Apple destroyed my 7-figure business
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Also how do you sell a mobile app without a mobile ecosystems? It’s someone else’s platform all the way down.
Google does the same with adsense; if you have a competitor which makes a good amount with Adsense, just hire a botnet and have it click ads. Happened to us as well.
They should not care about this and just leave it; they know it could be a competitor more likely than it is you (if you make 7 figures for an extended period of time, why would you suddenly do this?); if they can detect suspicious behaviour, why do they care about it and not just filter it? But nope; you get axed and no one cares. It is really very important to make sure you don’t trust one platform when real real starts coming in.
If you are around long enough, you will have many bad platform stories. Every moment I see money coming in via 1 source, I get nervous and start planning to diversify that dependency.
At the moment Stripe stories keep popping up over here; if you make a lot of money, you should have multiple alternatives or, better, get very close to an acquirer; they will answer your calls and the fees will be lower too; sure it’s more integration work, but if you make enough money, why is that more important than securing your future?
But more so, they don't actually care that much about the whys. If your app draws lots of fraudulent purchases, they want it dead. You're just creating negative revenue (when the fraudulent purchases are reversed) and bad reputation for Apple.
Kill-x-app-as-a-service would be popular among scammers.
The way that payment processors see it is that sites that accept payment's duty is to take enough precautions -- based on the nature of their business, the profile of their customers, etc. -- to keep fraud down to a relatively low level. And if your site is a magnet for fraud you've failed to be a good citizen and they're entitled to be harsh with you. They in return eat the primary liability for fraudulent payments -- that is, they may try to recover fraud from the sites, but it's anyone's guess whether they will be able to, while they themselves will always be on the hook for it.
From the perspective of especially smaller sites, it can be like, "Wait, what? What were we supposed to do? How were we supposed to even know that people were using us for fraud?"
There's definitely a lot of room for the payment processors to misbehave and push more liability onto the sites than is perhaps optimal.
From my experience, there are many cases where involving a lawyer makes a hard problem much harder.
Then the lawyer explained that we would win but with appeal this will take 3 years. Or we can settle for 1/3rd of what was owed to me. The stress in the court room isn't for me. I settled and took the loss. Add the lawyer fees, time wasted and stress. Not worth the effort in that case.
I had another problematic customer a few years later and I just stopped it after the letter writing process. Not worth the aggravation. Luckily these are two very rare occasions. I pick and choose my customers since then.
Just $10k would be 50 hours @ $200. Maybe his cashflow was such that he couldn't manage this by that time but coming up against like $1M revenue a year it seems silly to do all that other weird stuff (like crashing some kid's birthday party? hope that was an exaggeration) and not do the one thing that guarantees some type of attention & response.