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Stripe may automatically reject a WooCommerce Payments account. Stripe reviews all connected accounts and uses various signals to assess risk on those accounts. You can read more about the Stripe’s Terms of Service Enforcement process here. As our payments partner, they have the final say in delaying or suspending the payouts or deposits, and suspending or terminating an account or its ability to process transactions.

The store owner can contact Stripe directly and discuss their account with them via the Contact Support link at: https://support.stripe.com/.

This guide explains how to check if an account has been rejected It assumes you are familiar with the Stripe Platform Dashboard and know how to access the dashboard.

• Deposits – Temporarily Suspended
• Rejected Accounts

WooCommerce Payments Account Creation and Review Process

Here’s what happens when a user signs up for a new Stripe Express account to use with WooCommerce Payments.

Timeline: 

• User signs up via WooCommerce Payments
• Initial 7 day waiting period begins
• Stripe sends the account to a8c upon initial approval. Some accounts are rejected during signup.
• The account is automatically reviewed by our fraud prevention tool Sift Science and is given a risk score. If the account scores above our current threshold, a ticket is generated for review by FraudSquad. 

When accounts land in the FraudSquad queue for review they have the following restrictions automatically applied, depending on their risk score: 

• Review Tickets: no restrictions
• Looks Risky Tickets: deposits set to manual (soft blocked) 
• Looks Bad Tickets: payments to the account are paused, and deposits set to manual (hard blocked). In addition, for this elevated risk group the merchant is notified via email that the account is under review, and then notified again of approval or rejection via email when a decision is issued by the team. 

Note: there are no circumstances under which an account is rejected without human review.

FraudSquad makes a decision within 7 days to approve or reject an account that has been restricted, which aligns with Stripe’s own risk mitigation strategy. This timeframe may be exceeded if the account is high risk or already restricted by Stripe.

In cases where a decision cannot be reached in the first 7 days the account may remain restricted temporarily. FraudSquad will re-check it upon signup completion, or after enough time has passed to evaluate the initial payments, at which point a decision will be issued.

Some merchants may see the ‘manual payments’ notice during this time, visible in the WooCommerce Payments extension menu. This message will be removed in the next sprint. 

Deposits: Temporarily Suspended

Cases where FraudSquad has suspended auto payments: why and next steps 

Typically, auto payments are suspended when the account has been soft or hard blocked either: 

• Automatically, and FraudSquad is yet to review the account, or
• Manually, and FraudSquad has a ticket on hold to review the account again at a later date.

How to tell if FraudSquad or Stripe has suspended auto payments

In some cases the merchant will face a There was a problem redirecting you to the account dashboard. Please try again. error message when visiting /wp-admin > Payments and will have a Could not process the account. error being logged( you’ll need to request logs from the merchant to see this ).

If FraudSquad have paused payouts (“blocked”) or rejected an account, it will appear in the Blog RC’s audit trail. In the example below, the account came into the queue as a “Review Ticket” (no restrictions). The account showed enough risky signals to be soft blocked while FraudSquad monitored it, and was ultimately rejected due to fraudulent activity.  

You can also see activity like this in the WCPay Tool in the Audit log, like this:

For information on the account’s current status, you can check the WooCommerce Payments section of the blog RC, which might look like this:

Or, use the WCPay Tool to check the Account status in top left, which might look like this:

What we’re looking for here is the WCPay account status, and the Last Fraud Action field.

Note that in these cases our internal WCPay account tool should be considered the source of truth, and that it’s possible that the Stripe dashboard view for the account can show inaccurate information due to limitations in Stripe’s API (more Context in this Slack thread)

If the Last Fraud Action is:

• none, but the account status is “Suspended”, then this account has been auto-blocked by Sift Science, which is our auto-checker rules system. Fraudsquad probably hasn’t manually reviewed it yet. ()
• soft_block or pending_review – this likely means Fraudsquad has reviewed it and it is actively being monitored by them for activity, hopefully heading towards a final decision of rejection or restoration.
• rejected – this is a final decision that it is rejected by Fraudsquad.

Note that in the none/soft block state, the customer would not have received any email or notification, so all they have to go on is the notice under Payments on their dashboard that deposits are suspended. If the account has been fully rejected, they should receive an email to that effect soon after the rejection.

