Notes
A weird one this—only posting is here publicly as the clock is ticking.
On the morning of August 5 from 10:24 am my time (GMT+8) until 3:36 pm the same day, I received over 300 new subscribers on the paid 7-day trial thing. To say this was unusual, would be a slight understatement. At a glance many of the email addresses look fake, think email prefixes like:
djfhdhfjdhjfhsjhdff@
ffdffffffffffffffffffffff@
etc
In the time since, I’ve sent two newsletters to paid subscribers, and of the 300+, 13 have opened an email. This seems, given they’re all on a 7-day trial, to be rather unusual.
I checked into my Stripe account, and Stripe hasn’t flagged any of the cards as dodgy, but while Substack has marked all as being from the US (I assume via IP), in Stripe, the cards are from all over the globe, with many many foreign cards.
All up, looks ahhhh well dodgy.
So I emailed Substack support on the same day and received a reply the next day from their support team thqanking me for the headsup and saying that my enquiry had been escalated to “Trust and Safety.” I sent a followup on the 8th, asking if Substack had any further thoughts on this, but have heard nothing back.
My main concern is if these are all dodgy accounts with hot cards, I assume running a small charge on a stolen card, that when the trial finishes and the charges hit the cards this Saturday, I’m going to score 300+ chargebacks from Stripe which would cost me thousands of dollars. This would not be ideal.
So, my question is, has anyone else seem something like this happen? And if so, what did you do?
If I manually cancel all 300+ accounts in Substack, will that remove the risk of chargebacks from Stripe?
Better still, if Substack to get back to me with some advice/insight, that would be grand.
Thanks! cc (as you’re all about growth, but probably not this kinda growth) and (as you’re the boss). Thanks all.