
Why some businesses aren't allowed on Stripe - pc
https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed
======
chatmasta
It seems a little disingenuous to pass all the blame to the credit card
companies, when clearly it's possible for these "shady" businesses (porn
sites, get rich quick ebooks, preorder campaigns) to work with a merchant
account provider other than stripe, and process the same credit cards. If
stripe truly had no problem with these businesses, and it was all the credit
card companies tying their hands, then no merchant account would be able to
support the businesses. Yet there are many merchant accounts, some catering
explicitly to "high risk" businesses (with correspondingly higher fees), that
have no problem with these businesses. They work with the same credit card
companies and yet are not hamstrung by the same regulations.

I can see why stripe wouldn't want to support these businesses, especially
those with higher chargeback rates, but don't tell us it's because of the
credit card companies. If other merchant account providers can handle it, so
can you. It would require more monitoring and possibly tiered fees to
accommodate "high risk business," but you could do it if you wanted to.

Don't open the article with "we'd love to not be gatekeepers" and then talk
about how you're doing exactly that.

~~~
collision
We're trying to outline how the restrictions and limitations that exist can
affect different businesses. With the right approvals (and often with
substantially increased fees), some of these businesses can certainly operate.
And we hope to be able to work with as many as possible in the future.

By our nature, we are on the side of people building things. We have been
through many of these kinds of struggles ourselves. (Stripe's first
application for a corporate bank account was rejected!) So we wanted to make
that clear and describe where we're falling short of our aspirations today.

~~~
pdeuchler
I think a lot of this is coming down to how you're framing it. Most people,
some of the commenters on this thread aside, would think you're being
generally reasonable given the current environment of the financial services
industry. However you're really just asking to get yelled at when you say
things like: "We want to avoid taking editorial or moral stances regarding the
businesses built on Stripe."

This statement is absurd, all businesses make these decisions whether they
want to or not, and being the errand boy for The Powers That Be does not
absolve you of these decisions. The continual framing going down that post is
something of "We always do the right thing, except when we can't or we don't
want to." Which isn't a great way to win people over.

If you were just explicit from the get go that as a financial services company
you have to CYA first, and then try to do the right thing second nobody would
blame you for that. Most reasonable people who will be doing actual business
with Stripe have dealt with processors/merchants before and know what goes on
with these deals, it's all about hedging risk.

But when you phrase it like you're trying to do the right thing and CYA is
just an incidental inconvenience pressed on you by some big corp who's really
the bad guy here... well, that's just disingenuous and people know it.

Beyond that people are aware that Stripe is growing, and growing fast. Large
companies have inconsistencies with this sort of stuff, PayPal is a prime
example. And while I've had amazing experiences as a lone developer with my
own projects I've also had some not-so-great experiences with Stripe in my
professional life (obviously I don't speak for my employer or any prior ones).
Again, this makes sense, a lone developer is a lot less risky than someone
who's already funneling funny looking money through your system, but trying to
whitewash this clear fact as if you were in fact "doing the right thing" the
whole time makes people frustrated and reduces people's ability to predict
Stripe's actions. And nobody wants to deal with an unpredictable payment
provider.

I realize that a decent amount of the article here talks about risk and how
it's hedged, but you continually phrase things like the OMGYes case study as
if your hands were tied in some non-moralistic decision, which again rings
disingenuous. Same with the "Businesses that pose a brand risk" bullet point.

Last but not least, you guys squirreled away the most important piece of
information in this article to a small paragraph. "Contact us first if you're
at all worried" should be bolded in 60pt font at the very top. Asking people
to do that and being very explicit and upfront about your CYA policy before
trying to explain the nuances would go very far with how people _interpret_
the message, even if there's nothing explicitly wrong with how it's done now.

~~~
collision
> "We want to avoid taking editorial or moral stances regarding the businesses
> built on Stripe."

This really is true. All companies will have to apply _some_ criteria -- there
are businesses that AWS or mail companies reject. In our case, we would like
to avoid editorial and moral stances as much as we can. And as the post
hopefully makes clear, we still have a ways to go.

> If you were just explicit from the get go that as a financial services
> company you have to CYA first, and then try to do the right thing second
> nobody would blame you for that.

We would actually like to be a bit more progressive than that -- rather than
supinely CYAing all the time, we want to (and frequently do) take risks and
push back on behalf of businesses we believe in. The latter half of the post
was intended to lay out some examples of that. But the distinction you're
drawing makes sense and I'll look at editing the post with it in mind. Thanks
for the feedback.

Separately, I would be very interested to hear about your suboptimal
experiences if you'd be willing to share them over email or the phone.