Next steps for Woo Support HEs: 

• Check the Stripe Express account per the guidelines here: Stripe Account Restricted. If the Stripe interface indicates they require additional information (you can see this by hovering over the “restricted” or “restricted soon” notification at the top of their account), share that information with the customer. If they need to submit documentation, they should have received an email from Stripe with a submission link; if they can’t find it, open an internal ticket with Stripe to help facilitate the submission.
• Check the creation date on the account. If the account is within the initial 7-day waiting period, a decision will usually be made to approve or reject accounts when the waiting period ends (apart from exceptional circumstances). You can let the user know they’re in this typical waiting period, and to check the account again after 7 days has passed.  
• Check for any Risk-Related Communications from Stripe by conducting a Zendesk search using their WooPayments Account ID (acct_xxxxxxxxxxx).
• Check the Last Fraud Action in the WCPay tool:
  • If the Last Fraud Action is soft_block or pending_review, check the Support History on the User RC for a ticket in the Fraud queue, which might look like the image below. If there is an open Fraud ticket, then Fraud Squad is actively monitoring the account so you can share a canned “deposits delayed” response from here. Many merchants in this case want to know how long the review process will take, but we cannot share this information as it may allow merchants to doctor their income stream to appear legitimate, so be deliberately vague. Their best chance to have the account released is to continue to take customer payments and show a healthy income stream, but if they cannot function with the account in deposits suspended status, they may need to consider other payment gateways.
    
  • If the Last Fraud Action is rejected, this is a final decision by Fraudsquad. Share a canned rejected snippet from here. They will no longer be able to view any account information from their dashboard, so if they require information about deposits or past payments, we can provide them with an exported CSV. Assure them that any remaining balance will be paid out.
  • If the Last Fraud Action is none, but the account is shown as suspended, and there are no Audit Logs or an open ticket, then this account has likely been flagged by our automated Sift Science risk rules, but has not yet been manually reviewed by Fraudsquad. False positives do happen with Sift, so this is a good case to ping #fraudsquad on Slack to ask them to look at the account right away and see if it can be immediately released. They will either release the account or (more likely) move it to soft block status, and advise you share a soft block canned response with the customer and then forward the ticket on to the Fraudsquad queue for monitoring. While FS is reviewing, you could consider sharing this canned response:

Thanks for reaching out!

After taking a look, it seems your account was flagged for review by our automated systems. I’ve asked our payments team to take another look, and they’ll get back to me once they’ve finished with their review.

We’ll let you know when we have an update.

• Again, ping in #fraudsquad if ever in any doubt about what to do next.

Pending Review Accounts

If the account has a Pending Review status, the account is under review by Stripe and likely waiting for the merchant to upload some docs, then ask the merchant to upload those documents to complete the setup such that Stripe can review and update the account.

More information about the documents that are missing may be found by searching the Stripe Risk-Related Email queue, or by conducting a Zendesk search using their WooPayments Account ID, (acct_xxxxxxxxxx).

If the Payout is disabled and you find the site is selling alcohol, then ping in #wcpay-payment-operations. Someone from Payment Ops will reach out to the merchant directly.

Currently, for sites selling alcohol, we require that they meet certain eligibility criteria and submit specific information before they can use WCPay.

Rejected Accounts

Accounts are rejected for either fraudulent activity or terms of service violations.

When an account is rejected, you may see a message like this in the Blog RC even though there is no message in the Stripe dashboard.

This happens when fraudsquad attempts to reject an account but experience an error in the process.

In most cases, i.e. when there is no error in the rejection process, you will also see a message like this in the Stripe dashboard:

Scroll down for more details:

When an account is rejected by FraudSquad, both Stripe and the user are automatically informed. Occasionally users reach out asking for more information.

Use the predef below. No further information is provided to the user about the reason for rejection. Users are not restricted from publishing or using WooCommerce when accounts are rejected, we are only declining to process their payments. They can utilize other payment extensions with WooCommerce if desired.

Your account was suspended due to activity which is in violation of our Terms of Service and/or Account Agreement through Stripe: https://en.wordpress.com/tos/ https://stripe.com/connect-account/legal We appreciate your interest in WooCommerce Payments, however we cannot re-open the account. There are alternative payment processors you can try that work with WooCommerce: https://woocommerce.com/product-category/woocommerce-extensions/payment-gateways/

Rejected Account Predef

If the user does not accept this response and wants to know specifically why they were rejected, we should *not* give them further detail. A simple reply like this is good:

We won’t be providing any further detail about why we are not able to support your account.

When in doubt, use the workflow in #fraudsquad in Slack to get further assistance.

“Failed to reject account” notice in audit log

Occasionally, you might see a notice in the audit log of a WooPayments account that says Failed to reject account... like this:

This can often occur if there are active disputes or if the account has a remaining balance. In cases like this you can look at the Last fraud action as the source of truth for this account and relay that info to the merchant:

If you are unsure about the status of the account for whatever reason then use the workflow in #fraudsquad.

Payments menu in WooCommerce dashboard for rejected accounts

When an account is rejected, the merchant has no longer access to the submenus under Payments. That means they can no longer access the Transactions or Deposits data.

