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[mouakter13]

Update: This post was originally written in 2014. A few hours after this post was published we were contacted by several people at Stripe and managed to get our account reinstated. And we haven't had any issues with them since. You can jump to the case tracking directly.

Why We Chose Stripe
We’ve heard a lot about Stripe over the past few years, but as a European business, we were unable to sign up for a long time. Not until they finally started accepting UK-based companies. We’ve been a high-volume PayPal user – both as a seller and buyer – since 2007, with over a million dollars transacted on their platform. We had our disputes and long chats with PayPal’s support team, but there was nothing that couldn’t be handled.

However, there are two major problems with PayPal :

Its reputation, many customers tell us that they would like to avoid paying with PayPal, at all costs.
Their API is a nightmare; it's overly complicated and lacks features that should have been default in 2014. Long story short, we were excited to build Kinsta's credit card acceptance program with Stripe .
The registration process is easy, although there are a lot of documents to submit, which is understandable. While you wait for your live account to be confirmed, you can already start building your client for their API and they provide libraries for the most common languages, which are written based on modern programming standards and as a result, are very easy to work with. This was not a surprise, as Stripe was born out of the founding team's frustration with the payment processors available at the time, they set out to disrupt the industry.

And they did it: the API doesn’t feel like an afterthought like PayPal does, it’s a real pleasure to work with. Setting up and starting to receive payments with Stripe is easy.

Then the Problems Begin
I can't remember when was the last time we had to deal with a fraudulent online payment - maybe we're lucky (or maybe PayPal's fraud protection isn't so bad after all). About a week after we started using Stripe (between PayPal and Bitcoin ) on our site, the first scammer came along. The funny thing is that he paid for the service (apparently with a stolen credit card), and he didn't even use the service! A week later the money was returned, and since it was already considered suspicious by our team, we refunded it immediately.

As the number of our transactions increased, so did the fraudulent activity. Again, it's strange that except for one person (who tried to use an account to spam, but was caught and banned in no time) all the stolen credit card abusers just wanted to pay us the money and then do nothing - it seems illogical to me. If they wanted to try a bunch of card numbers, they could have done it with a service that costs a dollar or something, and if they wanted to use it to spam or something else, why didn't they at least try?

Unfortunately, Stripe has a $15 chargeback fee, so we were losing money on every transaction that, in my opinion, should have been stopped by Stripe before they even happened. For example, there was a guy who used the same email address and tried cards from 3 different continents within a 15 minute span. Unless he's Flash, that's not possible and it's a huge warning to every payment processor I know, but Stripe did nothing.

Since we were losing money and Stripe wasn’t providing any help to stop this at all, we set out to find a company that specialized in online fraud prevention. Here are a couple that we heard good things about, but haven’t had a chance to check out yet: minFraud by MaxMind, Sift Science , and Signifyd . They’re all very affordable, even for a small business. I’m not sure why Stripe doesn’t have a partnership with any of these companies – it seems like a no-brainer to me.

Before we could finish implementing any of the above services, one night (and I'd like to emphasize the night part) we received an email from Stripe, out of the blue, saying:

Hi,
Unfortunately, we will have to stop offering the service for kinsta.com at this time. Currently, Stripe can only support users with a low risk of customer disputes – after reviewing your submitted information and website, it appears that your site presents a higher level of risk than we can currently support. Unfortunately, we will not be able to accept any additional payments on your behalf.

And that was it.

Well that escalated quickly!

I would like to emphasize that none of our legitimate users cameroon phone number data disputed anything, ever, just that the owners of the stolen credit cards requested a refund through their banks, which is what you would expect from them. However, what I did not expect from Stripe in any situation is for them to close our account, in the middle of the night without any warning. Or help. And that goes against everything we experienced with Stripe before that.

They could have advised us on how to minimize fraud, what we could have changed in our way of doing things, or whatever. Also a warning like “if this continues, we will have to suspend your account” a couple of weeks before the final decision would have been nice too. Plus they are not answering questions about the issue. This is a perfect case study of how not to handle customer relations.

Is the problem with us? After some Googling, it turns out that this is a pretty standard way of doing business on Stripe these days. Check it out here , here , here , and here . And if you need more, just do a search for yourself and pay extra attention to the comments sections.

It turns out we are lucky, we have programmers and we can move to another API in no time. When ordinary people selling and shipping tangible products get scammed, it can break their entire business and sometimes their lives as well (as we have read in the threads above). To think that implementing a good fraud detection system could solve all this, and yet they do nothing about it is mind-boggling.