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

PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 216 posts

Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”

#41

Post by mrweasel »

skissane wrote: post #36
mrweasel wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it has to do with err on the side of caution. I don’t think PayPal has the technology to implement better blocking.

The problem is that if you make a false negative error, there is the risk of severe legal sanctions, if you make a false positive error, there are zero negative legal consequences. Hence the law encourages everyone to prefer false positive errors to false negative errors, and this is the result. If the legal incentives were different, the outcome would be different. The law could provide an efficient recourse in case…

I understand the legal issue for PayPal, but then they got really lucky in this case. Tardigrade isn’t really a widely used word, so just blocking the word completely is “fine”, but what if the arms dealer in question operated under the name “Arts and crafts ltd”? Would PayPal have used another blocking system?

I don’t blame PayPal for their reaction, but I also doubt that they actually have better solutions than keyword blocking.

Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”

#42

Post by pieno »

saddlerustle wrote: post #31
_Microft wrote: post #7

Per [0], a possible answer to this seems to be that an arms dealer had connections to a company called Tardigrade Ltd. and all transactions with firms like these are prohibited which is why the word "Tardigrade" made it into PayPal's filter. As long as companies like PayPal have issues like that, or with moderation in case of Youtube, Twitter or Facebook, I'd claim neither of these companies have actually solved scal…

PayPal compliance is a very different problem to social media moderation. Financial regulations require any transaction that is "suspicious" in any way of having links to terrorism financing or money laundering be reviewed, and there are large and personal penalties for not doing so. And a review is expected to be more like auditing your customers entire financial history than just asking what they meant by a word, s…

Well completing Know Your Customer checks and audits is sort of their job, isn’t it? They provide a service, saying that they will process payments unless the payment is prohibited by government sanctions. But instead of carrying out actual due diligence, they just block anything remotely related and put the onus and cost of doing their own job on their customers. At least they should have a better process to start proper diligence once a customer complains about overreach of their blacklist, to avoid improperly sanctioning innocent businesses.

What if an arms trader used the name “Tickets Limited”? Would they block all payments mentioning tickets? Surely not, as it would hurt their business, clearly illustrating that their conduct is not at all due to “compliance with mandatory laws and nothing we can do about it” but “we did the math and we feel we can screw you over in this case.”

Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”

#43

Post by bleepblorp »

saddlerustle wrote: post #31
_Microft wrote: post #7

Per [0], a possible answer to this seems to be that an arms dealer had connections to a company called Tardigrade Ltd. and all transactions with firms like these are prohibited which is why the word "Tardigrade" made it into PayPal's filter. As long as companies like PayPal have issues like that, or with moderation in case of Youtube, Twitter or Facebook, I'd claim neither of these companies have actually solved scal…

PayPal compliance is a very different problem to social media moderation. Financial regulations require any transaction that is "suspicious" in any way of having links to terrorism financing or money laundering be reviewed, and there are large and personal penalties for not doing so. And a review is expected to be more like auditing your customers entire financial history than just asking what they meant by a word, s…

This is the kind of thinking that lead to the TSA putting infants, and even a US Senator, on the US no-fly list because their names matched those of "known terrorists."

The Washington concept of NATIONAL SECURITY is a brain-eating parasite that seemingly renders compliance managers unable to tell the difference between categorically different things, such as US Senators and IRA terrorists, or Serbian companies named Tardigard and products, sold by companies completely unconnected with Serbia, with descriptions that contain the word tardigard.

Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”

#44

Post by Silhouette »

mrweasel wrote: post #26
_Microft wrote: post #7

Per [0], a possible answer to this seems to be that an arms dealer had connections to a company called Tardigrade Ltd. and all transactions with firms like these are prohibited which is why the word "Tardigrade" made it into PayPal's filter. As long as companies like PayPal have issues like that, or with moderation in case of Youtube, Twitter or Facebook, I'd claim neither of these companies have actually solved scal…

I don’t know if PayPal ever claimed otherwise, but I’ve suspected that much of the AI powered moderation online is simply advanced keyword matching. We have to start accepting that either websites are unwilling to or unable to do moderation in any meaningful way, unless they hire human moderators at huge costs. Hearing an interview with the country for Facebook on Danish radio just two weeks ago, it’s pretty clear to…

Politicians often ask for silly things in connection with technologies they don't really understand, to achieve goals they don't really expect to achieve, just in order to look good to a certain part of the electorate.

