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As mentioned by many others - there are a number of details missing here that are extremely relevant. What are you selling? Where? To whom? If you had hundreds of charges in your first month, did you migrate over from another payment supplier or are they brand new customers? If you migrated, how did you migrate?

I used to work on fraud operations at a payment processor and there was always more to the story. There were four categories that account's broadly fell into:

* The quiet fraudster. These would either have a scam business model with real victims attempting to pay, or would not have a business and were using stolen payment details to pay themselves. The quiet fraudster would not argue when you closed their account - they would just sign up again and try a different approach to get round your system.

* The loud fraudster (the vast majority of fraudsters). These come in all shapes and sizes. They were often the most obvious frauds (100 payments from the same IP at our max payment amount, within 10 minutes of each other). Unfortunately they sometimes came in the form of someone deluded - for example the man that sold 'magic beans' that cured AIDS. These are the loud fraudsters because they will either shout down the phone at your support team (shouting never helps when calling support - by the way), or try and drum up negative PR to create pressure.

* The accidental fraudster. These people have good intentions, but are none-the-less breaking the rules. For example, migrating all of your customers over to a new payment supplier by filling out a new payment form on their behalf (note - I worked for a payment processor that was not based on cards - this method may be allowed for CC though I doubt it). The accidental fraudster might also have fraudulent customers paying them yet be a legit business - for example online sellers of jewellery will have a lot of people pay with stolen details hoping that the business will ship the goods before the payment is flagged. Sometimes you can work with the business to fix the issue, many times you have to let them go (remember, they will have all the signs of an obvious fraudster - so you have to be sure that their story is true).

* The innocent. As you can imagine, sometimes there are people that have all the signs of a fraudster yet are perfectly legitimate. There can be many reasons for this.

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Without a lot more information, I cannot begin to speculate what category the author falls into - hopefully one of the latter two.

That said, as much as I love what Stripe in general, it is completely unacceptable for them not to have an escalated support/appeals process for fraud complaints. If they have made a mistake (which happens even with the best fraud systems), then they could be destroying a business that might have customers/employees/suppliers that are also relying on them to receive their payments on time.




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