~~~
pdeuchler
Not quite sure I'd be allowed to talk about that stuff anymore, although
depending on the records you guys keep my name will probably pop up in some
calls/emails if you searched for it.

And look, I entirely get what you're saying, and I know you guys probably mean
it, but again, you're missing the perspective of people who have a distinct
impression of the financial services industry and who _know_ what happens when
you go down this road with PayPal, Braintree, et. al. They don't necessarily
care if you guys are making a best effort on a case by case basis if you're
still hampered by contractual obligations to play by someone else's game. And
when you try to make these moral stands but almost immediately point out where
you were contractually obligated to compromise said stands it doesn't give
people confidence in the moral stands and makes it look like grandstanding
(holy run on batman). This is where the disconnect and (seeming)
disingenuousness arises.

This is also why I emphasized that you guys should really just tell people to
contact support first, because that clears all confusion and miscommunication
without having to make moral pronouncements and before you guys are put in a
position that forces you to compromise these bright lines.

Anyway, I really support what you guys are doing and don't want to seem overly
critical but I wanted to communicate a disconnect that seemed to get lost in
translation.

~~~
makomk
Funny thing is, even PayPal allow sex toys and a lot of sex toy sellers accept
PayPal. Have done for quite a while if I remember correctly. I guess from
their perspective it must not be that high risk

------
SwellJoe
Some of these, pornography (and other sex-related work) in particular, are
sketchy businesses _because_ of the difficulty of operating above-board in
those industries. Several of my friends are sex workers of various types, and
their ability to get paid is always through shady people and businesses,
because legitimate payment services won't allow them to use their services.

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy, in short. If the law or industry forces
something underground, it will breed a dangerous culture. I'm happy to hear
Stripe has a desire to be more open to these kinds of business...because the
people working in them often suffer due to having to use unscrupulous
providers for everything. Models having their payment accounts closed without
warning and without receiving moneys owed, horrible rates (cam models often
receive only about half of the money their customers send their way), etc.

But, it's also still very frustrating; when I've advised friends in the
industry on technical matters I never have a good answer for payments. There
just aren't any really good payment processors that will work with people in
the adult industry. It's legal in all 50 states (at least in the case of
pornography), there's just no reason for it to behave like a grey market, but
it does.

~~~
samsonradu
Working as a dev for a company In the industry I fully agree. This has been an
issue forever, companies use high-risk billers like Epoch and pay higher fees
due to the huge amount of fraud involved and the lack of competition. Also,
there was a case a few years ago when ING decided to close down a company's
bank account just for being in the adult business. I wonder what's so shady
about just a very big entertainment industry like this one.

~~~
lcarlson
It's because of the higher than normal charge backs that stripe's sponsoring
bank doesn't want on their books. There is also some reputational risk I'd
imagine and plenty of shady actors trying to get underwritten

------
jMyles
I find it frustrating that private businesses, especially in the various sub-
sectors having to do with money and payments, have pretty much been wholesale
enlisted to be arms of the state.

The kind of agnosticism described in the first paragraph might mean, in a sane
world, that a company like Stripe makes no assessment over whether a company's
practices are legal or illegal, leaving this to the government to act upon
alone.

~~~
milligrade
It is in Stripe's rational self-interest to choose who they partner with; and
thus, they chose the constraints related to those partners.

The real message of this blog post is that Stripe's revealed and stated
preferences are not aligned. Their stated preference is that they sell to
literally anybody. The revealed preference is that they prioritize
relationships that facilitate growth over that stated preference.

