I got this email from Stripe:
The only thing I (to my knowledge??) use this Stripe account for is accepting Substack subscriptions and occasionally paid video calls (generally people who want to talk about my writing). It's possible I hooked it up to something else a long time ago that I forgot about, but I haven't seen any unrecognized payments.
I'm in the process of contacting support, who looked at my account and said they were elevating it to a specialist. I'm currently waiting for them to contact me.
By two months from now, will my Stripe account be "in the clear"?
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This was a shockingly fast resolve; my guess is they confused me with the company Aella, which does do aggregating of customer funds.
(I know my market says 'in two months' but i meant that as a cutoff; if there's a separate problem within the next two months then I'll make a separate malket)
Manifold went through a similar experience with /Austin/will-manifold-still-be-accepting-pa . The back-and-forth emails with the Stripe support team were a bit stress-inducing, but in the end a video call with the team cleared things up, and we received approval to continue to sell mana and provide charity donations.
I think Manifold itself had a much more complicated setup than you do (based on your description and what I know about your Substack writing), so I'm predicting that this will get cleared up!
(I might suggest changing the market title to be "accept money through Stripe" as that's where the dispute seems to be; before clicking in I thought that it was Substack the company who had conducted some kind of action against your blog)
It's interesting to note that in both cases, we were flagged for "aggregation and grouping of funds". It seemed to be a plausible (though not actually accurate) description of how Manifold operates, whereas it's totally off base for Aella's work.
I'd wildly speculate that someone in Stripe has a mandate to move over accounts onto their Connect product, for compliance reasons?
The questions in the title and description aren't quite the same.
Will I still be able to accept money from Substack in two months?
By two months from now, will my Stripe account be "in the clear"?
If the answer to one of these turns out to be yes and the other turns out to be no, then how will this market resolve?
@LukeHanks I am trying to think of a scenario where there's one but not the other, but it's hard. I'm thinking if I am happy, like either I am actively accepting money or my account is like "You're approved, payments will resume next week" or whatever then that'll be a yes
@Aella I was imagining you finding a way to accept money from Substack without using Stripe.
Aella probably has more anecdotal evidence gathered than most of us.
On the one hand, if it was paypall, I would heavily bet No.
On the other, payment processes in general are super loathe to touch anything in any way related to sex, lest it lead to higher chargeback rates.
https://slothytech.com/banned-from-stripe/ lists 'Keep in mind that the appeals process can be complicated and time-consuming, and there’s no guarantee that you’ll be successful'
