How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps • Hacker News Board

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#41

Post by ErrantX » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 9:10 AM UTC

Hmm, this isn't a "Paypal horror story". This is a case of Paypal getting around to due diligence on a new customer and realising that they are not in line with the terms and conditions.

You are accepting payments on behalf of other merchants (those offering travel experiences) and that brings risk. Unfortunately this is not an issue limited only to Paypal, many other payment operators will reject you for the same reason; the fraud liability is just all over the place with such systems and they won't want to take the risk.

It sucks, but there you go.

If you are really looking at 10's of Millions in revenue over the next few years.... go to your bank and work something out with them, although it might be initially expensive while the offset the risk.

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#42

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 9:24 AM UTC

URSpider94 wrote: post #39

zaidf wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#43

Post by spyrosk » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 9:50 AM UTC

Slightly OT:

I've been looking into paypal alternatives but there really wasn't anything available, besides setting up a merchant account, for non-US businesses.

Does anyone know of any similar service available internationally?

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#44

Post by HelloBeautiful » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 10:01 AM UTC

Once the coolest startup, now a part of a greedy mega-corp, run by MBA suits. Paypal has no respect for it's customers whatsoever.

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#45

Post by HelloBeautiful » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 10:05 AM UTC

mickeyben wrote: post #38

dwynings wrote: post #31

How 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 !

I don't even need to make any transfers. Log in with account A, log out, log in with account B (same browser, without clearing paypal cookies) - accounts A and B locked.

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#46

Post by kalleboo » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 10:14 AM UTC

zaidf wrote: post #4

thinkcomp wrote: post #2

I'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…

American banks are really terrible with this, and I just don't understand why.

I live in Sweden, but I get paid for work I do for a U.S. company. Both my employer and I have Bank of America accounts in the states, and my employer sending a wire to my BoA account takes longer to process than me sending a wire from my BoA account to my Swedish bank.

So it takes longer to send a wire WITHIN THE SAME BANK thank it does to send internationally halfway around the globe. There's really something truly deeply wrong with U.S. banking.

Meanwhile, here in Sweden, cheques don't exist and everyone uses wire transfers to pay each other, pay rent etc. They're always free, can be done online, take seconds within the same bank, and half a business day between banks. And this system has been in place for literally decades.

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#47

Post by ffffruit » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 10:34 AM UTC

I also find the fact that the official email from PayPal is just signed "Julie" with no surname and just comes from a generic sink account, thus eliminating any chance of actually following up the problem with a human being rather annoying.

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#48

Post by oemera » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 11:01 AM UTC

Hey guys seriously is there any "real" alternative to pay pal? I'm getting sick about these stories.

To be honest my account got never frozen but I also never sold anything with Paypal. I don't want to support this insane service.

What about using Amazon payment? I payed once with Amazon on kickstarter and was surprised how smooth it was! Is Amazon a valid alternative?

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#49

Post by Lucadg » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 11:30 AM UTC

I cash several tens of thousands Euro every year in Paypal, since 2003 I guess. I have legitimate business in Germany and the money is deposits for apartments reservations. I have never done anything illegal, never had a dispute with a customer, never, ever created a problem for them. Nevertheless they freeze my account once every 2 months. They ask me a few papers, I send thema and if I'm lucky in a few days it's restored. If I am not lucky it goes one one month. I would have many nice stories to say, this is the last one: since I log in often from many different countries (since 2003), they block my account. So I asked them to write down somewhere that I travel a lot and give me a break. They told me this is not possible and I should use only my iPad to login, not a computer.

Re: How to Get PayPal to Freeze Your Account in Four Easy Steps

#50

Post by ig1 » Thu, Mar 10, 2011, 12:11 PM UTC

I can't say I really blame them, you're in a high-risk business which tends to have lots of credit card chargebacks and you can't guarantee delivery of service. If you went the merchant bank/credit card processor route you'd probably have to put down a substantial deposit.

If you're operating a high-risk business you can't really expect PayPal or a merchant bank to absorb that risk on your behalf unless you're willing to pay for it.

PayPal's policies do forbid the kind of marketplace aggregation you're doing (Unless you're using their Adaptive Payment split payment mechanism which is designed for this sort of situation; but from your description I assume you're not)