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

PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds

mailpile.is

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 366 posts

Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds

#341

Post by smackfu »

_pius wrote: post #268
teraflop wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, PayPal has an explicit policy about how they handle presales. Why can't I turn your argument around and say that if somebody doesn't like that policy, the onus is on them to not use PayPal?

I don't grant your premise that crowdfunding constitutes "presales." Crowdfunding is an inherently speculative activity, a way to invest in a team with the hopes that they will create a product that you'd like to see in the world. Trying to fit Indiegogo into a presales model to justify PayPal's outrageous behavior here is a Procrustean approach that helps no one.

>Crowdfunding is an inherently speculative activity,

Crowdfunding is only popular because it's got a high success rate though. If only 50% of projects succeeded and provided rewards, and 50% took your money and ran, how many supporters do you really think would be left?

Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds

#342

Post by lambda »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #250
patio11 wrote: post #118

Indulge me in a flight of fancy in which we pretend, for the sake of argument, that a) Paypal is run not by Snidely Whiplash clones but b) by smart geeks working with thin margins in a highly regulated industry where c) customers are at risk essentially never, d) merchants eat 100% of the risk if they stay in business, and e) Paypal eats 100% of the risk if the merchant doesn't. Why is Paypal very skeptical of pre-sa…

And yet this story keeps happening, over and over and over across the years. Remember the $1 million-plus raised for hurricane relief raised after Katrina that PayPal threw down the drain by declaring that they wouldn't release it until long after it mattered? If PayPal has good reasons not to accept donations and crowdfunding, they shouldn't fucking accept donations or crowdfunding, instead of letting users get in d…

So wait. You want Paypal to require everyone who opens a PayPal account to have to write up what it's going to be used for, and wait in a queue before you can receive funds so that they can review it to ensure that it's not something like crowdfunding, and then require that you either never change what you use your PayPal account for, or submit any changes back to them, so that they can re-review it and approve your new use?

As far as I know, PayPal allows anyone to open an account and start using it without any review (I've never received funds with PayPal, only sent funds, but I don't recall any extra hoops that would be necessary to receive them).

Likely what happens is that either certain kinds of activity cause an account to be flagged for a manual review, or someone gets cold feet about the crowdfunding campaign and does a chargeback, so PayPal looks into it to see what you were selling. When they see that you are in violation of their very explicit pre-sale policy: https://www.paypal-businesscenter.com/content/presale-policy... they hold your funds until you are within 20 days of shipping your product.

They have a lot of rules about what you can sell via PayPal, and there's no way they could possibly check what you are going to use funds for before each transaction, as you could start using an account that was used for permitted transactions for ones that aren't permitted at any time. So, they wait until an automated system, a complaint, or a chargeback notifies them that something is amiss, and then hold on to the money until they can resolve the situation.

Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds

#343

Post by Karunamon »

jplewicke wrote: post #169
Karunamon wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wouldn't kill paypal to have non-reversible transactions as long as this is made clear to the user.

Paypal is just an intermediary between merchants and whatever payment methods customers use to pay Paypal, such as debit/credit cards and bank transfers. And guess what? The modern financial system has no irreversible payment methods. Bank transfers, credit cards, and ACH are all reversible, wherever you go around the world. If you haven't heard of it before, the May Scale of Monetary Hardness is a great way of think…

Paypal already has a policy for dealing with users who reverse transactions out from under them. Unfortunately for the users, that policy is known as "scorched earth". We're talking account suspensions and referrals to collection agencies.

It would certainly be a lot less skeevy if it was done for a service-oriented reason (i.e. one way transactions) instead of the "because fuck you" reason that they appear to use currently.

Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds

#344

Post by wmf »

danielweber wrote: post #325
freejack wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah, I totally agree. My only nit was your claim that Paypal bears risk. Its true that their model comes with risk and they've built their business model in a way that they shift it to third parties as extensively and quickly as possible. Its a sore point with me in how Paypa, Visa, etc. operate. The merchant is rarely right.

I have been gob-smacked by how, as a buyer, Ebay[1] took my side so readily in a dispute. It seemed they were ready to believe anything I said. I would hate to be on the other side of that. [1] I know Ebay isn't exactly the same as PayPal, but one owns the other.

And due to such policies they now have a ton of fraudulent buyers.

Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds

#345

Post by PhasmaFelis »

lambda wrote: post #342
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet this story keeps happening, over and over and over across the years. Remember the $1 million-plus raised for hurricane relief raised after Katrina that PayPal threw down the drain by declaring that they wouldn't release it until long after it mattered? If PayPal has good reasons not to accept donations and crowdfunding, they shouldn't fucking accept donations or crowdfunding, instead of letting users get in d…

So wait. You want Paypal to require everyone who opens a PayPal account to have to write up what it's going to be used for, and wait in a queue before you can receive funds so that they can review it to ensure that it's not something like crowdfunding, and then require that you either never change what you use your PayPal account for, or submit any changes back to them, so that they can re-review it and approve your…

"So wait. You want Paypal to require everyone who opens a PayPal account to have to write up what it's going to be used for, and wait in a queue before you can receive funds so that they can review it to ensure that it's not something like crowdfunding, and then require that you either never change what you use your PayPal account for, or submit any changes back to them, so that they can re-review it and approve your new use?"

Not at all. I want them to say up front, when you sign up for an account, which apparently-innocuous activities will likely get your funds suspended for long enough to be useless. After that, it's on you if you go ahead with it. They're obviously not communicating clearly enough right now, or this wouldn't keep happening.

Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds

#346

Post by PhasmaFelis »

saurik wrote: post #263
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet this story keeps happening, over and over and over across the years. Remember the $1 million-plus raised for hurricane relief raised after Katrina that PayPal threw down the drain by declaring that they wouldn't release it until long after it mattered? If PayPal has good reasons not to accept donations and crowdfunding, they shouldn't fucking accept donations or crowdfunding, instead of letting users get in d…

> Maybe it's buried in the small print that they don't expect anyone to read. Maybe you don't expect people to read the fine print, but PayPal clearly does, and frankly if you are going into business then you should be making a point out of always reading the fine print. > If PayPal has good reasons not to accept donations and crowdfunding, they shouldn't fucking accept donations or crowdfunding, instead of letting u…

"Maybe you don't expect people to read the fine print, but PayPal clearly does, and frankly if you are going into business then you should be making a point out of always reading the fine print.

Money is money, so if you are dealing with people who apparently won't consider reading "the fine print" or even doing some trivial due diligence in the FAQ, you can't somehow not accept these use cases."

Fine print is an odd problem. In a world of rational actors, yes, obviously everyone should read all the fine print all the time, just like everyone should every word of the manual for every product they buy. The problem is, a typical internet power user is signing up for new services on a weekly basis, and most of them have 20 goddamn pages of fine print of which 19.5 are useless, meaningless gibberish. Corporations train their users to not read fine print, because 99% of the time it's half an hour wasted to learn nothing of value, and then exploit that training to slide shit past the radar. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a company that cares about its users' welfare to put the really notable bits up front in full-size print.

Just as an example, did you know that, by signing up for a comment account on any Gawker Media site (Lifehacker, Gizmodo, Gawker.com, Deadspin, io9, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Jezebel), you give them explicit blanket permission to sell any positive comment you make about a commercial product for use in that product's advertising? I bet you didn't, and Gawker counts on you not knowing that when you sign up.

Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds

#347

Post by likeclockwork »

paisawalla wrote: post #333
_pius wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it's "gambling" the way donating to an artist you like is gambling. And who's trying to entice them? Again, if doing business with Indiegogo projects is incompatible with Paypal's risk profile they shouldn't do business with Indiegogo projects. That seems straightforward. Bizarre to think we should be sympathizing with, enticing, or otherwise fellating PayPal in this situation.

Bizarre to think we should be sympathizing with, enticing, or otherwise fellating PayPal in this situation. While I understand how easy it is to sympathize with the merchant here, as none of us will ever be payment processors, the reality is that the sum of your suggestions or assertions, if explored just as a thought experiment, quickly lead to a world where nobody can do payment processing without imposing absurdly…

The thing is...

...nothing is being sold.

Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds

#348

Post by ceejayoz »

jafaku wrote: post #337
ceejayoz wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

What is this, another reddit meme that will be repeated until the end of the internet? Bitcoin can only go to zero or +inf. Past performance is a way to show what haters are losing every year for denying Bitcoin.

> Past performance is a way to show what haters are losing every year...

... said real estate agents in the early 2000s.

Folks who bought in April at $260 are out more than a hundred bucks per Bitcoin. It's just as easy to lose your shirt as it is to get rich.

Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds

#349

Post by saurik »

PhasmaFelis wrote: post #346
saurik wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe it's buried in the small print that they don't expect anyone to read. Maybe you don't expect people to read the fine print, but PayPal clearly does, and frankly if you are going into business then you should be making a point out of always reading the fine print. > If PayPal has good reasons not to accept donations and crowdfunding, they shouldn't fucking accept donations or crowdfunding, instead of letting u…

"Maybe you don't expect people to read the fine print, but PayPal clearly does, and frankly if you are going into business then you should be making a point out of always reading the fine print. Money is money, so if you are dealing with people who apparently won't consider reading "the fine print" or even doing some trivial due diligence in the FAQ, you can't somehow not accept these use cases." Fine print is an odd…

I am going to repeat this, as I don't think you caught the key noun: if you are going into business then you should be making a point of always reading the fine print. You don't hear about "power users" running into serious problems with PayPal because "users" are the core of PayPal's risk model. In stark contrast, this failure of a situation is a business attempting to deal with over one hundred thousand dollars via PayPal... I have absolutely no sympathy for them--or any other business--that can't take a few minutes to read "the fine print", doing even basic due diligence into "am I allowed to use this service for this purpose"; reading the contracts you agree to for critical services like payment processing is fundamentally different than reading the terms of service on your Gawker account: you should understand what you are agreeing to in full, and should not be relying on some cribbed cheat sheet of "the big stuff" handed to you by the service (as you argue should be provided, in this and other threads). Business involves lots of agreements, these agreements have to deal with tons of complex contingencies, and if you don't take agreements seriously (and likely it you don't actively enjoy reading them) you simply shouldn't be in business.

Re: PayPal Freezes Mailpile Campaign Funds

#350

Post by jessaustin »

mootothemax wrote: post #39
[deleted] wrote: post #28

[deleted]

I added a "donate" button to a free to use website I run. After its first use, PayPal proceeded to freeze my account because I "recently declared your organisation to be non-profit or started receiving donations". I was very unimpressed, mostly because there was absolutely no indication that adding a "donate" button would do this The first Google result for "paypal donate button" gives this page: https://www.paypal.c…

Yeah when I put together a donation site for a small (not-501(c)(3)) org some years ago, I was tempted to use donations but while reading the docs realized I just wanted payments. That site still operates, although thankfully I'm no longer involved, because PayPal still makes me nervous.
Post reply on HN