Stripe Discriminates Witches WIRED

When I decided to start offering tarot readings, selling them through my website seemed like the easiest method. I’m a writer, and I prefer to give my testimony in writing – and once I built my site on Squarespace, the integration with Stripe took only a few minutes to set up. Eventually, I added more products – digital workbooks and tutorials that gained popularity through my growing Instagram followers – and built a solid business selling these goods online.

A few months later, I received a notification from Stripe that my sales violated their terms of service, as my work with tarot seemed to fit into their broad category of “mental services” and was therefore considered a limited, high-risk business. After sending them an email to protect my business to no avail, I restructured my payments to work with PayPal and continued to offer services through my website in this more limited capacity.

Then, in early 2020, with the onset of the pandemic and the subsequent loss of my freelance photography income, I launched a newsletter on Substack. After carefully researching Stripe’s terms of service and designing my personal tarot writings around them, I started with great excitement and was excited that people immediately signed up for paid subscriptions. I was able to run it for a month before receiving the same familiar notification from Stripe that I had violated their terms. And I fought again, this time I won my case and kept my ballot alive. I was relieved to believe that my newsletter was safe, and I continued to create content on Substack – only to run into similar issues with Stripe a year later.

I’m not alone. Stripe, a technology company launched in 2011, serves as the exclusive payment processor for popular platforms such as Substack, Teachable, Circle, Ghost, Shopify, Medium, Revue, Memberful and Clubhouse. Operating on more than 3 million websites, they are one of the most common payment platforms on the Internet – and are not friendly to people who run metaphysical businesses, which due to the label “mental services” are often considered ineligible for payment processing.

The lack of nuance in these terms, combined with a constant misunderstanding of what occult work actually involves, has led to many people and companies in this space being thrown off the platform, often without warning. Books, courses, seminars, lectures, consultations, readings and other services are the main sources of income for many freelancers and small business owners, so the inability to be paid for these offers directly affects our livelihood. And because most of these metaphysical services are offered by women, strange people, people of color, and people with marginalized identities, this policy can disproportionately affect people who may already be financially disadvantaged.

An occult working being classified as “high risk” is nothing new. Companies like Etsy and Square have also historically challenged metaphysics practitioners to use their platforms to sell products and services. Stripe’s official policy, according to an email from the support team, is that “these businesses often make claims that are not supported by science or past evidence, which can lead to a high rate of refund.” Customers will be promised a result, and when that doesn’t happen, they will challenge the fee as “The product is not acceptable.” Their policy is broad enough for the company to terminate the service immediately and permanently, even if the business has run smoothly. for some time or never had to reimburse dissatisfied customers.

It is not unreasonable for Stripe to want to protect customers from fraudsters or reputable sellers. But for many, the generalized label of “mental services” that tries to define and categorize our business is not even accurate. Occult services offer opportunities for reflection, self-awareness, and compassion, providing a variety of ways to explore truth, spirituality, and intuition. They empower, comfort, and can help people regain strength and purpose when they feel vulnerable or scared. Everyone who works in this industry already has a vested interest in making sure that customers know exactly what they are getting – we also don’t want to have dissatisfied customers or promise things we can’t actually deliver. The tarot readings I provide, for example, help my clients look at challenges, issues and situations through a different lens, providing clarity and new perspectives in a safe and affirmative environment. I have never claimed to be a psychic, and in fact I explicitly say that I am no mentally on my website.

“The use of terms such as fortune teller and mentally are humiliating, humiliating and discriminatory, as well as the suspension of the service, “said Philly Curot, a lawyer and priestess of Wicca, about her own struggles with Stripe. “The fact that countless Wiccans, witches and pagans have had a similar problem with Stripe is beginning to sound not like random, algorithmic nonsense, but as a model of religious discrimination.” witchcraft makes it even harder for small specialty firms to defend themselves.