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PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says

nytimes.com

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Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says

#31

Post by linuxkerneldev »

jakobegger wrote: post #19

Why is it, when an established company does something like this, the headline talks about "redirecting contributions", instead of calling it what it is? Why not just say "Paypal Defrauds Donors"?

I remember that several Xorg developers alleged that Paypal robbed Xorg. I think Xorg never got anything back. https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1417033.html

I recall reading a bible quote or might have been another religious book. It said, when a powerless man breaks the law, a crime has been committed, but when a powerful man breaks the law, the law was unclear.

Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says

#32

Post by lolc »

At least some of the donations would have been made directly to charities had Paypal not advertized in their name. So charities who weren't informed, couldn't get or didn't want a Paypal account were deprived of donations.

They did the whole thing to get people to use Paypal but didn't want to put in the effort to run it properly. In effect they ended up defrauding charities. If you put up a sign that says "accepting donations for charity X" and then don't make every effort to donate the collected money to X, it's fraud.

"Paypal accused of defrauding charities" would have been the appropriate title.

Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says

#33

Post by Lazare »

cronjobber wrote: post #29
packetized wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The algorithms was triggered before any attempt to send the funds anywhere was made, and without any knowledge of where the funds were going, and with the stated concern that they might not be going to a charity.

Yes, we get it, it's ironic that the Red Cross didn't look so good either in the aftermath of Katrina, but this has literally nothing to do with Paypal or their algorithms.

Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says

#35

Post by JoshTriplett »

Nightshaxx wrote: post #27

So 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 ch…

Which non-profit?

I'd love to hear more about how Amazon Smile works from the charitable organization's side.

Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says

#36

Post by smartbit »

nolok wrote: post #17
paulmd wrote: post #11

Remember 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…

FYI, Paypal is declared and regulated as a bank in the EU, declared in Luxembourg. So if something like this happens to you as an european, either sender or receiver, use your rights. > As of July 2007, PayPal provides localized versions of its service to customers in the EU through PayPal (Europe) S.A.R.L. et Cie, SCA., a wholly-owned subsidiary of PayPal that is licensed as a bank in Luxembourg. Whereas: > In the U…

@nolok what is the value of this regulation? Some recent/current examples. 1) During the banking crisis after 2007 EU banks loose 100billions of euro's and the taxpayer mostly payed for their losses. 2) They get 80billon euro's for free every month (quantitative easing) from the ECB which goes down the drain, iow into their profit, not into supporting the economy. 3) Up till the Greece crisis, Greece had to pay high interest rates to the commercial bank because of the risks associated with lending to Greece, but when the shit hit the fan, the commercial banks got their loans redeemed by the IMF/ECB instead of the banks having to write them off. 4) And more recent, N26 is regulated in Germany but had very flakey security https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7969-shut_up_and_take_my_money. And I can go with al long list...

I couldn't agree more that Paypal can not be trusted, in my vocabulary Paypal US stole the money from the designated charities. To say that Palpay is nice and good in Europe because they regulated by Luxemburg banking authorities, IMHO is far stretched.

Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says

#38

Post by happywolf »

bostand wrote: post #34

Paypal is evil, but what are the alternatives? AliPay? WebMoney? Bitcoin??

The good'ol cash or physical check will always work. Don't believe so called the 'new money': you lose all control of your own money and at someone else's mercy.

Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says

#39

Post by BHSPitMonkey »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #4
djrogers wrote: post #2

This looks really bad for PayPal. "It did not have an account with the Giving Fund, even though its profile page there included its logo, mission statement and tax identification number." TLDR; PayPal is soliciting donations for over a million charities, most of whom are unaware of this.

It sounds like they already have a team manually collecting information on charities. It wouldn't be so unreasonable for them to manually write a check to the actual charity after 6 months with no collection, which would take most of the meat away from the lawsuit. The free money would probably help their conversion rates with this trick, too.

> It sounds like they already have a team manually collecting information on charities.

Probably not. There are many online databases of registered charities already, and I wouldn't be surprised if new ones get scraped into them automatically. It seems likely that PayPal would have used an already existing dataset.

Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says

#40

Post by innocenat »

happywolf wrote: post #38
bostand wrote: post #34

Paypal is evil, but what are the alternatives? AliPay? WebMoney? Bitcoin??

The good'ol cash or physical check will always work. Don't believe so called the 'new money': you lose all control of your own money and at someone else's mercy.

I doubt anything physical would work if you are on different continent.
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