It's totally rational on their part. They're actively serving the big market,
and writing a blog post about how sorry they are that they're ignoring the
tiny market. That's the right division of effort, and it's smart too, because
many members of the tiny market will (naively) believe Stripe's stated
preferences; even though absolutely all evidence is that Stripe wants, more
than anything, to build a big, legal, US-based business. And that's fine.

~~~
rpgmaker
> _They 're actively serving the big market, and writing a blog post about how
> sorry they are that they're ignoring the tiny market. _

Funny. Porn is _far_ from being a small market online. And taking on porn
related businesses doesn't mean they have to stop serving other types of
businesses.

~~~
hk__2
> Funny. Porn is _far_ from being a small market online.

Are you sure about that? The source I’ve found [1] says it’s a ~$5B market,
which is what FB makes in one quarter alone (and only one month for Google).

[1]:
[http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/347252](http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/347252)

~~~
pyre
You're rebutting someone that merely said that the industry is "far from a
small market" which was in response to someone claiming it was a "tiny"
market. Pointing to one of the largest companies operating a web business is
not really a rebuttal. That just says they are far from being the biggest.

I wouldn't call a $5b market a "tiny, niche market" like the GP post stated.

~~~
lcarlson
In the overall scheme of payments, $5b _is_ small. You need big volume to make
money as a payment processor.

~~~
raarts
There are many markets that are much smaller than that which Stripe doesn't
have a problem with.

------
aconcerneduser
My friend runs a perfectly legitimate business making holsters for firearms,
real, airsoft, whatever. Maybe just a step up above what you'd find in your
army/navy surplus store.

Stripe's TOS expressedly forbids these, yet all they are is just a hunk of
plastic not unlike those old tacky blackberry holsters that people used to
have a few years back.

So yes, be in the "wrong business", you can't even sell a bit of plastic or
leather because it's shaped wrong.

------
nikanj
"We don't want to be the moral police, but won't do business with you if
you're a brand risk, such as a sex toy store"

It seems like the opening paragraph directly contradicts their policy

~~~
madelinecameron
I don't think they meant brand risk to Stripe. Credit card companies don't
like "immoral" businesses and refuse to do business with them.

There are quite a few stories about porn stars having their credit cards
closed just because of how they make a living.

There is a portion in there that mentions Stripe sees this regulation as
"overly moralistic" and that credit card companies have "old school morals".

~~~
pc
Correct; the brand risk being referred to is _card network_ brand risk. (Which
they're very sensitive to.)

------
_kyran
Patrick is anything being done between Stripe and your underwriting banks to
reduce the amount of declined transactions?

I frequently see ~30% of all transactions declined (customers in USA &
Australian Stripe/Bank account) and it's a real pain for them having to
constantly call their banks asking for transactions to be whitelisted, which
often doesn't change anything.

This then leads to customers asking we don't just accept Paypal.

~~~
collision
That's an abnormally high rate of declines to be seeing. Can you send me an
email (john@stripe.com) and I'll look into it?

One change we're making is giving you better insight to which charges Stripe
declines on your behalf (because they look fraudulent; you can override this
behavior) and which charges are declined by the cardholder bank (you can't
override this).

~~~
_kyran
Thanks John, just sent you an email (HN in the subject line).

That would be great to see what the underlying cause or rational behind a
declined transaction is.

I was especially surprised by how frequently payments were declined,
especially after mandating that a name, address and CVC were required.

------
jusben1369
I'm not sure, but i feel like what is missing here is "Stripe does some things
differently to other payment providers, via our immediate onboarding via a sub
merchant account. Prior to Stripe, everyone had to go through pages of
paperwork and wait week/s for an approval or non approval. For 80% of the
market, that was a terrible waste of time. However, there is a % of the market
that does benefit from having someone perform a deep level of due diligence.
We've made the trade off whereby we can't address that segment due to
restrictions placed on us in return for being able to onboard merchants
immediately"

Or maybe the unique approach is not a factor here in these decisions.

------
devy
> #5 Businesses that attract money-laundering or fraud > * Cell phones > *
> Drop shipping > * Stored value or gift cards

It's easy to understand stored value/gift cards, but why cellphones and drop
shipping?

Anyone care to elaborate?

