Stripe withheld $85k from our EU platform | Hacker News Reader

Stripe withheld $85k from our EU platform

36 pointsMelkerWendelbo19 comments

I'm the founder of Zorq AI (zorqai.com), an AI video and image generation platform based in Sweden. I want to share what happened to us as a warning to other founders, and to seek advice from anyone who has been through something similar. We launched in November 2025 and grew quickly. On March 24, Stripe flagged our account for a routine credit review due to a spike in volume. We submitted all requested documents. On March 28, Stripe closed our account permanently citing "unacceptable level of risk." Our current Stripe balance is 803,043 SEK (~$85,000 USD): Available: 556,906 SEK Pending: 246,136 SEK

The critical part: Stripe support confirmed in writing: "If a balance still remains in your account after eligible payments have been refunded, it will not be made available to you." No specific legal basis. No policy violation cited. Why disputes occurred — being fully transparent: There were two real technical issues on our end that we want to be honest about:

Our Stripe webhook handler was being rate-limited by Cloudflare (429 errors), causing credits not to be delivered to some customers after payment. We fixed this with retry logic and manually resolved every affected customer same day. Our infrastructure provider unexpectedly went down, forcing a 25-hour emergency migration. We built a recovery system so customers could restore their credits using their Stripe receipt number. Every customer who reached out received credits or a full refund.

We acknowledge these issues caused disputes. We have resolved all of them. Why this is legally questionable: Stripe Technology Europe Limited is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland as an EMI under PSD2. We are in the EU. The permanent withholding of merchant funds without a documented legal basis is questionable under EU payment regulations. Stripe has not cited which specific clause or policy we violated. What we are doing:

Submitted a formal appeal with full documentation to Stripe Contacted lawyers regarding PSD2 implications Filing complaints with Finansinspektionen (Sweden) and Central Bank of Ireland

Has anyone successfully challenged Stripe's fund withholding in the EU? Has anyone worked with lawyers experienced in this specifically?

You have to sue them. If you don’t sue them, they’ll keep doing it.

I am not sure about Stripe terms of service but don't most companies have some hatch-key terms of service to prevent suing. (I am not sure about stripe but there are some products that if you use their service, then you can only sue them for 1$ for example)

My recommendation feels as to get the money as soon as possible and then contact a lawyer and see if they can get enough pay-off from this somewhat, rightful lawsuit.

IANAL, but Maybe if they make even more than 85k$ by suing them right now, then perhaps they can sue them right now but maybe a lawyer here can give more definitive answer as to how they should proceed (and perhaps they shouldn't listen to any of us online people especially about the law)

OP, I suggest contacting a lawyer just in case.

In most European countries, UK excluded, the law of contracts doesn't work this way.

Reasonableness and good faith are implied in contracts. If a clause kills the essence of a contract maliciously, the court will not enforce it.

As I understood it, even in the UK there is the concept of a 'reasonable man' as in, the contract should perform as a 'reasonable man' would expect. If it does not, that is enough to get such terms discarded. So, you cannot just obfuscate the contract with impenetrable legalese that excludes reasonable things and expect to get away with that. Which is not to say that (insurance) companies will not try.

my source for this was an ex career insurance man (retired out)

Yes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_on_the_Clapham_omnibus

The difference is you have to sue for e.g. negligence if a term is reasonable but not implied in the contract.

In civil law you can sue with an action under contract enforcement, which carries a lighter burden of proof

The Stripe horror stories are adding up, making me think startups will move to different platforms.

A friend in China recently got shut down by Stripe for a perfectly legitimate business. They moved to Creem.

Stripe cares about big business. Startups can't really be moving the needle much for them anymore.

Stripe's APIs have become too confounding for small business anyway. They care about big business shaped entities at the expense of smaller scrappy players. Easy things aren't easy. It sucks.

You have to build your own hooks and logic for upgrades and downgrades. The event types are mismatched yet you have to listen across several semantic classes to capture the right state changes. Absurd, legacy/big biz focused garbage.

It should be click a button and integrate one API and webhook and you're done.

Huge opportunity.

> Creem

I kinda liked the website, I feel like there are some good features within this website, the more competition the better, Kinda like its referral and split model within co-founders, especially like this for something like a course website/maybe even Patreon alternative, combined with Cloudflare workers/Hetzner. I am seeing a lot of competition within this space, Does anyone have a github awesome-list about these or should I create one?

