> For consumers, I suspect that much of the power “arbitration” seems to confer on corporations lies in its opacity This one hundred times. There has been a surprisingly-effective PR scare campaign around arbitration in the U.S. Sure, for sexual harassment, it’s a bad forum. That’s approaching criminal territory. But for civil disputes, it’s straightforward and cheap.
I'd have more faith in arbitration if it was offered as an option instead of being required by the TOS. If it's universally good for me, surely there's no reason to force me to use it?
I fought the PayPal and I won
261–270 of 349 posts
Re: I fought the PayPal and I won
#262> While PayPal is technically a private company that can work with basically whoever it wants for whatever reason, its centralized role as an online payment processor makes this a weirdly potent free speech fight. > He did share correspondence with me where prominent free speech attorneys told him, in an apparent contradiction to my claims, that he had no viable legal recourse to getting his account reinstated. Thoug…
Re: I fought the PayPal and I won
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get it. The lawyer asked "“Is there anything the court would like to review to reconsider?” and the judge said, oh, well "since you have asked if I want to, yeah I guess I do, so I'll just change my ruling for no reason?"
"I implore you to reconsider" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fvu5Ephsqyk
Re: I fought the PayPal and I won
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
AFAIK banks here charge extra for that.
Use Wise ( https://wise.com ). In Germany especially N26 is also popular but IMO they went downhill quite a bit as soon as they realized that being a neobank is a losing venture. Source: I work in finance.
1) they offer services for free or for a low cost (compared to "normal" banks)
2) when these services work, they do work
3) when - for whatever reasons - these services do not work their assistance/support is either not-existing or unreachable, and when (if) you manage to contact them they provide no solutions/fixes and more likely than not you end up with your account frozen or closed (with no actual idea of the reasons why it was frozen/closed)
Surely there must be something (in EU) that complicates matters (anti-money laundering Laws/limits to transfers/National and EU Authorities/whatever) but right now it seems to me like none of them is actually reliable (if it is used as secundary or tertiary card/means of payment they are fine but I wouldn't trust any of them as "primary".
BTW - just for the record - right now N26 has been ordered to suspend making new accounts in Italy by the Bank of Italy (since March 2022) assertedly due to not full compliance with anti-money laundering checks:
Re: I fought the PayPal and I won
#265The important thing for Americans to understand is that Paypal is not a bank . You can have an "account" and hold money in it and it may function similar to one, but it has none of the federally mandated legal protections of being a bank. Some much more recent Fintech startups such as Chime are legally underpinned by something that is an FDIC regulated bank.
Back when it was x.com, they were trying to figure out how to avoid being a bank, and they did it with something that violated credit card merchant agreements: by crediting accounts without correlated purchases (you can still do this today, depending on your card processor I think).
That got noticed, so they just started holding the money instead. I never figured out how a company that holds your cash with exclusive rights to do anything they want with it has avoided banking regulation.
Re: I fought the PayPal and I won
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
There's a way to bring stuff like this up on HN that won't result in...well, you see the replies. Yes he is a bigot, and I know this from reading his own comments (not from hearsay as his defenders like to assume), but even as The Choir I find this comment a bit unhelpful. It's a one-liner and a link. Not even with an anchor to the part of the wiki that addresses this.
But this really shouldn't be about Singal or Wright. I, a trans woman, had a fine evening out with the actual author of the piece, Yassine Meskhout, back in April along with a few other folks, and I'm quite sure he isn't bigoted against trans people.
Re: I fought the PayPal and I won
#267Earlier quoted context omitted.
I lost access to a PayPal account I had used for years, because one day they decided they needed to know the CVV of a long-expired credit card, and refused to let me log in without it. Surprisingly, customer support was very helpful and let me transfer out the (minimal) balance in the account to another, completely unconnected PayPal business account I happened to have. Which is even more disconcerting, because it me…
Transferring money out is far lower risk than unauthorised account access. If they transfer money out and it turns out it was fraud they can easily compensate the original account holder by putting the money back in their account and there's little harm done, especially if the sums are small. If they give unauthorised account access then there's far greater harm including risk they'll get penalised by regulators over…
But, once he'd learned that all of the other ½ cents are left floating around inside the megacorporation's database, Gorman hacked into the company's computer system and funneled them all into his next check, accruing the amount of $85,789.90, (a crime that would be later be known in slang as "salami slicing").
Re: I fought the PayPal and I won
#268Re: I fought the PayPal and I won
#269This piece demonstrates excellent writing skills - bits of humor interspere information-dense sections on legalese, allowing the reader to easily absorb the information. As far as the byzantine arbitration process described here, signed off on by the US Supreme Court and adopted across most of the corporate world, with the obvious intent of making it hard for ordinary citizens to sue corporations for damages, see thi…
There should be real skepticism about arbitration in user agreements, but didn’t make it easier in this case? Only someone rich or famous enough to entice a free lawyer could afford to sue PayPal over a suspended account. But many many more people could afford to try arbitration.
> "Had the incident taken place in Washington, D.C., it would have likely been illegal. The District of Columbia has an anti-discrimination law covering political affiliation. In Madison, Wisconsin, it most certainly would have been. The city’s broad non-discrimination clause defines political beliefs and physical appearance in its law. Political views can include 'opinions, manifested in speech or association, concerning the social, economic, and governmental structure of society and its institutions.' "
Hence a dedicated person could plausibly incorporate their business in the District of Columbia, and then bring a (potentially very expensive and public) lawsuit against PayPal on the basis of political discrimination. Such incidents might be relatively rare, but they could also have major negative PR effects as well as the possibility of large jury awards, outcomes that binding arbitration is designed to avoid.
https://huckleberry.com/blog/right-to-refuse-service/
As far as where the line between 'respectable political affiliation' and 'member of a violent organization' lies, Irish history is worth looking at, i.e. Sinn Fein vs. the IRA.
Re: I fought the PayPal and I won
#270> For consumers, I suspect that much of the power “arbitration” seems to confer on corporations lies in its opacity This one hundred times. There has been a surprisingly-effective PR scare campaign around arbitration in the U.S. Sure, for sexual harassment, it’s a bad forum. That’s approaching criminal territory. But for civil disputes, it’s straightforward and cheap.