Blew $180 on a payment processing platform that ghosted us for 3 weeks

I signed up with a new Canadian fintech startup called PayStream back in February for their flat fee merchant accounts. After I paid the $180 setup cost, my account got flagged for "manual review" and I couldn't process a single transaction for 21 days. Their support team in Vancouver just kept sending automated replies. Anyone else deal with a fintech that took your money then went silent?

3 comments

3 Comments

brian_smith61mo ago

That "manual review" thing got me. My buddy signed up with a different fintech startup last year called LeanPay. He paid the $150 setup fee and then they said his account was under review for "compliance checks." He kept getting the same automated emails you did for like two weeks. Finally he called them out on social media and someone actually picked up the phone. They told him his business type was "flagged by their system" but wouldn't say why. Took him 18 days total to get his account active. He said he felt like an idiot for paying upfront.

leo_fisher1mo agoMost Upvoted

@brian_smith6 paying upfront is just the cost of doing business with startups, they gotta cover their risk somehow. 18 days ain't bad considering how many shady businesses try to game these systems.

lunag301mo ago

Actually that 18 day wait sounds pretty standard for these fintech companies, not just startups. My neighbor went through something similar with a well known payment processor back in 2021. He paid $200 upfront and then got stuck in a review loop for almost three weeks. The worst part is they never told him what triggered the flag. They just kept saying it was a "routine security check." He finally got through when he found a direct number to their compliance department on some obscure page of their website. The person on the phone admitted their automated system flagged any business that used certain keywords in their description, but they wouldn't tell him which ones. So he had no way to fix it or avoid it next time. That's the part that bugs me more than the wait time honestly.