On personal experience, Just recently, I still have 12$ of my money stuck within Pulsedmedia/their payment provider as I had done a (crypto) payment but their system has failed to recognize it and Pulsedmedia could do nothing about it, not cancel or accept the deal as after 24 hours or at this point close to 48 hours, yet no response by coinpayments or any response at all.

All of this happened because I had accidentally sent them the whole amount but just 60 cents less... let that sink in, Pulsedmedia says that they can't do anything but as a customer, I don't feel like recommend Pulsedmedia anymore because of my experience with their payment provider being so bad and they have said that they have no control over, not even refunding me. Man, a lot of the times, I feel like payment processing should be a solved problem but recent experience indicates otherwise as I felt restlessness from my money being stuck in limbo

Either refund me as soon as possible or allow me to have a service, having to open up mail multiple times and seeing no response feels really frustrating even if the money might be low, I would still like to have it back. I feel like your choice of payment provider matters quite a lot and it can be a differentiating factor even, for the end consumer.

I had heard some good things about pulsedmedia within the forums I browse but when I had raised tickets, they had responded to me with AI too :-/ It felt extremely weird typing everything out taking time only to be responded with I hear you--you are extremely right. I don't want to blame pulsedmedia here but man oh man, some payment processors make me feel so rageful, and I think that I am fairly patient in most cases, but having money stuck no matter how tiny definitely makes me a bit stressed.

If I learn anything from all of this, it's to not have a shit payment provider, heck I might even try becoming a customer and raise issues like payment getting stuck or see their customer support response times before buying them.

(Not related to Stripe) but I tried to go to your terms of service and I didn't see a mention of any company and the mail within support is a gmail, zorqaiservice@gmail.com, So do you have a corporation formed

I am also unable to see a page like who-we-are, to verify this post especially given your new account. For more legitimacy, I somewhat suggest some way of manually verifying your account/claims

That being said, there have been cases within past where Stripe team has contacted here, Someone once joked about Hackernews being the golden ticket to Stripe support.

I hope that your problem gets resolved quickly as I can understand it must be very tense.

It is definitely some feeling when you just feel un-heard by a large corporation and get into its shenanigans that it really sucks, so messaging them on social media becomes often times the last resort.

You don't. 1% DR = ban. I forget the snapshot. Disputes should be refunded to be void and that user banned. If you incur more in fees than a DMA plan you shouldn't be using Stripe for cards anyway. Only ACH, PADs, crypto. The hook should be on a subdomain only allowing Stripe IPs in WAF.

You don't mention any timeframes here relating to when the bulk of payments happened. It's quite reasonable for Stripe to hold what they see as high-risk funds in _anticipation_ of more disputes coming in.

The bulk of payments happened within the last 30 days, so we're well within any standard chargeback window — which is exactly why a temporary hold would make sense. We have no objection to Stripe holding funds as a chargeback reserve for 90-120 days as per their standard policy. The issue is that Stripe explicitly stated in writing that funds will "not be made available" — not that they will be held temporarily. They also stated they will begin issuing refunds to all customers within 5 days, meaning they intend to reverse all payments regardless of whether those customers have actually disputed anything. That's not a hold — that's reversing legitimate completed transactions and returning money to customers who received and used the service. We have delivery proof for 37,938 successfully completed jobs and refund records showing we proactively refunded every customer who asked. The concern isn't the hold itself — it's the active reversal of funds to customers who never complained.

Read also https://shaun.nz/why-were-never-using-wise-again-a-cautionar... than understand why crypto (not stablecoin) shift is a need not because their are good (they are not much) but because they can't block us. Banks and fintech have dug their own grave with such behaviors, and they'll resist until common people will understand.

> Banks and fintech have dug their own grave

Most of the annoying stuff with banks is just a response to government regulation.

Yes and no, many are just bugs due to a crappy layered crapware stack started decades ago a "kept in sync" an update at a time... At least in the EU.

You should've used cryptocurrency. My personal choice would've been Monero. Note that stablecoins, with the exception of DAI, can technically be frozen, although you would have to piss off the government for that to happen.

Hey, you should try their tech discord group. https://discord.com/invite/stripe That has helped me resolve issues in the past.

Same thing hit us, $60k for three months with no warning either. It was infuriating. Been building a monitor to catch the warning signals early since then: https://stripehealth.earlyproof.io

Okay, but why even risk it with Stripe? Just move to stablecoin or other cryptocurrencies, ideally ones that can't be frozen.

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