~~~
collision
Anything with low traceability and high resale value (like dropshipped goods)
tends to become a fraud/money-laundering target.

~~~
throwaway991199
Wouldn't these criteria apply to Shopify? If Shopify is a legitimate business,
how can other legitimate businesses overcome the same hurdle?

~~~
collision
First, let me explain why drop-shipping is a popular vector for fraud. Drop-
shipping means selling a product which you don't make or hold in stock;
instead, when a purchase comes in you go and buy it somewhere else and have it
shipped directly to the buyer. You can think of it as a form of arbitrage.
They're remarkably efficient businesses: they need to have no assets or
physical presence. The flip side of that is that if you were looking to create
a legitimate-looking shell business to, say, cash in on stolen credit cards
then drop-shipping would be a very plausible cover story. It's hard for us to
disprove.

Since Stripe is on the hook if customers don't get their goods or services, we
need to be able to ensure that the businesses are legitimate. It's hard for us
to reliably do so with drop-shippers. While dropshipping is not Shopify's
primary business, they are more specialized in ecommerce, they have more
business-specific data, and there are a handful of other properties which let
them support these businesses more readily.

------
user5994461
I am working in an industry that is usually considered more shady than most of
the examples given and it's nowhere to be found in that banlist.

That's sweat! Where do I sign up? :D _be right back_

~~~
ymse
Forget Stripe, where do _we_ sign up?

~~~
user5994461
Are you asking for our current payment provider? (Adyen)

or are you asking for our website? That I'd rather not associate to "shady",
and sadly we're blocked to operate in the USA [and most countries in the
world] so that wouldn't help you anyway. Sorry.

~~~
ymse
Don't worry, I was just poorly joking about being intrigued by that product
description.. It does sound like an interesting place to work though.

Mind sharing what you do, and/or how you ended up there? :)

~~~
user5994461
Well, the "or" is tricky considering I found the job on "HN: Who is Hiring" :D

Let's say we operate an exchange (think: like a financial exchange except it's
not).

------
randy777
Well explained and very reasonable.

------
eonw
rather then placing blame on your partners, find new ones that allow these
types of businesses or have appetite to have more in their portfolio and
shuffle your clients accounts into these providers networks.

also, visa reg's change by region, are you in multiple regions and following
the rules of each? or are you operating entirely under the US region and
forcing all of your clients to do so as well?

------
pjlegato
Several of these -- high end wine / online alcohol sales, travel tickets /
private jet rental, high end all-natural pseudo-pharmaceuticals -- amount to
little more than "this business is too risky when normal people are buying,
but fine when rich people are buying."

Is it just that they can accept more risk when the average ticket price is
higher?

------
walrus01
Dammit. I had an excellent business plan for a multi level marketing based
online dildo shop!

~~~
duskwuff
That just means you need to take it to the next level. How about a crowdfunded
alcoholic dildo drop-shipping pyramid scheme?

------
20yrs_no_equity
"We’re building business infrastructure that, like electricity, should be
available on tap to use however the world sees fit. While we may personally
like some businesses on Stripe and disapprove of others, we want to make as
few judgements as possible as a company."

And then the last category is "Brand risk" including pornography.

I once worked for a startup that had an opportunity to boost its revenue by
%100 by simply accepting the business of an online porn place (all we were was
a recommendation engine). The startup turned them down because "ew porn,
yucky!". If its legal, you shouldn't be passing arbitrary moral judgements.

That startup later failed.

And I won't be using stripe, even though I have no interest in doing anything
related to porn.

There are too many moralizers (particularly the government "regulating" "money
laundering" which is so broadly defined that they could prosecute any one of
you successfully for this "crime" if they wanted to. EG: you take money from
your checking account to pay a credit card, that's "money laundering" as the
law is written.)

The government's bad enough, we don't need companies like Stripe preventing
perfectly legal businesses for reasons of political correctness.

And this is a totally slippery slope. If my hosting company ends up
accidentally hosting someone who takes advertisements from Torrent sites, is
stripe going to cut me off? What if one of the sites I host is a blog that
reviews porn sites? Am I now in the porn business?

Here they are signaling that they cannot be trusted.

