If you absolutely have to use PayPal it should always be a payment proxy and should never hold a cent longer than necessary.
Whenever people snub cryptocurrency I always bring up examples like these.
PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter
131–140 of 196 posts
Re: PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter
#132"We don't like what you are doing, and are going to hold your money for six months. I hope you don't subsist on it, or have any business obligations to attend to. We'll call you." This should be illegal for Paypal to do, period. Absolutely illegal. And if it is on behalf of a government or banking/fraud regulations, then the person should be referred to relevant agencies. Let's be clear and drop the pretense: They ar…
I haven't trusted PayPal for years - but I still use them.
My business does ~$100-250k monthly revenue, and probably 1/3 of transactions are via PayPal. I'd never not have them - it helps conversions too much.
But, I made sure to call their support and enable the "auto-sweep" feature, so that I can withdraw everything above a balance that I set into my bank daily.
This way, I never need to worry about too many funds getting frozen should anything go wrong.
Re: PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
I sold a gun on Gunbroker, they have a PayPal button as an option for some inexplicable reason. I wasn’t thinking about terms of service and clicked it. Buyer clicks it on his end, but there was an issue with his dealer and I refunded him, sale fell through. PayPal bans me three months later without saying why. I explain it was an accident to click the PayPal button and it didn’t go through. Banned for life :D PayPal…
I work in "online payments for guns" and it's amazing how many innocent people get banned by PayPal over guns. I talk to at least one per week. In almost every case, these people simply weren't aware that PayPal prohibits firearm transactions. Although PayPal doesn't provide much warning, it is actually following an industry-wide practice. All the payment platforms prohibit guns [1]. [1] https://www.guntab.com/paymen…
I had someone walk away from a sale because he would only accept guntab after getting screwed on a PayPal transfer. I hadn’t heard of it then.
I know nothing about the industry you are in so far as payments go, but get the fees closer to 2% and you’ll own the market.
Re: PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe that's in the ToS. At least in the US, they have a quite restrictive binding arbitration agreement.
Interesting. I wonder if a small claims court (assuming the balance wasn't too large) would help. Edit: found the text in the TOS: "Holds based on PayPal's risk decisions We may place a hold on payments sent to your PayPal account if, in our sole discretion, we believe that there may be a high level of risk associated with you, your PayPal account, or your transactions or that placing such a hold is necessary to comp…
Yes it could help. A breach of contract claim would force them to provide evidence that the amount withheld is disputed actually disputed.
Re: PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter
#135I see a lot of outrage in here and I truly love that.
Honest question: would you express the same level of outrage, if the service in question was primarily a purveyor of political content that you disagreed with, or "hate speech"?
I see a lot of libertarian-minded comments whenever the service in question is some form of file sharing/hacker related service, but I don't really see much outrage when the same culprits use their weight to censor political content, and / or wrong think. PayPal, Visa, YouTube, Amazon, all of these big companies have been engaging in censorship.
Too many seem to be OK with others' rights being taken away, as long as they disagree with those who are losing their rights. How is that any different than what happened to this Tor supporter?
Re: PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter
#136At least I'm not being held hostage, but PayPal has just had their last interaction with me. After few sales of an un-marketed old product for most of the pandemic, someone tracked me down and wanted to purchase. Agreed on options and I said I'd have an invoice out in minutes. Should be easy, right? Login to PayPal, fill out invoice info, hit [Send] . . . . Nope, something wrong, contact support. Phone w/half-hour+ w…
I think support people will claim they can't hear you in order to get the caller to hang up so it improves their metrics (short call time and the caller hung up).
I always say "I have plenty of time and will wait until you can hear me, and I won't hang up" or something along those lines. The connections always seem to magical improve after saying that.
Re: PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter
#137News like this is proof that cryptocurrencies like Monero are necessary. It’s proof (not that we needed any) that centralized finance does not have your best interests at heart, and they can and will abuse their power.
Decentralised currencies just open up a whole new can of worms.
How do you reverse fraudulent transactions? What happens if your wallet is stolen? Who do you speak to when you need help setting up an account? On a macroeconomic level, it prevents the government from setting certain types of monetary policy that benefit the economy as a whole (although I may be biased there, as the Australian government bailed out the economy as a whole through economic stimulus in 2008 and prevented the spread of the GFC to here).
This is all assuming it's pegged to a stable asset like the USD. Bitcoin's average annual inflation over the past 5 years is around 3,000%. For comparison, Zimbabwe's inflation rate in the early 00's was around 500%.
Re: PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter
#138News like this is proof that cryptocurrencies like Monero are necessary. It’s proof (not that we needed any) that centralized finance does not have your best interests at heart, and they can and will abuse their power.
I know this is a popular belief but it’s actually the exact opposite…
The reason PayPal holds funds is that a consumer is allowed to reverse a bank and credit card transaction for a few months after the transaction happened. This ability exists to protect consumers from fraudsters, scammers and bad businesses (ones that don’t provide service etc.) which is much more common than people realize.
With crypto, the ability to reverse a transaction disappears and with that the ability to protect consumers. Now who do you think will thrive in a world where a consumer has no protection? Scammers, bad businesses and criminals..
Re: PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter
#139Recently the was a rant against cryptocurrency, now this is a case for it.
I thought there were regulations in the US that would prohibit a financial institution to hold money that long. Looks like there aren’t.
Re: PayPal shuts down long-time Tor supporter
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not only did they split, they just forced all sellers to move from PayPal to direct deposit: https://gizmodo.com/ebay-and-paypal-finally-break-up-for-goo...
This is what caused me to let me eBay seller account die - they demanded Social Security Number (SSN) to continue selling. Call me crazy but giving my SSN to a company where the C-suite thugs sent live cockroaches to bloggers for negative articles seems like a bad idea.
> This is what caused me to let me eBay seller account die - they demanded Social Security Number (SSN) to continue selling.
Was this before or after they had to force-reset everyone's account password because their user data was compromised?