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Comment by lucas_adlp | Hacker News Reader

I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy.

If I share accurate info about what and how we sell things, It's very easy for opportunists and competitors to undertake us in this specific project while our processing solution is down temporarily.

What I will say though, is that we're not speaking vapes or anything borderline, more like kitchen and household appliances, and so on.

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If you ask a community for help you can't expect them to play with half a deck behind your back and 'trust me' when your account is a brand new one. That is simply not how this works. Trust is a two way street, you don't trust HN to know what it is you are selling but you do expect help in solving your problem. Those two don't match, especially not because you use multiple Stripe accounts and have issues with both, that alone is a pretty big red flag. A kitchen and household appliances company that is above board would have zero problems naming their website, nor would they be classified as 'high risk' by Stripe.

> It's very easy for opportunists and competitors to undertake us

This is nonsense, sorry. It really sounds like you're selling something Stripe would understandably want nothing to do with.

I guess what I'm struggling with is: if you're not saying who you are (HN account created 2 hours ago), and you're not saying what the business is, and you're not even sharing something like a Stripe account id or ticket number (some sort of identifier that might help Stripe support identify you), what exact are you hoping to get out of this post?

We all want to believe you and help out, but you're not doing us any favors.

It's really difficult to believe that you're basically selling ordinary household appliances but that for reasons of business strategy you can't even reveal what you're selling.

You can't say what you sell but you have customers buying it?

Yeah, right.

Now we know why you got banned - you're a scammer.

Frankly I'm sick of seeing these articles on HN. You're not having technical issues with Stripe, you're having legal issues. Get a lawyer and get off of HN.

> I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy.

It says all. You are most likely a scammer or criminal.

Yep.

Search below for response from 'caitb' who works at Stripe:

> I work at Stripe, and we're already in touch with OP.

> We don’t comment on specific user cases for privacy reasons. As a reminder, facts presented in a public forum can often be misleading or untrue.

Along with:

> We were in touch with OP over email before this post was made.

> We know that confirming we review cases posted here provides an incentive for bad actors to post.

> We wish that weren’t the case–but we do pay attention to both internal case reviews and to any public complaints where users are having a bad day (or, in some cases, profess to be having a bad day).

And the resolution posted by OP below was:

> UPDATE : Stripe has just closed our account without further notice and refunded the whole balance.

So, this story is that Stripe just protected a whole bunch of people paying around $100 for scams worth up to $250k or so.

As an exercise everyone should spend some time on r/tifu, r/ChoosingBeggars, r/antiwork, etc and play spot-the-fakes, particularly when some story that hits the front page of reddit sounds very appealing to your biases.

Indeed. Another angle to consider: there are a 1001 ways in which people scam other people even if they have a website and it all looks legit to you that doesn't mean it isn't a scam or a way to process gambling or porn charges or to launder money. There are so many ways to do this that I know of because I come across them professionally from time to time and then there are untold ways that I don't know of. So without access to all of the information that Stripe has at their disposal it is impossible to know what's going on even if it looks legit. And Stripe is always going to err on the side of caution simply because no matter how big your business and how important it is to you their reputation, merchant account status and legal exposure is worth infinitely more to them.

> I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy.

How do you get customers if you tell nobody what you sell?

So do you not tell customers what you are selling either for fear of competitors? That might be why Stripe suspended you.

> I cannot be super specific due to the nature of business strategy.

This is such a lie

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