161–170 of 182 posts
I work at PayPal, though not in fraud detection, and it always seems interesting how much bad publicity the company is getting lately. I personally wish they would address the social part of doing business on the web. There's a reason why the hold explanations are vague but it has nothing to do with questionable intentions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_Secrecy_Act#Suspicious_Act...
Is this what you are talking about?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You would think so, and that was their original business plan — just make money off the float. Instead they ended up charging fees (30¢ + %3) to get to profitability.
I don't think the original business plan included credit card payments. You only ever put "real" money into your account, and in order to use the service you basically had to keep enough in there for them to float it. Adding credit card payments changed that. Notice that paypal still doesn't charge fees for payments that come straight from a bank account.
Paypal is also set up to avoid making credit card transactions at all costs — you need one to sign up (as effectively overdraft protection), but payments always debit from the bank account first. If you have a pro account and embed/link it to customers, they can have the option to pay directly with a credit card, but only if they don't have a paypal.com cookie.
There is only one way to reliably avoid the fees — you have to explicitly make the payment as an 'eCheck' which only takes out the 30¢, but Paypal will take at least a week to clear the funds.
Paypal has the most customers of any financial institution in the world, they have some of the largest challenges of any financial institution in the world. Not the least of which being that everybody who is capable of using paypal is simultaneously connected to the biggest and most efficient megaphone ever invented (the internet) and the unique consequences for bad press that situation entails. You can decry paypal'…
If you discover that you have processed a fraudulent transaction, undoing it is quite understandable, but keeping the money for yourself (as per the link) is a pretty shady solution.
1) Use your full legal name when creating the account.
2) If you're creating the account for a company, make sure the owner of the account is an officer of the company (CEO, Vice President, etc).
3) Have only one account. If you're creating an account for your business, and you already have a personal account, you're gonna run into problems.
4) Make sure the mailing address you give is actually accessible. PayPal's gonna mail a verification code to you once you start making a sizable amount.
And just in general, once you start getting money into your account, PayPal's always gonna come knocking. At one point, PayPal prevented us from even receiving payments. But eventually, after a while of working with them, they got off our backs and we stopped having problems with them.
Paypal has the most customers of any financial institution in the world, they have some of the largest challenges of any financial institution in the world. Not the least of which being that everybody who is capable of using paypal is simultaneously connected to the biggest and most efficient megaphone ever invented (the internet) and the unique consequences for bad press that situation entails. You can decry paypal'…
You can decry paypal's customer service, no doubt, but recognize that the root cause of these problems are all of the very real scammers who have abused the system and never make the news. If you discover that you have processed a fraudulent transaction, undoing it is quite understandable, but keeping the money for yourself (as per the link) is a pretty shady solution.
If withdrawals from your bank account is frozen due to suspected (or actual) fraud, few people jump to the conclusion that the bank is out to snatch up their money. Why not extend paypal the same courtesy?
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
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…
With >€600,000 in revenue since the 25th of August there is no doubt that this qualifies for an account manager.
As for the blog post saying that “if they decide something bad’s being going on, they’re going to keep the money” — I think that must have been part of a misunderstanding, e.g. if PayPal find out that the €600.000 are collected via fraudulent means, yes, he will not get the money because people will be reimbursed, but PayPal doesn’t keep peoples money. Even with an account freeze (where the account owner doesn’t get it lifted), the money can be paid out after 6 months.
I run a browser based MMO that once upon a time earned a fair amount of money (not at Minecraft's astonishing levels though!) and Paypal is my only method of payment. The first time I made a large withdrawal (10s of thousands) they did something similar. I think people are being very knee-jerk with their reactions about all of this. Yes, it's annoying to have your money frozen temporarily, but Paypal is basically on…
Plenty of healthy businesses would either go bankrupt or have to delay shipment (which would royally piss off the customers, because from their point of view, they already paid...) if the money paid by customers suddenly took more than a week to arrive.