Costco Merchant Services did exactly this to us way back in the day( 2007-ish?). We switched from our previous merchant account bank due to better rates near the beginning of that year.
Everything was fine, up until right after Thanksgiving. This was an ecommerce company, so a sudden 500% increase in authorization volume is pretty normal and expected. Well, not to Costco ( or rather, the bank whose services they were reselling ). Our account was immediately deactivated, and we ended up having to spend a week begging our previous bank to reactivate our previous account.
That first night was, personally, an all-nighter writing janky code to encrypt cardholder data with ephemeral keys and store it off-database on an isolated, firewalled host (in order to pass the PCI-DSS SAQ coming to us in January), ship the product anyway, and hope that we'd be able to authorize a reasonable percentage of that unauthenticated cardholder data in the future.
This is what happens when you make business decisions based purely on price -- or in the case of Stripe, developer convenience.
Everything was fine, up until right after Thanksgiving. This was an ecommerce company, so a sudden 500% increase in authorization volume is pretty normal and expected. Well, not to Costco ( or rather, the bank whose services they were reselling ). Our account was immediately deactivated, and we ended up having to spend a week begging our previous bank to reactivate our previous account.
That first night was, personally, an all-nighter writing janky code to encrypt cardholder data with ephemeral keys and store it off-database on an isolated, firewalled host (in order to pass the PCI-DSS SAQ coming to us in January), ship the product anyway, and hope that we'd be able to authorize a reasonable percentage of that unauthenticated cardholder data in the future.
This is what happens when you make business decisions based purely on price -- or in the case of Stripe, developer convenience.