~~~
FreeFull
From reading the blog post, I got that they personally want to support those
businesses, but financial partners like Visa and Mastercard stop them from
doing it.

~~~
desdiv
I brought both porn and guns with Visa and Mastercards. In fact, you'd be hard
pressed to find a porn store or a gun shop that doesn't accept at least one
type of credit card.

And yet Stripe prohibits both pornography and firearms.

Not just Stripe, all the other major payment processors i.e. Paypal/Braintree,
Square, Amazon Payments have similar prohibition clauses.

~~~
swang
while you were easily able to buy porn and guns, on the flip side the people
who sold you the porn and guns had to go through a high-risk payment processor
just as if they'd try to sell porn/guns online. you don't notice anything
because if you had to deal with that hassle, would you have bought your
guns/porn from that shop? no. stores eat the cost of high-risk payment
processors because customers want to pay with credit card.

you are mistaking visa: the credit card, with visa: the payment network.

~~~
hga
You can't buy guns online as such, in the usual case of out of state customers
they've got to be shipped to a Federal Firearms Licensee (FFL) in their state
who then does the normal retail song and dance including a NICS background
check. But of course the big money part of the transaction will be done before
that, and almost certainly as a credit card transaction, as was the case for
my last gun purchase (see e.g.
[http://www.gunbroker.com/](http://www.gunbroker.com/) where I half-bought
that one, and how many _firms_ on it offer payment by credit card (the flip
side of course is that if you're an individual selling a gun, or a bare
receiver as I did once, you of course are going to have to go the cashier's
check/money order/personal check route (no PayPal, of course))).

And I've never heard that firearms and their accessories including ammo being
a fraction of financially risky like porn, e.g. no one dancing to the tune
Operation Choke Point cites that sort of risk, vs. it being a purely political
decision. Plus it's just plain more serious of an industry, e.g. no one needed
a Federal background check to buy porn (!).

And there are many merchant banks that have affirmatively decided to provide
credit card processing services to such companies at normal rates, for
references to one offered in part as a enticement to join, see
[http://nssf.org/didyouknow/?iurl=payment-provider-offers-
ser...](http://nssf.org/didyouknow/?iurl=payment-provider-offers-services-to-
nssf-members) from the nation's gun _industry_ association (the NRA is the gun
_owner 's_ one).

------
skyrw
Would love to see a more in depth callout to the firearm and firearm related
services sector in this. This is considered a high risk area for seemingly
entirely political reasons, and any body in the industry is constantly afraid
of being shut off at a whim for even tangentially related services.

~~~
hga
_and any body in the industry is constantly afraid of being shut off at a whim
for even tangentially related services_

Only by processors like Stripe and of course merchant banks (but the latter is
easily dealt with nowadays), politically right now we're _very_ strong in most
of the nation, and at the Federal legislative level, and by and large the only
companies with political risk are those in our modern slave states ("A house
divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure,
permanently, half slave and half free." (Lincoln) and I believe there will be
a resolution to this sooner or later, but that's not something companies like
Stripe can make any plans or current polices about.)

Perhaps.... Team Obama are currently trying to land the first major blow
they've come up with/dared to try, to shut down most of the nation's gun
smiths ([http://www.nssfblog.com/ddtc-says-guidance-is-not-new-but-
cl...](http://www.nssfblog.com/ddtc-says-guidance-is-not-new-but-
clarification/)), so there's still clearly nationwide political risk.

But Stripe would be viewed very differently by, say, half the nation's
population if they were willing to do business with those that do firearms and
related stuff, as so many merchant banks are still quite willing to do, in
states where that's politically safe, which is on the order of 40 with more
than half the nation's population (which is not the same slice as the half I
mentioned previously).

