Stripe is holding $50K and refunding our customers
by JohannesSchip | 2026-02-21 00:58:03+00:00
We process $20K/day selling physical massage devices. 140K+ customers. Chargeback rate: 0.35%. Stripe shut us down for "unauthorized payments" with no warning, no specifics, and no human review.

We spent a week investigating and found the root cause ourselves, since Stripe wouldn't tell us.

Our checkout platform (CheckoutChamp) was processing post-purchase upsells as separate Stripe charges using the stored card token, without triggering 3D Secure. About 64% of our customers accepted an upsell, which means the majority of orders created 2-3 charges on the customer's bank statement instead of one. Customers who didn't recognize the additional charges contacted their banks, generating Early Fraud Warnings (Visa TC40 / Mastercard SAFE reports). Stripe's Radar system picked these up as "unauthorized" activity.

This is the exact same upsell flow that works perfectly on Shopify, because Shopify's post-purchase API adds upsells to the existing transaction. CheckoutChamp creates a separate charge. That's the entire difference. It's a transaction architecture issue, not fraud.

We immediately fixed everything: disabled all post-purchase upsells, canceled every active subscription, restructured the checkout to a single-transaction flow.

Then we tried to tell Stripe.

We submitted a detailed root cause analysis with screenshots from Stripe's own dashboard showing our 0.35% chargeback rate. We attached our checkout platform data proving upsells were disabled. We submitted 33+ documents: EIN, Articles of Organization, 6 months of bank statements, supplier contracts, 3PL invoices, inventory photos, customer invoices. We offered a 25% rolling reserve.

Both support cases were closed with template responses. Not a single reply referenced our root cause analysis.

One response addressed our case to "Greg Misc LLC." Our company is JS Commerce Group LLC. That's how carefully they're reviewing.

We emailed patrick@stripe.com. No response. We emailed risk-support@stripe.com. No response.

We posted on X. Stripe's social team replied: "Our internal team is still reviewing your case." Since that reply, both support cases were closed again. The X team and the support team are clearly not connected.

Now Stripe is auto-refunding ~$50K to customers who already received their products and are using them daily. These customers didn't ask for refunds. They're going to be confused when money appears in their account and then we have to explain what happened.

I've spoken to 6 alternative payment processors this week. Every single one understood the upsell architecture problem within minutes. They all said the same thing: this is a known issue with platforms that create separate charges for upsells. None of them considered it fraud.

Stripe's system is designed so that once you're flagged, there is no path to a human who can evaluate new evidence. The support team sends templates. The risk team doesn't respond to direct emails. The X team says the right things publicly but has no connection to the internal process. And the auto-refund clock keeps ticking.

If you're a merchant reading this: do not rely on a single payment processor. It doesn't matter how clean your business is. An architectural quirk in your checkout platform can trigger an algorithm, and once that happens, no amount of evidence will reach a human.

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