The issue is that the credit card company doesn’t necessarily run through a full legal analysis of the seller’s rights in a transaction when the buyer requests a chargeback.

Of course it may eventually all get settled in the seller’s favor in court, but in the meantime the buyer has their vehicle and their money back and it’s on the seller to track them down and sue.

So people tend to do person-to-person used vehicle purchases in cash-equivalents (cash, cashier’s check, etc) so that there’s no worry about the money disappearing after the buyer drives over the horizon.

But that can be said of any transaction via a card. When ever I've receieved a chargeback (iirc its only happened twice in all my years, but I've been lucky) my payment provider has offered me the ability to dispute the charge back which will send the evidence that the transaction was legitimate back to the bank requesting the chargeback.

At which point you would give the documentation showing that that it was a as-is purchase and a legitimate transaction.

But as I said above, this could happen to any card transaction not just used car sales.

It's a large transaction (by most people's day-to-day standards) with usually a random person who you have no business or other relationship with, who takes the car and drives off, hopefully to never be seen or heard from again. A private seller doesn't want to be dealing with credit card chargeback disputes weeks after the fact to get the money they thought they already had.

A used car dealership is better positioned to spend time dealing with chargeback disputes than a private seller, but why bother with extra work when you can just put up a sign that says "no credit cards" and never have to deal with it?

But my inital question was Why would stripe deem a used vehicle sale as a huge liability enough to flag the transaction. Not the seller having reservations about using the card system as a means of payment for the sale.

The person having the issue with stripe clearly initally thought accepting payment via card was fine, the purchaser hasn't issued a chargeback as far as we can tell, the transaction itself was flagged by stripe.

EDIT: just to be clear. or atleast try to be more clear. I'm not against Stripe "holding" on to the cash for a while, it was an abnormal transaction on the account for an item not normally sold by the seller (as they used Stripe as a back up method as their primary provider was down).

I was just asking the question why would a used vehicle sale be deemed as a huge liability for a company selling their old company van to process via the card network (not your avg joe selling a car from home who might not want the hassle - cash is king for as-is sales at the end of the day) because the fact it was a used vehicle was the reason the person I was replying to stated as the prob cause.

EDIT2: Allow me to word it like this. If the company wished to sell off old networking gear and/or servers "as-is" because they were no longer needed. The size of the transaction and the items sold would be unusual for the business to be selling which may cause the transaction to be flagged for further inspection/validation/hold on the funds just to be on the safe side (Thats fine, I get that, they were doing transactions outside their normal operations and tripped some safeguards).

But I just don't see why the item(s) themselves (the network gear/servers) alone would be such a liability to justify the hold, servers and network gear get sold as-is online all the time, so why would a used vehicle be any different? The person I initally replied to was saying that because "a used car seems extremely likely to cause a chargeback". I just don't get the "extremely likely to cause a chargeback" part.

I'd guess that a manual review for the automatically detected out-of-policy transaction wouldn't be prioritized if it's been flagged as a transaction outside the seller's line of business that they mentioned in their agreement with Stripe when onboarding.

I kind of agree - I don't see why manually reviewing a transaction that probably violates their agreement with Stripe should be prioritized by Stripe - even if the transaction would eventually emerge as legit (not fraudulent and not chargeback-able). Because such a manual review would entail a cost to Stripe that is being forced upon Stripe by the seller's actions.

I'm not questioning the idea that the transaction was outside the sellers normal line of business (and tbf to Stripe, would imo be a valid reason to be extra careful with the transaction and may be justifcation for account termination, even if account termination seems a bit harsh for a first time "offensive" imo, but hey, thats ToS for you), just the idea that "used car seems extremely likely to cause a chargeback" thats all.

Yep, FWIW I hope OP gets their money if not their account