I bought a 1-year VPS. The charge showed up on my credit card account, which means it was a successful transaction. Two days later, after the payment, Racknerd sent me a KYC verification link through Stripe. The next day, Racknerd suspended my VPS.
Why take my money, charge for a year of service, and then send me a link to verify myself?
The biggest issue here is with Stripe asking me to verify my identity, even though I’m not using their service. Yes, they might be legal, but their intrusive behavior in collecting people’s information is unreasonable and should not be tolerated.
Racknerd is not innocent here. If you’re having trouble accepting my payment, then send it back and don’t provide me service. Why provide service for 2 days and then suspend my VPS? And then give me a cancellation button that only cancels the service but will not provide a refund?
This is what they said:
“We’ve received your cancellation request for this service, and it is in queue for the system to automatically process shortly. As a reminder, per our Terms of Service, refunds for any unused service time are not offered.”
In the future, I recommend avoiding services that require Stripe for payment verification. Though it seems impossible to distinguish between the transactions that requires it and those don’t.
Update: Racknerd have explained to me that cancellation of the VPS and a refund are separate processes, and a full refund will be issued.
Zikeji@programming.dev 1 day ago
I work for a hosting provider, not Racknerd though so I can’t speak to their processes. Main difference is that while we use Stripe, we don’t use their ID verification service (and no customers have reported that Stripe has forced them to do so).
The post title is misleading. Yes, Stripe has an ID verification service, but Stripe isn’t what is requiring your ID. Racknerd is using Stripe’s ID verification feature against your payment because of some flag or policy on their end.
This is standard operating procedure and happens in pretty much every industry that accepts online payments. Some flag, policy, etc. was indicated they need to take addition steps to verify you.
I’ll reiterate that Stripe did not arbitrarily force that on you, Racknerd did.
This isn’t useful advice. Racknerd forced the verification on you, not Stripe. I would recommend reviewing the terms of service and going from there. The hosting provider I work for explicitly mentions in the ToS that we may require ID verification. You can use nomenclature like that to a avoid a service, though Racknerd doesn’t mention it in theirs so YMMV. Research and accounts from other customers can be used as well.
If the intent is to avoid ID verification, I would recommend ensuring the data you provide is accurate and up to date but there really isn’t much you can do outside of that. You can thank fraudsters and abusers for ruining that for you.
TherapyGary@lemmy.blahaj.zone 20 hours ago
I can second most of this as a service provider using stripe to collect payments from clients