Stripe closed our account over upsell transaction architecture, not fraud
Stripe shut down our account citing "unauthorized payments" and is holding ~$50K with plans to auto-refund customers who already received their products.
After investigating, we identified the root cause. Our checkout platform (CheckoutChamp) was processing post-purchase one-click upsells as separate Stripe charges, using the stored payment token without 3D Secure. About 64% of our customers accepted upsells, meaning the majority of orders generated multiple charges on customer bank statements. Customers who didn't recognize these separate charges likely triggered Early Fraud Warnings (Visa TC40/Mastercard SAFE) — which Stripe's Radar system picked up as "unauthorized" activity.
This is a transaction architecture issue, not fraud. The same upsell flow works fine on Shopify because Shopify's post-purchase API adds the upsell to the existing order rather than creating a new charge. CheckoutChamp creates separate charges.
We've already fixed this: disabled all post-purchase upsells, canceled all recurring subscriptions, and restructured the flow so future add-ons consolidate into one transaction.
We submitted 33+ documents through the dashboard (EIN, Articles of Organization, 6 months bank statements, supplier contracts, 3PL invoices, inventory photos, customer order confirmations). We offered a 15% rolling reserve. We showed them the customer emails proving full transparency.
Every support case gets auto-closed with a template response. No one has told us which specific transactions are "unauthorized." One response even referenced a completely different company name ("Greg Misc LLC" — we are JS Commerce Group LLC).
Today we received what appears to be a final rejection — again a template, with no acknowledgment of the root cause analysis we submitted two days ago. Stripe is now starting automatic refunds within 5 days to customers who have their products in hand.
We emailed Patrick Collison directly. We're running out of options.
Has anyone dealt with a similar situation where Stripe flagged legitimate post-purchase upsell charges as unauthorized? Interested in hearing what actually worked to get a human review.