(And with regards to that above resolution, if it's in our favor, companies
like Stripe that boycotted us will not be gently dealt with. So there's
political risk in every direction, but I can't see how picking one side of a
cultural currently cold civil war is a good long term strategy, and I
seriously doubt its helping them in the short term, vs. staying out of the
fray.)

------
throwaway991199
Sorry, but all of this is simply not true.

I run a business where I regularly do between 50-100k a month. There are many
other marketers that I know who are also doing the same.

I was not a good candidate and neither were they. Why? Because we act as
middle-men between a product creator and the end user.

To someone like stripe, we are scammers. We supposedly put up sites which lie
about products, we mark-up pricing and we take the money and not ship out the
products. Yes, that is the brush that is tarred amongst all of us.

This could not be further from the truth, as it if was, then we'd be getting
charge-backs up the wazzoo and our current merchant providers wouldnt be
working with us.

I have yet to recieve a single charge back and I have many many repeat sales.
So much so, that I an creating a brand by selling other manufacturers products
under my own white-label brand. Which incidentally is against stripes terms
and conditions.

What is laughable, is that stripe had no idea about my business model. In fact
what they offered was stripe connect and having the manufacturer owning the
stripe account. Which would actually confuse my clients even more.

Here is the deal. A lot of manufacturers don't know how to market. They don't
know how to setup a sales funnel, market for clients, generate sales, make
products go viral and generate 100k of sales. They have tried themselves
spending $10k in marketing stacks and spending $1000s on facebook ads and
getting nowhere.

But no, Stripe does not want to work with me or others like me. So guess what.
We tell everyone one can, DO NOT DO BUSINESS WITH STRIPE.

I don't be doing business with them and I will be telling all my clients and
be sure to tell everyone they know as well not to do business with Stripe
either. I hope this has a knock on effect that 1000+ individuals who thought
about using stripe, use someone else as well.

If only stripe had actual controls where they did reputation testing against
IP, actually sided with the seller on charge backs instead of bending over and
making the seller the bad guy, or do more fraud analysis.

I choose other vendors who do exactly this and I have had no problems so far.

Here's something. I'm not a scammer. I would rather lose a sale rather than
trying to get that money and have someone have buyers remorse and do a charge
back or demand refund.

Not all of us want to make a quick buck at all costs. There are other ways of
doing this, believe me and STRIPE wouldn't be a way of doing it. That;s just
laughable.

TL;DR. SCREW STRIPE.

~~~
PeterisP
If a merchant type has 90% good merchants and 10% bad merchants, then that's
too many bad merchants - this means that you either have to treat all of them
as very risky; or adopt pain-in-the-ass filtering to make it more like 99+%
good / <1% bad if it can be done; or charge a totally uncompetitive 10% extra
fee from each payment to cover your risks.

It's not enough for you to be good. If an unreasonably large proportion of
merchants in your segment are bad, then you can't be trusted to be good unless
there are easily distinguishable factors that differentiate you, or the
volumes are high enough to warrant the expense of doing a proper audit of your
business, as the some examples Stripe describes.

~~~
eonw
or learn to do proper due diligence and stop blanket blocking what could be
very profitable clients.

~~~
PeterisP
Proper due diligence is expensive, it may easily be a smart business decision
to choose a blanket ban on a minority of segments and leave the due diligence
to businesses who can specialize on doing that cheaply and accurately.

The article explicitly gives multiple examples where they have accepted
businesses from those risky categories after proper due diligence. However,
it's quite likely that for Stripe it makes sense to do so only for businesses
above a certain size or influence, not for everyone in the category who
applies.

~~~
deftnerd
If proper due diligence is expensive, let the merchant pay the fee for it.

------
mankash666
Setting aside illegal businesses, whole segments of the market seem to have
been ignored by stripe.

