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

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

#101

Post by pjmorris »

bleepblorp wrote: post #43
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…

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…

Our six month old was on the list. It was a shock when we went to the airport, and they asked that he be taken aside for an interview with a TSA agent. We wrote a letter explaining the situation, and got a letter back acknowledging that our information had been received. They stopped asking 3-4 years later.

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

#102

Post by JanisL »

ghego1 wrote: post #49

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 abroa…

Part of why PayPal got big is that at the time it was new the incumbent banks had transactions that tended to be slow and crappy and sometimes expensive on top of that. I remember when I was younger that there was this "mysterious" clearing time with my bank where you'd send money and the other party wouldn't get it for a number of days (and that number of days wasn't even reliable either). And with international transfers it was worse than the domestic ones.

Now that people have got used to better payment processing the banks have had to improve, I think it's easy to forget just how bad things used to be.

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

#103

Post by selimthegrim »

throw0101a wrote: post #83
bleepblorp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> […] because their names matched those of "known terrorists." As Bruce Schneier (IIRC) observed: these people are 'too dangerous' to let fly, but not dangerous enough to arrest. Safe enough for firearms as well: > In a 2010 report, the Government Accountability Office noted that "Membership in a terrorist organization does not prohibit a person from possessing firearms or explosives under current federal law," and i…

Stopping gun rights being taken away from No Fly people is the one time the NRA seems to potentially be of any use

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

#104

Post by flak48 »

pjmorris wrote: post #101
bleepblorp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Our six month old was on the list. It was a shock when we went to the airport, and they asked that he be taken aside for an interview with a TSA agent. We wrote a letter explaining the situation, and got a letter back acknowledging that our information had been received. They stopped asking 3-4 years later.

That they even requested that a 6 month old be taken aside is absolutely insane

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

#105

Post by M2Ys4U »

nelaboras wrote: post #75
ghego1 wrote: post #49

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 abroa…

PayPal used to be great in its time. Leadership and ownership changed and now its just there and because everyone knows and trusts it it still lives on. Scale/brand effects.

PayPal has always sucked, at least to some level.

For example: paypalsucks.com was set up some time around 2001[0].

[0] This is the earliest snapshot the IA has of the site: https://web.archive.org/web/20010215013627/http://paypalsuck...

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

#106

Post by gruez »

saddlerustle wrote: post #47
pieno wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

How would they know what transactions were true positives vs false positives? That would require them to know whether a transaction is bad or not, which as we know, is a hard problem

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

#107

Post by gruez »

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.

>But for regular banks service to private citizens is also compulsory

what country is that? AFAIK in the US most businesses can refuse to do business with you for any reason, except a very limited set of reasons related to discrimination[1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_group

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

#108

Post by Krasnol »

Dahoon wrote: post #94
Krasnol wrote: post #61

I hope the EU will come up with a central bank backed alternative soon.

The whole problem with PayPal is exactly that it isn't a bank so they can get away with all kinds of stuff a bank cannot. I doubt a bank backed competitor could survive against a business that can just lock an account with money in it and never pay them back. Not really a level playing field.

It's really hard to identify sarcasm on the internet.

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

#109

Post by ValentineC »

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…

> 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.

Unfortunately, PayPal's advanced KYC and AML verification process is hilariously incompetent and rigid.

Some months ago, they asked me to provide charity information for my personal account, and subsequently limited my receiving/sending privileges.

Phone calls to them trying to sort this out have always ended up at some call centre in the Philippines, where the agents can only tell their users that the account limitation is "for their safety".

That account of mine is still limited.

They've also limited the personal account of a friend of mine (who was interestingly enough ex-PayPal) before, also asking for charity information.

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