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Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

What if, get this, instead of all this vague shit about doing better you just had a support team you could talk to without blowing up on twitter/hn?

If I wanted to charge people on the internet right now I would go with Authorize, even though I've used Stripe in the past and had good experiences. Now my understanding is that I pay for the convenience of the better API etc. with the inconvenience of being unable to talk to a human that can make decisions if something goes wrong, unless I get sufficient upvotes/retweets.

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My understanding is that in most cases of fraud, what customers are looking for (clear explanations for why the account was suspended, funds are being held, etc.) will simply not be possible, either due to legality, or that the company will intentionally withhold information so that the fraudsters won't figure out how to work around the protections. Obviously this hurts legitimate customers who get tripped up by the system, but at Stripe's scale that's probably the "price of doing business" as the saying goes.

It's true that we can't be more specific about users in HN posts. But we do hear the legitimate feedback about getting more specific/helpful in sharing status with users where we've asked for more info from them (or when they are asking for more info/help from us). I don't think we've found the right balance in either case yet -- working on it.

This is all I want from any service that I buy from. Good, responsive support without scripted responses and black hole email addresses.

Surely that is even more important with a business critical payment provider?

I’ll forgive a lot if that is in place.

> This is all I want from any service that I buy from. Good, responsive support without scripted responses and black hole email addresses.

Many commenters in this thread are saying OP's account was frozen because of suspected fraud/money laundering. If that's true, what would "responsive support without scripted responses and black hole email addresses" entail?

Telling the OP that this is the case. Offering them the opportunity to supply evidence to the contrary.

The standard line in cases like this (whether it's a frozen payments account, a rejected app, or a suspended social media account) is that you can't tell someone what rule they broke, because this gives too much informative feedback to actual malicious actors about how they got caught. I call bullshit. Until someone can demonstrate that this is an actual problem, I will believe it to be a fake problem, purely an excuse used by giant companies to justify their systematically hostile (and cheap) approach to customer service.

> Until someone can demonstrate that this is an actual problem, I will believe it to be a fake problem

If a payment processor suspects money laundering, it's illegal for them to tell the business that. Under anti-money-laundering legislation, this is considered a crime called "tipping off": https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9780470685280.ch...

(Disclaimer: Used to work at Stripe, but not on this particular area. Not an expert on either the law or Stripe's policies.)

It is illegal to do so, but is it an actual problem?

This point is always repeated, and never proven.

I don't have a dog in this fight, but FYI (and it's been said before and may be said again) that there are LEGAL requirements by the US federal government for banks to NOT tell customers the status/reason for frozen assets if they have been flagged for potential money laundering. That may be the case here, it may not, and I don't know if Stripe is regulated like that or not.

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