An opportunity to serve these markets exists

~~~
PeterisP
There exists an opportunity to lose a lot of money serving these markets. All
those other categories are very financially risky to serve due to reasons
listed out in the nice article, as the acquiring institution will lose money
on that.

If you accept a merchant that has a lot of fraudulent transactions and after
some months get a lot of chargebacks, then you're out of that money if you've
paid that money to the merchant already and they (usually) go insolvent at
that point instead of returning the funds. If a particular market segment has
even a small portion (depending on how high your fees are) of merchants doing
this, the whole segment will make a loss for you.

~~~
20yrs_no_equity
The way you lose money in credit cards is via chargeback.

The more government and companies like stripe push those businesses out of
credit cards, the more mainstream the use of bitcoin will become.

~~~
PeterisP
The reason customers are eager to use credit cards online is because they
actually can do chargebacks, so they don't really have to verify if every
merchant is trustworthy.

The only place where irreversible transactions (i.e. bitcoin without escrow)
make sense are those services that have almost no risk of needing a
chargeback.

There are many businesses that I trust to pay them with bitcoin, but if
chargebacks are a problem for a particular type of business, if they're
getting a significant amount of chargebacks then _those_ are the exact
businesses for which the protection that chargebacks give me is useful,
_those_ are the businesses whom I would pay only with a creditcard but not
with bitcoin, because paying them with an irreversible instrument and no easy
dispute resolution likely to end in my favor means I'm likely to be taken for
a ride.

Competitive merchants with good reputation will accept credit cards (because
for them chargebacks aren't as big a problem), and if a merchant is explicitly
telling that they won't accept credit cards because they don't like
chargebacks, then they're de facto admitting that they're likely to screw
their customers, that their other customers are not satisfied and request
chargebacks.

~~~
Meekro
I own a small web hosting company, and I'd like to tell you that it's more
complicated than that. Nearly all of our chargebacks are the result of
criminals paying with stolen credit cards, and then using the accounts as a
platform for illegal activity. My company is the victim here, it has nothing
to do with unsatisfied customers, but we're still punished by the payment
processing industry.

We, like much of the hosting industry, fight back by denying new accounts to
certain high-risk countries -- like most of Eastern Europe. The fraud rate
from some of those countries is probably 75% or more! But that sucks, too --
it's not fair to honest people in Latvia that they're banned from the services
of many small online businesses. That's where Bitcoin comes in, and it's
actually been a Godsend to us!

~~~
lcarlson
Hmm, there are also some pretty sophisticated fraud detection tools available.
Have you explored them at all?

------
throwaway991199
Here come the down votes from developers who hold Stripe into such esteem.
That's right, if a business does not fit your view of a "business" then they
must be a scammer.

Go live outside of your SF/SV bubble and see how it works in the real world!

~~~
dang
It's legit for you to factually describe your situation and raise questions
about it. And it's legit to use a throwaway account to do so, since there are
sensitive business matters involved.

It's not legit for you to break the HN guidelines by yelling, calling names,
hounding, and going on about downvoting. Those things aren't allowed on HN.
They also aren't in your interest, since doing them reflects badly on your
credibility. I know it's hard to resist the temptation to lash out at
something you perceive as restricting you unfairly, but if you want to comment
here, that's what we need you to do.

We detached this comment from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12278660](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12278660)
and marked it off-topic.

------
20yrs_no_equity
Stripe is one of the Bay Area companies that clearly discriminated against me
based on membership in a protected class. Of course as a white male, it's "ok"
to do so by the standards of California political correctness. (The
discrimination was based on age. I'm grateful it happened when it did, rather
than, say, after taking an offer.)

Given the number of "support hell" horror stories that have been coming out
about stripe in recent years, there really is not much point in you hanging
out here spinning to try and put your company in a good light, you would be
better off digging into why you are failing these people.

~~~
dang
We detached this subthread from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12278723](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12278723)
and marked it off-topic.

------
byron_fast
TL;DR, we are beholden to a cartel.

~~~
byron_fast
I'm not blaming them. Their policy is rational. But if it weren't for the
credit card cartel and their rules, my hunch is they wouldn't have this page.

