Disputed payment from a social.coop user

On Nov 15 we got a notification from Stripe that a payment into Platform 6, made by a social.coop user, had been disputed. As far as I could ascertain from the information made available to us, the payment was the second payment from the user, with the first being made a year earlier, using the same card.

My guess was that the person had not twigged that when they made the first payment they had set up an annual recurring payment, and when it happened they were perhaps confused and consequently flagged it up to their bank as unauthorised. Anyone with access to the social.coop open collective can probably see the records concerned, and I'm happy to share more details but probably not here (which is fairly open).

It's the first time this has happened for us, so in the very limited time I had available (this coincided with a very busy few weeks) I read up a bit on the advice offered by Stripe, and was able to a) write to the person concerned as advised, explaining what I thought had happened, and asking them to rescind the dispute so that we could resolve the issue one way or the other, and b) not knowing how best to inform the social.coop community, I sent a brief email to Matt Noyes setting out in brief what had happened.

Had I had more time available I would probably have sought to submit evidence in support of our position, and flagged it up here rather than my knee-jerk response of mailing Matt, but simply didn't have the headspace or the spare half day to get things organised to take it further at that point. Also Stripe's documentation around the issue seemed to indicate pretty clearly that winning these types of disputes was hard, and that the system was designed in favour of the consumer.

I've now received a notice that the dispute has been 'lost' and so the payment (£41.40) has been refunded to the person concerned, and a further 'dispute fee' (I think £20) has been taken, presumably to bolster the issuing bank's profits.

Why am I flagging this up now?

1. I don't know what social.coop's policy is around this type of thing, but I imagine that you might want to pick this up with the person concerned. As I say I've written to them seeking their cooperation, and got nowhere - if my email even got past their spam filter. I'm not clear on the rules of using social.coop - do you disable accounts where people have not made a contribution?

2. Thankfully this looks to be a very rare occurrence, but it has taken up a good deal of my time, and cost money into the bargain. So I guess it's useful to give some consideration to the issue, and maybe see how we can collectively learn from it. It feels like it could be a risk where people are setting up annual recurring payments (higher amounts, bigger gaps in time so more likely to forget what it was for, etc.)

I'm more than happy to pass on my email to the person concerned, and also the email I sent to Matt, if that's helpful, along with the identity of the person involved.

Here's to a dispute-free future.