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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

It seems a little unfair to blame Stripe here. Per their communication, the site has been assessed as selling illegal merchandise and is subject to a $425k fine by the payment card issuers, despite Stripe's efforts to dispute the issue on behalf of their client. It's not clear to me whether this is the first that Flurly has heard about the issue or represents the last stage of an ongoing story, which Flurly's users were unaware of until now.

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(Edwin from Stripe here.) This is a really unfortunate situation. I can't talk specifics since it's a regulatory/legal matter and the decision wasn't up to us. But as others have pointed out, Stripe Connect should be used if you're building a marketplace. This gives the marketplace owner, Stripe, and the card networks some visibility into what's being exchanged—and so the marketplace owner can put proper safeguards in place to keep the marketplace safe, for both sellers and their customers. I'm saddened by what happened and I hope this does not deter JR from building future products.

I was pleasantly surprised at both of the emails they posted from Stripe. They seem to be more informational than similar situations in the past.

It's still a crap situation for Flurly and their customers, but if newsawp wasn't scammy or breaching credit card issuers' terms, then blame lies with whichever credit card company forced Stripe to take action, and if newsawp was behaving badly, then blame lies with Flurly for not doing a better job of vetting their merchants.

Stripe is on the hook for that $425k as well because it is their merchant account use to process transactions. If they don't pay it, card brands will cut them off.

This why stripe is quick to ban merchants.

FWIW, the site mentioned by Flurly (newsawp.com) looks like a dressed-up web spam tool. And that's assuming that it wasn't a front for something else.

Yeah, it sounds like Flurly was shut down by Visa/Mastercard, not Stripe.

Is Flurly literally a front end for users to sell whatever products they want via stripe? Lol

If the linked post is truthful, the issue here is the absolute opacity of the process and the fact that this "assessment" by the credit card network (I notice you used the passive voice "been assessed" - why?) seems very questionable.

I would certainly not trust stripe to effectively "dispute the issue on behalf of their client", based on experiences some of my friends have had with stripe. More likely, stripe just folded instantly upon receiving some automated nastygram from the CC issuer.

The opacity is by design. Fraudsters will use every bit of available information to make their businesses appear legit.

Having worked at Stripe (though not in risk), I'd wager that Stripe did not "fold instantly" for a 425k fine. It's unfortunate, but the OP is the one who made a costly mistake when they grandfathered existing accounts into a setup they knew had liabilities.

It's in stripe's best interest to fight the fine. Why would you think they would prefer to pay the networks and collect the fine from a merchant?

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