We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business • Hacker News Board

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

#321

Post by mindslight » Thu, May 09, 2019, 3:24 PM UTC

icebraining wrote: post #218

dTal wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The already have the money. The notion that it's somehow "in your account" is just PayPal fiction - especially if they deny you access to "your account" indefinitely. (Supposedly they don't operate fractional reserve, which means that Peter Thiel pinky-promises not to touch the principle. But it's still in PayPal commercial investment vehicles, earning away.)

Peter Thiel hasn't been CEO of PayPal for almost 20 years...

Which just goes to show how insanely difficult it is to find good pinky swear talent. It's like the voice-over of Silicon Valley.

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

#322

Post by wpietri » Thu, May 09, 2019, 3:25 PM UTC

chii wrote: post #264

paypal has no business in regulating what software their customers are allowed or not allowed to sell. Even if it's spam creation software. If it's not illegal to sell, it should not be blocked by paypal. If the software is spam and is bad for society, let society introduce a law to ban the software, the same way you can't sell drugs using paypal. This moral policing by businesses is bad for society - and lets busine…

I disagree. Freedom of association is an important right. Generally companies (and individuals!) should be free to choose who they do business with. We should only limit that freedom when there's some significant social harm. (E.g., we don't let businesses discriminate by race.)

I also think it's ridiculous to suggest that we should drastically increase the number of laws so that everything bad is explicitly illegal. Drugs are a great example. Can they cause a lot of harm? Sure. But the war on drugs has caused immense harm as well. Decriminalization and regulation are the right approach. But if that happens it still doesn't mean that PayPal (or anybody) should be required to participate in the drug business.

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

#323

Post by elliekelly » Thu, May 09, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

NeedMoreTea wrote: post #80

CaptainZapp wrote: post #46

As ar as I know PayPal in Europe is a bank with a Luxembourg banking license. I'm wondering if they could pull the same shitty here. Considering that any bank, which freezes your account, doesn't provide you with any reason and actually refuses to talk to you may draw quite some ire from their respecive regulator.

Which is exactly what banks do if they decide someone is on the terrorism blacklist, or you are "risky" - often on absurdly weak grounds. Mistaken identity or not, guilty or not, it seems to leave the customers with no options. Freezing funds only seems to happen with terrorism related closures, but it does happen, and the bank is judge, jury and executioner. One instance from search: https://www.theguardian.com/mone…

Banks only do this because the Bank Secrecy Act/USA PATRIOT Act makes it exceedingly risky for them not to. In addition to the bank's regulatory risk there's also potential personal liability for the individual serving as Anti-Money Laundering Officer. That strongly incentivizes an AML program that's overly cautious.

It might seem like the bank is "judge, jury, and executioner" but that's really not the case. In addition to freezing your funds the bank has to alert the federal government of the account. The government then decides whether to move forward and try to seize the funds or whether the bank can release them to the account owner.

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

#324

Post by hbosch » Thu, May 09, 2019, 3:28 PM UTC

gambler wrote: post #317

Yes, I too want banks and payment providers to act like moral authority for all their clients and freeze funds and close accounts with no explanation or recourse whenever an entity does something I don't like. This will totally make things better and not be relentlessly abused after the practice is normalized. Who needs a stable society anyway.

Legal marijuana shops are still mostly cash only specifically because they can’t bank, due to weed being federally illegal. Bank monitoring is in place to battle illegal activity, fraud and laundering. If you are doing something reprehensible, a payment company can be seen as endorsing that behavior by your association with that bank. I mean, you have a spam network here that was proudly displaying PayPal’s logo on it.

I agree that it’s not right for payment processors or banks (PayPal is, unofficially, kind of both) to pass judgement on what their users spend money on... but I also agree that it is not out of line for a payments company to stop offering their services to businesses designed to spam, defraud, mislead or abuse people. Gambling websites are also known to trigger these detections when you try and deposit on to shady accounts.

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

#325

Post by mathieuh » Thu, May 09, 2019, 3:29 PM UTC

butterpeanut wrote: post #319

lukeholder wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Longest sentence ever, upvoted.

Without that second 'had' it would have been too close to call.

“John, where Jane had had ‘had’, had had ‘had had’; ‘had had’ received the better mark”.

And now ‘had’ has lost all meaning for me. I forgot which verb it was conjugated from for a second there

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

#326

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 09, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #186

kalleboo wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of people (especially in Europe) only have debit cards and no credit cards. And those often have worse consumer protection or in the best case you're still out your money for a long time during the dispute.

How is it different from PayPal though? In either case you have to wait for the dispute to clear in your favour before being able to get your money back.

[deleted]

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

#327

Post by instaheat » Thu, May 09, 2019, 3:30 PM UTC

So what should we use? Stripe?

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

#328

Post by astrodust » Thu, May 09, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

jzwinck wrote: post #251

jake_morrison wrote: post #73

PayPal blocked us after 10 years due to a a Kafkaesque problem, where they decided that our Hong Kong company was both a Chinese company and not a Chinese company: https://www.cogini.com/blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failur...

Hong Kong is part of China and also not part of China. So it makes perfect sense that a Hong Kong company is both Chinese and not Chinese.

It's also not not China as in Republic of China as in Taiwan. This is worse than Schrödinger's cat.

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

#329

Post by luckylion » Thu, May 09, 2019, 3:31 PM UTC

kristianc wrote: post #309

luckylion wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You can find pretty much the same horror stories about any Bank or credit card company. I don't know if you can in the US, but not in my country. A bank working like paypal would be in trouble, and quickly. Closing accounts without prior notice? Deciding unilaterally to freeze assets? A bank can't do that unless ordered by a judge. If they would, they'll be on the receiving end of a court order and will get a call…

> I don't know if you can in the US, but not in my country. A bank working like paypal would be in trouble, and quickly. Closing accounts without prior notice? Deciding unilaterally to freeze assets? A bank can't do that unless ordered by a judge. A bank would absolutely be expected to freeze an account if it suspected illegal activity as part of its AML obligations - filing a SAR would come later. A judge wouldn't b…

> A bank would absolutely be expected to freeze an account if it suspected illegal activity as part of its AML obligations - filing a SAR would come later.

And this would take months, and the bank wouldn't be able to respond to inquiries?

> Neither should accounts like this necessarily be taken at face value - trying to apply social pressure through forums and social media is standard social engineering.

Certainly. I tend to lean towards believing them because I've witnessed a similar case with PayPal that nearly ruined the company of a friend. It got resolved after all, but it took around eight months, lawyers and our local equivalent of a DA to get involved before PP realized they might not want to pursue it any further and released the assets. That doesn't mean that everyone of these stories is accurate, of course, but it indicates to me that not all is well in the PP HQ.

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

#330

Post by welly » Thu, May 09, 2019, 3:32 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #222

gumby wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if a crook steals your money and buries it in the back yard instead of spending it it's not theft?

It was a bad analogy. A better one would be, you send a friend to pick up some money for you, and when the friend returns, they suddenly refuse to give you the money.

PayPal are not your friend.