Payment and Donation Tasks

We use Stripe and Paypal to process donations and payments. Read on for solutions to common problems.

Stripe

A payment is disputed

99% of the time when this happens, it's because somebody used our website to test stolen credit cards. What happens is:

• A zillion cards are stolen.
• The thief wants to verify that they work before selling them en masse.
• They write scripts to make donations all over the place.

We have a captcha on our donation form to deal with this annoying problem, but sometimes it doesn't work. When this happens, sometimes people dispute the payment. This is annoying because it is bad for our reputation with Stripe, and it charges us a fee. The solution, unfortunately, is to do nothing. We'll pay the fee to Stripe, they'll get their money back, and we all move on. The only other solution is to say, "No, this wasn't a mistake. The user meant to make that payment!" — and to provide evidence of the same to prove it to Stripe. Not worth it, and we don't have the evidence.