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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

#101

Post by gdee »

jacquesm wrote: post #37
[deleted] wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[deleted]

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…

  >   But I'm no longer accepting paypal payments myself 
  > and I would advise everybody to keep their account 
  > balances as low as possible.
Sound advice. In my new private project, I redraw from paypal every 200 euros. Thankfully, that's a lot of redraws (for certain definitions of a lot) and I'm a bit behind redraws but I learned the lesson from the losses the company I work with endures every month. Details in this same thread. (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1679288)

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

#102

Post by ImperatorLunae »

mattmanser wrote: post #55
jacquesm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Minecraft games sales. Unless the whole minecraft thing is a cunningly disguised money laundering scheme for the illegal sale of fjords to rich American businessmen... We've heard this one before, a surge in sales triggers Paypal's fraud systems.

If it is, then it's a money laundering scheme with a very good game. I recommend participating.

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

#103

Post by jacquesm »

Xurinos wrote: post #99
jacquesm wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What do you use now for your payments instead of PayPal?

Virtual access billing, a Dutch IPSP run by a bunch of friends of mine. They use segregated merchant accounts so the risk of them going belly up is minimal.

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

#104

Post by houseabsolute »

btilly wrote: post #78
jdietrich wrote: post #68

We've been going around in circles with stories like this for years. In spite of all the horror stories, people are still using PayPal. That would indicate to me that either PayPal are exploiting a monopoly position, or there is a massive gap in the market for a fast, easy payment system that doesn't treat serious customers like dirt. I completely understand the Googley argument that you can't provide much customer s…

That would indicate to me that either PayPal are exploiting a monopoly position, or there is a massive gap in the market for a fast, easy payment system that doesn't treat serious customers like dirt. You're missing the third possibility, which is that efficiently doing what PayPal requires requires "treating serious customers like dirt." PayPal is in the business of efficiently detecting and not paying for fraud. On…

> Their strategy for this seems to be to make people jump over a low paperwork barrier, then wait long enough that the payments have all cleared before they pay out.

I wonder why they don't just do this by default? Personally I would not be offended at all if they just had a status on the payments called "waiting for payment to clear."

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

#105

Post by scythe »

jdietrich wrote: post #68

We've been going around in circles with stories like this for years. In spite of all the horror stories, people are still using PayPal. That would indicate to me that either PayPal are exploiting a monopoly position, or there is a massive gap in the market for a fast, easy payment system that doesn't treat serious customers like dirt. I completely understand the Googley argument that you can't provide much customer s…

> there is a massive gap in the market for a fast, easy payment system that doesn't treat serious customers like dirt.

You're thinking of AlertPay.

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

#106

Post by aw3c2 »

eru wrote: post #60
jacquesm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

Yes, in Germany you could probably get away with just a normal bank account and accepting direct bank transfers.

Not as easily as with Paypal as transactions take a day or two.

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

#107

Post by btilly »

houseabsolute wrote: post #104
btilly wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would indicate to me that either PayPal are exploiting a monopoly position, or there is a massive gap in the market for a fast, easy payment system that doesn't treat serious customers like dirt. You're missing the third possibility, which is that efficiently doing what PayPal requires requires "treating serious customers like dirt." PayPal is in the business of efficiently detecting and not paying for fraud. On…

> Their strategy for this seems to be to make people jump over a low paperwork barrier, then wait long enough that the payments have all cleared before they pay out. I wonder why they don't just do this by default? Personally I would not be offended at all if they just had a status on the payments called "waiting for payment to clear."

I wonder why they don't just do this by default?

Because for the majority of their customers, not getting money for several months would cause them to look for another solution.

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

#108

Post by rumpelstiltskin »

zackattack wrote: post #91

PayPal recently pulled this stunt on me. While very frustrating at the time, especially since there was no phone support available for the next 3 days due to labor day weekend, at least now I have scanned copy of my Passport on my computer.

can you elaborate on this passport issue? are you in a foreign country?

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

#109

Post by lanstein »

jdietrich wrote: post #68

We've been going around in circles with stories like this for years. In spite of all the horror stories, people are still using PayPal. That would indicate to me that either PayPal are exploiting a monopoly position, or there is a massive gap in the market for a fast, easy payment system that doesn't treat serious customers like dirt. I completely understand the Googley argument that you can't provide much customer s…

They're not called the PayPal Mafia for nothing ;)

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

#110

Post by mkice »

gdee wrote: post #94
dRother wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look how they recently froze $10m that was donated to Burning Man. Seriously, how does they review process work, exactly? They could try Googling the customer and find out it's an internationally famous festival that has been going on for years and years. Instead, they just seem to notice the money involved and try to seize it. I bet that somewhere in paypal, it works like DEA style asset forfeiture, and the people w…

> I bet that somewhere in paypal, it works like DEA style > asset forfeiture, and the people who freeze accounts stand > to benefit financially, personally and directly. You'd lose that bet. They refund the money to the original payer. For better or worse. My company loses a few hundred euros each month to this. They keep asking for proof of delivery. Yet we sell internet access. No proof in that unless I'm willing t…

To get around this situation, mark your paypal invoices as 'Services' and they can not refund them at all (unless however the card was stolen, etc). But 'Services' don't require shipping proof.
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