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Paypal is holding over 600,000 euros from the minecraft developer

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Re: Paypal is holding over 600,000 euros from the minecraft developer

#41

Post by loewenskind »

[deleted] wrote: post #34
jimbokun wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can anyone explain how PayPal is not constantly in court defending against class action law suits? No lawyer anywhere has considered the possibility of a massive payout from representing all of the clients over the world whose money PayPal has swallowed without explanation? Or, somehow, PayPal has managed to craft contracts so legally airtight that they can do absolutely anything with anyone's money with absolutely n…

[deleted]

So you call most of the people who've ever claimed to have a problem with PayPal liars (unsurprisingly no less) and the nearest thing to a citation you provide for this claim is an anecdote and some naive pop legal analysis about "if they were bad they would get shut down!"?

Stay classy.

EDIT: Fixed faulty word selection.

Re: Paypal is holding over 600,000 euros from the minecraft developer

#42

Post by jacquesm »

[deleted] wrote: post #39
jacquesm wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had this happen to me with $50K and it wasn't 'lies or made up' in that case, I suspect most of them are much like mine. You realize you're up against a giant in a foreign country that says they'll release your funds in 6 months time. So rather than spend 50 K on American lawyers and end up with nothing even if you win you grit your teeth and get on with your job vowing to never use the service again. And they d…

[deleted]

edit (recovered because parent deleted their comment):

> citricsquid wrote: > And you're in the "legitimate claims" part, like I said. What's the story behind your problem, why did they take your $50k?

endedit.

To this day I haven't a friggin' clue. We were in their beta program when they started with batched money requests, we helped them debug their stuff and came with a bunch of helpful suggestions. We had over 30% of our customers using the paypay monthly money request to renew and had a whole pile of back-end stuff to handle the details.

boom one day to the next our account is frozen. But, and this is the juicy part, outstanding money requests were still being honoured and the money was taken from the users accounts when they tried to pay us.

So, from the users point of view they had paid and wanted service, from our point of view we did not receive the funds. Of course we realized the users couldn't help that so we gave them service anyway and only got their payment 6 months later. If PayPal would have at least stopped transferring money in to that account we could have made a different arrangement with those users for that month (fortunately this only affected the 'running' month for which money requests had been made).

Not a single person at paypal ever thought it worth their time to tell us why our account had been frozen.

I realize wallet systems are hard, that there are lots of people that will flock to a system like that in order to defraud it and so on. But when you're that close with a customer that has been in your pilot program and you freeze their assets and stonewall then you have a bunch of issues in your company that need taking care of.

PayPal, and by extension their parent company Ebay, sucks.

Re. Ebay, I alerted them recently to a bunch of guys that moved from Africa to London that are on their dutch auction site (yes, it's that complicated) using ripped images and fake details on vehicles and they're still at it, again, no response whatsoever.

I think that plenty of people are in the 'legitimate' claims part, and I'm giving you an illustration why we don't bother fighting. Personally I recognize too many elements in most of those stories to chalk them up to being bogus, what do those people have to gain from claiming paypal froze their accounts for no reason.

On my end there is nothing to gain, it's just another experience with a large company.

Re: Paypal is holding over 600,000 euros from the minecraft developer

#44

Post by jakewalker »

laverick wrote: post #21
drtse4 wrote: post #2

Another Paypal horror story added to the list. If someone was wondering (as i did), no, he didn't let 600k on his paypal account. That's what he's earned since they limited his account 25th august. See http://twitter.com/Toucanator/status/24089600756 and http://twitter.com/xnotch/statuses/24089647124 . EDIT: Minecraft complete steam sales data,amazing: http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/

So he's sold 60k prepurchases at EUR 9.95 in a little over two weeks?! Holy cow. Found some stats - http://www.minecraft.net/stats.jsp

Prepurchases? Pretty sure that could be the problem - - PayPal doesn't permit charging someone for goods that aren't going to ship immediately.

Re: Paypal is holding over 600,000 euros from the minecraft developer

#45

Post by jacquesm »

mattmanser wrote: post #5

At least he's a known internet guy, it's pretty clear where the money is coming from and this post alone will get paypal to sort it immediately. But why do you have to be a celeb to get decent support from paypal? Freezing over half a million euros and they don't even assign him a dedicated support person? They don't call him? Disgraceful.

