Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

blog.niteo.co

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 536 posts

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#81

Post by michaelt »

lawn wrote: post #52
cpach wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a consumer, I would only pay with Bitcoin if it was something that I really really wanted. Usually there are competitors that will accept credit cards, so I would prefer them. Bitcoin offers nothing to me that I value.

One potential benefit (which merchants so far don't show you) is that cryptos is free for the merchants to accept. Credit cards can take a massive chunk out of your profit and they're open to charge back fraud. Cryptocurrencies remove those fees and the risk for charge back fraud, so the merchant earns more when you pay them with cryptos. To incentivize this they could charge you less than if you paid with a credit c…

According to [1] right now, if you want your bitcoin transaction to have a good chance of being in the next block, the fee is 18,450 satoshis, i.e. $1.11

[1] https://bitcoinfees.earn.com/

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#82

Post by iwasakabukiman »

Nextgrid wrote: post #65
jpalomaki wrote: post #58

For me as a customer, having PayPal as payment option increases the propability of purchase. Especially with one-time purchases from small vendors. Reasons: No risk of credit card info misuse (by vendor), I only need username and password and I get certainly at least some kind of receipt for accounting.

I’m always surprised as to why people are concerned about card details misuse. You are not responsible for card-not-present fraud (without 3D Secure). You can dispute any fraudulent charge with your bank, and I’d bet good money the bank has actually better customer service in that regard compared to PayPal.

Because then you have to go through the hassle of doing all of the paperwork, talking to the bank and getting a new credit card number (which means updating all your services that used the old number).

It's a pain in the butt when it happens.

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#83

Post by viraptor »

qaq wrote: post #62

I bet paypal is running some ML based service that flags accounts so the rep could not explain the reason even if the rep wanted to.

I'm not sure if that's what PayPal does, but whenever I saw fraud policies in companies, they never provided specific rules violated and for a good reason. If you know the exact rule you're breaking, you know what else to change for your scam to work. Pretty much the same reason you get "authentication failed" rather than "your password's 2nd letter didn't match".

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#84

Post by dmurko »

metaprotocol wrote: post #78

Niteo produce a product to produce content farms and generate spam. PayPal has done the world a favour by banning them.

Founder here. We're not processing SaaS through PayPal, as mentioned in the post:

> The most interesting thing is that we’ve moved away from PayPal in the last two years and have only been receiving some minor payments and paying for a few online services.

We've stopped using PayPal for our SaaS business a few years ago.

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#85

Post by VLM »

S_A_P wrote: post #17

So from what I can gather, niteo is a SAAS. For Paypal to ban them in what is a pretty non controversial business, they must have commited one of the following offenses: 1)Breach this user agreement, the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, the Commercial Entity Agreements (if they apply to you), the PayPal Cash and PayPal Cash Plus Account Terms and Conditions (if it applies to you), or any other agreement between you and…

"Conduct your business ... in a manner that results in or may result in ... complaints"

My guess is they have a mainstream Republican employee or corporate officer. That's a bannable offense in silicon valley. Politics is a big problem.

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#87

Post by xoa »

jpalomaki wrote: post #58

For me as a customer, having PayPal as payment option increases the propability of purchase. Especially with one-time purchases from small vendors. Reasons: No risk of credit card info misuse (by vendor), I only need username and password and I get certainly at least some kind of receipt for accounting.

>Reasons: No risk of credit card info misuse (by vendor), I only need username and password and I get certainly at least some kind of receipt for accounting.

It's a shame virtual cards never got more traction through the CC industry. For those who aren't familiar, some banks/cards offer you a tool that let's you set an arbitrary spend and expiration date (+2-12 months usually) and then generate a credit card number (with CVC) with those attributes (Bank of America branded theirs "SafeShop" for one example). Since it's a fully backed card number it'll transparently work on any site a normal CC would, but it cannot be charged more then the small limit (so you can set it just to the checkout price of one item and it's done), it can be trivially cancelled at will (useful for fighting dark pattern subscription services), etc (some of them can bind to merchant too). It's very effective for preventing misuse from online purchases. However for whatever reason it never seems to have spread or evolved really. BoA never added it to their mobile app for example, which seems like the most logical place, but rather kept it as a little Flash tool tucked away in their website. Plenty of banks do not offer it at all, and it never got much PR. It is more work to use and while that could have been reduced through better UIs (mobile again could really help there) it would always have been somewhat more work.

Maybe options like Apple Pay/Google Pay will ultimately fill that role, since they're essentially an automated version of the above (tolkenized per-purchase card numbers). It'd be nice if the industry would work harder though on some standards for the hardware ecosystem needed.

Re: We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

#88

Post by blunte »

This is a known risk with PayPal... so many similar stories.

However, it's also a risk with Google and Facebook. I'm not sure if Apple and Microsoft are as bad.

One must assume that some automated systems are involved in these terminations because no reasonable human would slam the door and refuse any attempts of discussion or reconciliation.

Short of getting some significant press (here on HN where there are staff from each of these companies), one's chances of getting a termination resolved reasonably is practically nil.

The problem I see is that these companies have become so large and have acquired such relative monopoly positions that they can afford to lose/screw some customers because it's cheaper expense-wise than managing human staff to resolve these issues. That's not reasonable.

PayPal has much less of a monopoly position than Google, Facebook, and Apple do (because of the two app stores and the center-of-all-social). We know better than the use or depend on PayPal, but we have no choice but to depend on Google (Android) and Apple.

I really was hoping that React Native and other webbish technologies would kill the mobile "app" system and return the power to the people who actually create things. So far it doesn't seem to be working that way.

Post reply on HN