Consider an analogy between modern social media sites and something like a phone network or postal mail service. What would happen if a politician suggested that phone companies or their national postal service should be required to monitor all communications for some vaguely-defined concept of suspicious activity, and then when something was flagged, have it reviewed by a human and if deemed inappropriate cut off the spread within X hours? It would be considered an absurd suggestion by just about everyone, for being impractical, expensive, intrusive, unreliable and of questionable benefit.

And yet, politicians keep suggesting that social media companies should be able to do almost exactly that. There are demands that these companies magically detect any sort of inappropriate content on their systems, and then remove it quickly. Small details like subjectivity, privacy and practicality never seem to feature in the press conference, though.

Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”

#45

Post by [deleted] »

the8472 wrote: post #40
saddlerustle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PayPal compliance is a very different problem to social media moderation. Financial regulations require any transaction that is "suspicious" in any way of having links to terrorism financing or money laundering be reviewed, and there are large and personal penalties for not doing so. And a review is expected to be more like auditing your customers entire financial history than just asking what they meant by a word, s…

But for regular banks service to private citizens is also compulsory, so they can't just choose the easy path by blocking a transaction based on keyword filters, they must do the intended auditing. So for them there is a balance, for paypal there isn't.

[deleted]

Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”

#46

Post by [deleted] »

pieno wrote: post #42
saddlerustle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PayPal compliance is a very different problem to social media moderation. Financial regulations require any transaction that is "suspicious" in any way of having links to terrorism financing or money laundering be reviewed, and there are large and personal penalties for not doing so. And a review is expected to be more like auditing your customers entire financial history than just asking what they meant by a word, s…

Well completing Know Your Customer checks and audits is sort of their job, isn’t it? They provide a service, saying that they will process payments unless the payment is prohibited by government sanctions. But instead of carrying out actual due diligence, they just block anything remotely related and put the onus and cost of doing their own job on their customers. At least they should have a better process to start p…

[deleted]

Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”

#47

Post by saddlerustle »

pieno wrote: post #42
saddlerustle wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PayPal compliance is a very different problem to social media moderation. Financial regulations require any transaction that is "suspicious" in any way of having links to terrorism financing or money laundering be reviewed, and there are large and personal penalties for not doing so. And a review is expected to be more like auditing your customers entire financial history than just asking what they meant by a word, s…

Well completing Know Your Customer checks and audits is sort of their job, isn’t it? They provide a service, saying that they will process payments unless the payment is prohibited by government sanctions. But instead of carrying out actual due diligence, they just block anything remotely related and put the onus and cost of doing their own job on their customers. At least they should have a better process to start p…

I suspect there's a false positive rate on some teams's dashboard and it's kept at an acceptable level that won't require raising transaction fees or incurring too many more OFAC fines.

Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”

#48

Post by 082349872349872 »

The obvious workaround is to move from edges to facets.

Instead of Tardigrade (A) shipping arms to $TERRORISTS (B) and (B) sending money to (A) by paypal in a bilateral pattern AB, they should move to the next topological level.

A ships arms to $EMBARGOED_PARTY (B), (B) sends money to $FREEDOM_FIGHTERS (C), and (C) sends drugs with street value to (A), making a triangular pattern ABC.

Extension to tetrahedral trade is left as an exercise for the reader.

Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”

#49

Post by ghego1 »

Based on my experience as a developer and user I can't understand how PayPal got so big and ubiquitous.

I had the worst experience ever in trying to set up our recurring billing system with them, wasting several days of work, to the point that I simply gave up, switched to Stripe, and got everything up and running, in production, in hours.

Even as a consumer I had a terrible experience when trying to send money abroad, for my rent, with Xoom, a PayPal service. They initially took the money from my PayPal account, told me that the money was on its way to the recipient, only to block it some days later for non specified reasons (refunded in my account). On top of that, I lost the option to use my PayPal account to send money, for what appeared to be a technical issue. Even if the system appeared to give me the option to use my PayPal account as a source of funds, telling me that the accounts were indeed connected, then when actually sending the money the option disappeared.

To solve the issue I called Xoom, they told me that there was no way of reconnecting my account and that I had to contact PayPal. So I did and they told me that they couldn't do anything and that I had to contact Xoom. After few exchanges back and forth like these, I simply asked to close my Xoom account so I could open a new one and restore the link between my Xoom and PayPal accounts, but they told me that that was not possible and that to cancel Xoom I had to cancel also PayPal.

So I gave up, used another service and got my money to my recipient.

Re: PayPal is currently blocking all transactions containing the word “tardigrade”

#50

Post by wefwef23ggg23 »

Even Chinese have a better quality than any Californian overpriced сrар. Low IQ developers, pretending to be smart, but using a dictionary to block transactions, because their small brain is so incapable. Californians are the worst.
Post reply on HN