILURE to properly vet their customers according to their own standards and dumping the consequences onto the ex-customers. Sorry, but unless we're talking actual provable international criminal/autocratic money-laundering, that's just wrong.
Huh? Of course they do. Just one example:
https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/article/what-is-paypal%E...
always read the fine print
That is indeed the question. There is no way of knowing if the nature of the business is a factor unless you know that nature of the business.
If for some reason Stripe wants to withdraw that support, they must give their reasons and a proper period for transition to another provider.
I don't think your judgmental paranoia is founded.
https://www.reddit.com/r/paypal/
and
https://www.trustpilot.com/review/paypal.us
and
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-06-03/paypal-cu.... (which was attempted as a class action lawsuit)
The businesses were very not shady, and nowhere near morally controversial.
My impression from that piece and these stories is that Stripe is having some technical problems and it's wreaking havoc everywhere.
I wish I could remember the details better. They were focused on small business owners, retail mostly. I think they started out with an interview of someone with an interior design-related business.
if it's egregious, I'm assuming someone from stripe could get in here and ask permission from the OP to explain to the community what happened?