How to get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in One Easy Step:
Open a PayPal Account.
How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps
31–40 of 68 posts
Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps
#32moneybookers.
same result.
problem solved.
Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps
#33Sadly, for what you want to do, you essentially need to be a merchant bank yourself. Your business model seems to involve collecting payments on behalf of other people. Most merchant agreements from ANY bank or service provider would prohibit this activity.
Without the correct processes and procedures in place you open yourself up to issues involving money laundering and tax fraud. To do this right you need to spend the money on the identity, security and conflict resolution processes and procedures to ensure you mitigate this risk. The costs of real merchant services will pale in comparison to what you will spend on these issues.
Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps
#34How to get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in One Easy Step: Open a PayPal Account.
1. Open a PayPal account.
2. ???
3. Profit!
4. Have account frozen by PayPal.
Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps
#35My dad had a small eBay business several years ago and his account was frozen for some very illegitimate reasons. I was too young to really understand then, but in light of this and several other similar cases I've read about online, I'd stay away from PayPal.
Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps
#36Paypal is a classic example of a fossilized bureaucracy:
1) The departments within Paypal are unable to share information, alert each other of status, or become aware of what they are each doing. The first clue that this is happening inside an organization is the requirement to submit (or resubmit) the same information multiple times.
2) Complete inflexibility. If you don't fit a pigeonhole profile of previously defined customer models exactly you can't use the service.
3) No humans. There were people once. There aren't anymore. The people you talk to on the phone seem human, but they are actually part of the machine's broken user interface. They can no more influence what goes on inside the machine than you can. They can't tell you why your account was frozen because literally nobody anywhere actually knows.
4) Insistence that you are wrong (or a criminal in this case). The customer is always wrong. Enough said.
Add to all this a moral hazard so large it almost completely guarantees it will never be fixed: when the system breaks, they just keep the money, and you're got a perfect recipe for perpetual fail.
Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
You make a good point, I'd agree that this would seem to align with what PayPal is alleging in their letter. However, it does also seem that Airbnb, which they mention as a comparison, is doing the same thing -- Airbnb is serving as an aggregator for its individual lodging vendors, and THEY offer PayPal as an option ... Any Airbnb folks still here on HN who could explain if they've gotten around this particular hurdl…
In the article, Paypal's letter doesn't say you're not allowed to be an aggregator, just that you're not allowed to be an aggregator that lets merchants get around Paypal's acceptable use rules. Maybe Airbnb has assured Paypal that it does not let merchants circumvent these rules.
That's true, but if you look up PayPal's acceptable use policy at https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&c... , you'll see that PayPal prohibits "payment processors to collect payments on behalf of merchants".
So, it's not just because they're worried about what you sell, you're not allowed to process payments on behalf of others at all ... which makes the whole Airbnb-PayPal thing that much more interesting.
By the way, here's a link to an article that does a good job of explaining why acting as an intermediary for other merchants is risky: http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/high-risk-mech...
Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps
#38How to get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in One Easy Step: Open a PayPal Account.
Another easy way :
1. Create two paypal accounts ; one on your american account, one on your french account
2. connect to both from the same computer and make a transfer from one to another
3. Wait and enjoy !
Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps
#39I've been resisting the urge to market my startup as a PayPal alternative, because we're really focused on payments for in-person retail sales (largely to avoid competing with PayPal), but this is probably the fifth or sixth PayPal-froze-my-account posting I've seen on Hacker News and they all seem to garner enormous amounts of sympathy from readers. We've also built all of the infrastructure you'd need to do interne…
The most important service: instant money transfer (mostly) irrespective of physical location. I had one use-case this week where paypal would not work. I needed to withdraw the amount I was to be paid by my client and paypal has a $400/day ATM limit. So I asked the client to see if he can pay directly to my bank. The obvious solution is wire. Of course, my client happens to be in a state that didn't have his busines…
This is what Western Union is for.
Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps
#40Some folks on this thread have suggested that you open your own merchant account. FWIW, you're likely to face the same problems with that route if the underwriting department takes a good look at your business model. If you're selling "experiences", it's too hard to demonstrate whether your clients did or did not receive the alleged service. You're likely going to open yourself up to a huge risk of chargebacks -- remember, you're now vouching for the performance of each and every one of your "experience vendors". A chargeback rate of just a few percent would eat up all of your profits, and get your merchant account canceled to boot.
It would also be incredibly easy for me to launder money or commit fraud with your system -- I could just set up a fake experience, like navel gazing, at $100 per, and buy up unlimited sessions with stolen credit cards, or give myself a massive cash advance at purchase interest rates, with a small mark-up. Maybe I'm missing it, but if your system doesn't include some way to reserve the time for the "experience", then there's really no way to ensure that your vendors are not double- or triple-booking their time.
To summarize, the financial risks of your business model run far beyond PayPal. If you can come up with ways to hedge against these risks, you might even be able to convince PayPal to take you on (though I wouldn't count on it).