It seems to me that the donors are the little fish here and that charities who's logos were used with the intent to deceive the customer/doner are the ones that can eat PatPal alive.
PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
21–30 of 92 posts
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#22Remember when in the aftermath of Katrina, Paypal seized donations fundraised from Something Awful intended for the Red Cross for "fraud" and then refused to release them even when everyone told them they knew full well what was going on? After they got called onto the mat they finally agreed to release the funds but only to one of their own selected list of charities, all of which had vastly greater overhead expense…
PayPal is a nightmarish company. I've lost ~3000 USD to PayPal when I was doing small business back in early 2000s. Their "buyer first" policy had screwed us big time, even though we have provided all the documentation to contest the bogus claims. PayPal froze our money, and terrorized me for a whole year with collections agencies. It was awful. I am out of 3K dollars, and I have stopped using PayPal since.
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#23Remember when in the aftermath of Katrina, Paypal seized donations fundraised from Something Awful intended for the Red Cross for "fraud" and then refused to release them even when everyone told them they knew full well what was going on? After they got called onto the mat they finally agreed to release the funds but only to one of their own selected list of charities, all of which had vastly greater overhead expense…
On the other hand, it isn't entirely impossible that Paypal algorithms saw something about the Red Cross that looked like fraud.
http://www.npr.org/2014/10/29/359365276/on-superstorm-sandy-...
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Blockchain technology is (nearly) useless without the blockchain being public. Banks need stronger distibuted consensus primitives than theyre using now, but blockchain is overkill.
It would be interesting to figure out how much of the process you could make public without compromising the privacy of the donors too much. How much additional risk would be added by just publishing a log of all donations, with just the sender anonymized (with the sender knowing or even choosing the id, so they can verify their donation went through?), and how could that be mitigated?
With Bitcoin it is almost impossible to figure out who an account belongs to. It's however easy to follow the money as every transaction is public.
So while you can see what the charity does with the money, and also confirm that they received it, it's almost impossible for the charity to figure out who sent the donation.
An account in Bitcoin is just a long random number. And you can create as many accounts as you like. In order to find out who the account belongs to you have to trace back the money to an exchange, and not only hope they will cooperate, but also that they have not deleted the records of the transfer.
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#25PayPal is long known for its fraudulent behavior. Here is a good list of references:
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#26Man, I donated through this. I didn't know the charity wouldn't get the money.
You could write a letter demanding proof that they directed your money properly or refund it.
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#27So my parents run a non-profit and a recently letter we got from Amazon Smile explains what is happening here. Amazon Smile is a service were you can choose a charity for Amazon to donate to. When you shop at Amazon, a small percentage of that money goes to the selected charity.
Recently they got a letter in the mail explaining they had been chosen as recipients of this Amazon Smile money. The thing is, they never chose to be featured on Amazon Smile. Amazon used some database of non-profits (that they had never heard of) in order to present options to customers, then notified the non-profits later. The letter specifically said that in order to collect the money, they needed to create an account with Amazon smile.
PayPal is probably just pre-populating their list of charities, failing to fully notify recipients of the donations, then saying "Whoops, I guess we got to do something with the money."
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#28Remember when in the aftermath of Katrina, Paypal seized donations fundraised from Something Awful intended for the Red Cross for "fraud" and then refused to release them even when everyone told them they knew full well what was going on? After they got called onto the mat they finally agreed to release the funds but only to one of their own selected list of charities, all of which had vastly greater overhead expense…
On the other hand, it isn't entirely impossible that Paypal algorithms saw something about the Red Cross that looked like fraud. http://www.npr.org/2014/10/29/359365276/on-superstorm-sandy-...
Literally nothing in the PayPal algorithms could have foreseen something like the article you've linked, and to suggest so is exceedingly disingenuous.
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, it isn't entirely impossible that Paypal algorithms saw something about the Red Cross that looked like fraud. http://www.npr.org/2014/10/29/359365276/on-superstorm-sandy-...
Literally nothing in the PayPal algorithms could have foreseen something like the article you've linked, and to suggest so is exceedingly disingenuous.
It is likely that they didn't catch the linked problem, and I didn't intend to suggest so. What the linked article shows is that the Red Cross isn't beyond the suspicion that something they did wasn't that clealy above board that an algorithm couldn't possibly have been triggered.
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#30if you have been screwed by PayPal please consider Bitcoin. I started accepting Bitcoin for various things and really love being fully in control of my money. there are no intermediaries!