Comment by Redhill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Redhill | Hacker News Reader

Let me clarify some things for you people:

I run an AI technologies company, that does not fall under the prohibited company terms and conditions for stripe, it doesn't operate under any illegality, it is a genuine AI image generation service with other tools like text to audio, etc

Here is what I got after 6 days worth of sales: https://ibb.co/WyRGprh (this expires after 3 months but essentially says "Your business does not meet our terms" ... okay, why doesn't it meet our terms you ask? here is the reason they emailed me with: https://ibb.co/mynwqhD (basically them telling me they think a fraudulent payment happened to me and to be careful they're shutting me down)

excuse me, what? you have billions and billions of dollars are you tell me you "think" fraud has happened ? what is the radar that I'm being taxed more on for? as you can see here my settings for the radar is in full effect and I have 0 chargebacks or blocks -> https://ibb.co/3TCS5S6, https://ibb.co/D4FqLcS

Do you see my frustration???? as a small business owner you can't shut down companies based on "i think" with no actual evidence.. so I had to appeal about 5 times to actually get them to consider, had to even mention negative media attention for them to even consider reviewing me.. this isn't a fraud case or justified closure of account this is also not a mistake, I've seen issues like this dating back 2 years ago.. this is simply being ignorant to the issues at hand

Thanks for sharing detail about your business publicly—I'm sorry we can't support your business. Per our terms of service, adult content and services are prohibited (https://stripe.com/legal/restricted-businesses#:~:text=Adult...). This was already communicated to you.

From your Discord channel (https://discord.com/invite/cupidai): "CUPID AI is a smart AI-based NSFW and SFW subscription entertainment and content generation platform that provides AI generated content and realistic chatbots to consumers, entrepreneurs and companies for profit or non-profit use cases."

https://snipboard.io/Q0X3RK.jpg

That is very outdated text, — 09/05/2023 00:16, we changed directions 2 months ago and we already had a notice about this from stripe and this is the main reason we decided to pivot directions... but yes we do not do NSFW, that was just an outdated text since that was 3 months ago, since I've been busy I did forget about that but I will change it, but that isn't the issue I'm having with stripe, the issue is them closing my account for "fraudulent charges".. but yeah I'll be changing that ASAP since you brought it to my attention

and also to further explain, we offer AI tools that can be used on a wide array of use cases- that being said do you outlaw knives because they can be used for murder when in face they can be used to cut vegatables? stripe should base their prohibited business list off the content sold and distributed mainly by the service, not what the consumers do with the service.. and like I said i've been allowed to operate on stripe and I am passed that as they have already allowed me to operate selling AI tools but an example from this is that amazon (that uses stripe or has used stripe) has tons of media attention of people doing fraud, will they shut down amazon because the consumers do fraud? no, so why should they play with peoples money like that?

The knives argument holds no water. I think Stripe would be in the right regarding NSFW content as it relates to their TOS (maybe at fault for using outdated info and not communicating with you so you didn’t have to find out this reason on HN).

And yet, nsfw content is not fraudulent charges.

Knives argument was correct in the fact that stripe should decide to punish businesses for the production of user generated content that they cannot prevent. putting restrictions on it will not work, ask sam altman how restricting GPT4 is going, you cannot beat the people at censoring your technologies, so penalizing the business for something out of their control is stupid.. and as for the stripe being in the right, they have let popular NSFW content platform Onlyfans operate on their site before.. not sure if they do so now but they have allowed Onlyfans on stripe.. so ToS is out the window when the most popular NSFW selling content site is on stripe

Maybe they have, but Onlyfans would not be able to complain if Stripe decided to kick them out for that. It would be at their discretion. I think what you want is consistency, but companies, and even governments have shown us we cannot expect policies/laws to be applied the same for every one. A cop will stop only one of 3 speeding cars.

Have you found this out just now, is this the actual reason they were blocked and was this communicated to them clearly?

If this is not the root cause then pointing this out as part of this conversation is misleading. If it is, why was it necessary for OP to find this out on HN?

Yes, this was already communicated to the business two weeks before posting here—we don't support adult content per our restricted business list.

Thanks for clarifying

do you still process for onlyfans?

NSFW wasn't the reason I posted here.. I don't care enough to post here about something like that, I don't like posting and making noise about things.. the reason I posted her was due to the fraudulent charges claims.. they wanted to close my accounts based on no information, they didn't provide me with any proof or information to back what they claim up.. I, on the other hand had multiple screenshots proving that my chargeback rate was 0, I used the default radar settings and I had 0 blocks on stripe, so if anything it's stripe that has issues.. this has nothing to do with the NSFW thing, I had no NSFW block on my account as you see in the screenshots

I had messaged support 5 times before posting here, I had been declined the appeal once and I was not going to allow myself be bullied off the site for a mistake they made

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