Making a live-mode test payment to yourself = a payment processor ToS violation?

To me it seemed like common sense that before you push the thing into the real world, no matter how much testing you do, you'd fire a couple test payments on the live version.

Apparently, after reading more into it, if you make a payment to yourself, or to a business where your name is associated with it, this is a violation of the Stripe (and other payment processor) ToS, and you can get your account banned AND even potentially put on a MATCH list that effectively blacklists you from using ANY payment processor in the future. Well over the last several months I've made about a dozen such payments just to test things out and make sure everything was working correctly. Now I'm worried that I'm boned.

If you search the subject online you can find several posts on Reddit where people (mainly the same few people) detail the ominous "hammer-of-doom" consequences that can and likely will result from making a few live-mode test payments like this.

How big of a deal is this really? Is this not practically speaking just the common-sense norm before launching your live product? Did everyone else know this and I'm just a moron? Can anyone in the software developer / SaaS community point to one real-world example of someone they know who had their payment provider account banned for doing this, let alone outright blacklisted and put on a MATCH list, because of a handful of small test payments? I couldn't find any clear examples online, making me think, the severity of this infraction may be overblown.

I'm curious to see where the SaaS / software entrepreneur community is on this issue, since this is really pretty vital to what ALL of us do as part of our product development/launching/testing process. It's got me THOROUGHLY stressed out. Thanks.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42836981

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42836981