About this record

This site is run by a software founder whose payment account was closed with about $800 of customer money inside it, and who was told the balance would be held for six months.

That is a small amount of money and it is not the reason this exists. The reason is what happened when I went looking for other people it had happened to: they were everywhere, and the information was nowhere. Individual accounts scattered across review sites, forum threads that fall off the front page in a day, and support tickets nobody else can read. Meanwhile the first page of search results for the company's name is written almost entirely by companies selling something adjacent to it.

Payment companies are not unusually evil. They are unusually well positioned: they hold the money, they write the terms, and the disputes are individually too small to be worth a lawyer and collectively invisible because nobody is counting. The only part of that a person on the outside can change is the last one. So this is a counter.

What this site will publish

• Documents issued by regulators and courts, linked to their originating authority.
• Published data such as review distributions, with the date they were read.
• First-hand accounts from the person they happened to, labelled as their report, with the source linked.

What it will not publish

• Anything invented, exaggerated, or reconstructed. Every factual claim here is traceable to a source you can open.
• Second-hand summaries of somebody else's complaint that we have not read at the source.
• Personal information about employees of the companies covered. This record is about institutional conduct.
• Paid placement. No company has paid to appear here, to be praised here, or to be left out.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it gets fixed. That applies to the companies covered as much as to anyone else: if you work for one and an entry misstates something, write in, point at the specific claim, and say what the accurate version is. Corrections are made in public, with the change noted and dated, not silently.

If you are a person whose case is published and you want it taken down — because your money came back, because you settled, or because you changed your mind — say so and it comes down. No conditions.

Write via the case form, which reaches the same inbox; put "correction" at the top.

Independence

The rule this record is run by is that nobody can pay to get onto it, off it, or higher up it. No company has paid to appear here, to be praised here, or to be left out, and none ever will — a record of who mistreats merchants is worth nothing the moment that is purchasable.

As of today the site earns no money at all. If that ever changes, what changed will be written on this page, in plain terms, before it takes effect.