> it's pretty clear where the money is coming from and this post alone will get paypal to sort it immediately.

I wouldn't bank on that. It's possible, but by no means sure.

> But why do you have to be a celeb to get decent support from paypal?

Consider the fact that he is a celebrity and does not get decent support, you can imagine how it is for the rest of the world.

Especially when you're not in the US.

> Freezing over half a million euros and they don't even assign him a dedicated support person? They don't call him? Disgraceful.

Business as usual for PayPal, see below.

Re: Paypal is holding over 600,000 euros from the minecraft developer

#46

Post by zumda »

die_sekte wrote: post #32
pmichaud wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternatives?

There's Google Checkout and Amazon Payments, neither of which work outside the US. There's also AlertPay, which is apparently used by IPREDator and which is sometimes used by 7chan. I'm not sure whether I trust them more than PayPal.

There is also Moneybookers[1], though they aren't free of horror stories either.

[1]http://www.moneybookers.com

Re: Paypal is holding over 600,000 euros from the minecraft developer

#47

Post by jacquesm »

acabal wrote: post #6
shin_lao wrote: post #4

The "paypal blocked my money" stories are frequent. I'm curious to which extent this is legal. I'm pretty sure a bank isn't allowed to block access to your accounts without a formal request from a legal entity. Paypal doesn't "own" the money. This sounds to me as extremely abusive. Is that this frequent?

That's the rub--Paypal is not a bank . They can do whatever they want with the virtual money that is exchanged on their servers. Which is why a real merchant account is the only serious option for a larger-scale business.

Paypal actually is a bank, just not in all jurisdictions.

As for the 'virtual money', it's not virtual, it's real. They run what is technically called a wallet system.

A real merchant account is of course an option, but the transaction fees can be quite high, there is the charge-back risk and a whole pile of regulatory hoops to go through before you can get that to work. Larger scale businesses have plenty of users for who credit card use is not an option. Large parts of the world are relatively free of the credit card plague and so can not pay you using your merchant account. For those situations paypal (or something like it that does not have paypals drawbacks) is a solution.

Re: Paypal is holding over 600,000 euros from the minecraft developer

#48

Post by jacquesm »

helium wrote: post #8

I'm building a website that I would like to launch soon and were planning on selling digital goods. My initial idea was to just use the PayPal shopping cart, since I already have a PayPal account and it so easy to set up(I definitely don't want to go through the hassle of setting up a merchant account). But all these horror stories I have read on HN the last few days have scared me a bit. I also seems that its even w…

Make sure that whatever method you use that you never ever build up a balance bigger than a few hundred bucks, that way if they go south, decide to freeze your account or do any one of a hundred other nasty things you don't have too many eggs in that basket.

Epassporte is in trouble by the way, best to stay away from them.

Re: Paypal is holding over 600,000 euros from the minecraft developer

#49

Post by drtse4 »

die_sekte wrote: post #32
pmichaud wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What alternatives?

There's Google Checkout and Amazon Payments, neither of which work outside the US. There's also AlertPay, which is apparently used by IPREDator and which is sometimes used by 7chan. I'm not sure whether I trust them more than PayPal.

Do you mean that you can't register to checkout and amazon as a seller if you are not an US resident? Because as a buyer i've used checkout a lot of times from Italy, same thing should be possible in other european countries.

Re: Paypal is holding over 600,000 euros from the minecraft developer

#50

Post by khafra »

jacquesm wrote: post #42
[deleted] wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

edit (recovered because parent deleted their comment): > citricsquid wrote: > And you're in the "legitimate claims" part, like I said. What's the story behind your problem, why did they take your $50k? endedit. To this day I haven't a friggin' clue. We were in their beta program when they started with batched money requests, we helped them debug their stuff and came with a bunch of helpful suggestions. We had over 30…

I've seen Paypal described as a fraud detection company monetized by a payment transfer front-end. With that core competency in mind, it astounds me how bad they are at recognizing communication from a customer that deserves attention and response.
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