What they are seeing is an “Account details” block with the Rejected label and the Payments and Deposits status.

What we can do for merchants

• If they need access to the data from their past transactions or payouts we can export those from Stripe and send them as attachments (see screenshots below).
• Some European merchants may ask us for the VAT invoices. These are no longer available for them since the Payments > Documents page where invoices are listed is no longer accessible.
  Check WooCommerce Payments: VAT Tax Invoice – Rejected Accounts for more information about whether you should and how to provide the rejected merchant with the VAT documents.

Refund After Rejection

If the store owner needs to refund payments, they can still do that via their site’s dashboard from the Edit Order screen using this guide.

If the store owner is not able to process refunds and gets an error message, they can reach out to Stripe at support@stripe.com to reinstate their ability to issue refunds (reference).

There may be some occasions where the user says they have been in contact with Stripe and this wasn’t resolved.

In this scenario, please follow the below steps:

1. Ping #fraudsquad to supply input on the support ticket.
2. If the customer mentions they’ve been in contact with Stripe and there’s been no movement, the best protocol is to create a new ticket so we can contact Stripe, and then work with them on resolving the situation.
3. If Fraud Squad find anything unusual, it should be added in the ticket notes so that all HE’s have visibility into this and we can work collaboratively together.

(References: Ticket, WC Pay Operations P2)

There may also be instances of a merchant wanting to make a refund after the account being rejected, but their balance is negative. The solution might be a wire transfer to top up their balance as described here, but we must first check with #fraudsquad.

If in doubt, please do use the workflow in the #fraudsquad Slack channel for further guidance.

Deposits After Rejection

Whether or not an account will receive deposits after it is rejected depends on why it was rejected.

This is covered in-depth on FraudSquadUniversity here, but the gist is:

• Risk rejections will not be paid out for the first six months.
• Service violation rejections with some rare case-by-case exceptions will receive their deposits as they normally would.
  • If this doesn’t happen as expected, we can manually pay out their remaining balance to the attached bank account.
    • Should you have any questions about whether or not an account can be paid out, please use the workflow in the #fraudsquad Slack channel.

Disputes After Rejection

Merchants cannot challenge disputes after their account has been rejected, that’s normal. We do not assist the merchant in these cases. Simply reply with something like:

I understand you wish to submit evidence on this dispute. However, your account has been closed by Stripe (our payments provider for WooPayments) due to service agreement violations. After discussing this with our payments team, I’m afraid we are unable to assist with disputes on rejected accounts.

Initially Suspended, but Later on Approved by Stripe

This case may be rare, but you may encounter cases where Stripe had initially suspended the user’s account, and later on approved.

In this case, you will observe the following:

• Zendesk: User Info > Account Status > Payments: Disabled
• Blog RC: WooCommerce Payments section > Payments blocked: true and Account Suspended: true
• Site’s SSR: WC Pay’s section: Account ID: -
• Stripe Dashboard: WC Pay > Account > No flags or visible warning

For this, ask in #fraudsquad Slack Channel about the account, and see if the account can be approved now that Stripe seemed to have approved on their end.

Account un-rejection

Accounts may be un-rejected/reinstated in rare cases by Stripe, and Fraudsquad needs to review the account first. If that has been requested, please do not take any action on that account and use the WCPay Merchant Risk macro to send it to Fraudsquad or use the workflow in #fraudsquad Slack channel when in doubt.

Example tickets of two such rare cases are #5354783-zen and #5201904-zen.

Stripe Risk-Related Emails

We are BCC’ed on communications sent to our Merchants by Stripe’s Risk Team; these emails are stored in Zendesk, so they can be searched either through the previous link, or by simply conducting a Zendesk search using the Merchant’s WooPayments Account ID (acct_XXXXXXXX).

Some example scenarios found in these communications include:

• Putting a Reserve on the account (holding a percentage of their funds to cover disputes and refunds)
• Disabling Payouts (Deposits in Woo parlance) and requesting more information about their account, or requiring documentation to re-enable deposits.
• Problems reviewing an account (site unavailable or information mismatch to their account application), more information needed
• Notification that a merchant has been placed on the VFMP or VDMP programs for dispute/fraud activity
• Closing an account for Risk
• Closing an account for TOS

While these emails should not be cited directly, they can be helpful for us to understand the whole situation, and we can ask the Merchant if they’ve received these emails.

Other information for the store owner

Let the customer know that WooCommerce Payments is a service separate to the WooCommerce software and that their store’s products will remain online and able to accept orders via other payment methods. We can suggest other payment gateways to them.

You can use the snippet wcp.rejected to inform the customer about this.

You can see further discussion in this response to a customer’s ticket about their rejected account in #2993632-zen.