That's a good point, hellbanner should have used the test API, but this is still troubling. First, due to the lack of the communication and a proper ticket system from Stripe. Second (and more troubling), the idea that someone could maliciously cause you to lose the ability to process payments on your site simply by submitting a bunch of fake (or half-fake) transactions.

Creating a system that processes payments can be an involved process, requiring significant development effort, even when using API and libraries like Stripe provides. It seems like Stripe should only be shutting people down as a last resort, after repeated warnings with a clear way on how to fix the problem. This is also just good business practice. No one wants to be shut down without a good reason and without any recourses for appeal or reconciliation.

I'm willing to wager that a huge number of Credit Card transactions are submitted with names that don't match the credit card. In 10+ years and hundreds (thousands?) of transactions, I've never submitted a credit card transaction that matched the name on my card (which has my full name, and I just use my first and last name in the fields) - I've never been rejected.

It's the "using my own credit card" that sounds like a great way to get your account shut down, not using it with a fake name. Charging your own cards is something payment processors don't like for a number of reasons, like the fact that it can be used to perpetrate all kinds of frauds: giving yourself cash advances the card issuer hasn't approved, gaming credit card reward programs, skewing your volume and reversal metrics the processor uses to evaluate your account risk, etc.

I wanted to verify their production code worked. Instead of using a real customer's credit card, I used my own. If there was a bug in my code, my own card would be at risk, not a customer's.