Dear Anurag Goel,

Thank you for your kind email and attention to this matter.

We very rarely go public with internal issues. Our business is our livelihood and having such a meaningful, unfixable leak is intolerable. Yes, we have had 4 cases of fraud since Jan 2015. One of which we “won” and the rest we lost… The cost for winning was very high. Time and money spent on gathering information from the customer, courier company, Stripe, Banks, ISP’s etc… was not negligible. Until the dispute was resolved we were still out of pocket. Winning or losing, disputes are complicated for a small business.

If stripe offered a “No Chargeback” insurance for 2.99 per month we would take it. Everyone would take it. The cost of doing business would drop for stripe and us. Instead Stripe and their clients are embroiled in what I can only refer to as a farce of bureaucracy.

You are the first person from Stripe that has responded in a way that creates a way forward. All the previous responses have been condescending. I say that because each response, whilst wrapped up nicely, was telling us that we had signed a contract and there is nothing that can be done on stripe’s part but that I should have done more to avoid what in hindsight was obvious fraud.

As for some of the agent's comments. I have mentioned many times that our product is bought as a gift. Mentioning those two countries as a red flag can only be described as profiling. More than that. It is not a steadfast rule that our business can employ. We would simply miss too many genuine clients.

Lastly. When it comes down to it. There is no real way of winning a dispute or proofing fraud. If it is real fraud then one would be calling the fraudster. If it is a dispute then there is very little one can do unless it is a clear cut case. Even with our win, it was only because we contacted the customer daily until he relented. You can clearly see how this process is not scalable.

We have moved to Shopify, where Stripe gives a much more detailed GUI based interface of what is going one with each payment. Through Sqaurspace the information is basically written in some low level programming language.

We are using these online platforms to save on a dev team and simplify our process. If we continue taking hits at this rate it would be more cost effective to build a simple shopping cart and use WePay. I am sure others have thought about this. We have no particular preference for one service over the other. We do however like to know that as clients, we have someone fighting our corner when things go wrong.

Kind regards,

Eyal and Bianca