My friend, Angie, is a counselor who provides emotional and psychological support and assistance to women through phone conversations. She calls herself a phone friend because she wants to sound friendly so people feel comfortable. She just launched her new website, "Be My Friend."

I built her a simple WordPress site where clients can schedule appointments with her and settle the counseling fee. I implemented Stripe as a payment gateway.

Her Stripe account was closed a few days ago because Stripe had miscategorized the site as a dating service. "Specifically, we are unable to accept payments for dating services as stated in our list of prohibited businesses." they wrote to us.

I can see why this has happened, and it sounds like a simple misunderstanding of the website's purpose due to its domain name: bemyfriend.community

The domain name contains "be my friend" and "community." I realize now that those words sound a bit like a dating service at first glance, and miscategorizing is an easy mistake. Her counseling service has nothing to do with dating. Not even remotely.

When we scrolled the list of available domain names, we chose "community" as the domain suffix because it has a nice ring and aligns with the atmosphere she tries to create in her counseling sessions.

There is no dating, meeting, encounter, or encouragement to bring people together as part of her service. She provides one-to-one private phone-based counseling, with no connection between her clients and no shared information among them. She does not meet the clients, and clients are never in contact with or made aware of each other.

She specializes in counseling lonely people, and the "be my friend" part of the domain name comes from there.

Is anyone here experienced with this and can advise us about our options for reopening the account?