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PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

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Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#131

Post by seiji »

logicallee wrote: post #127
ohitsdom wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm missing the LinkedIn comparison. PayPal handles money. Their track record of horrible customer service has caused a lot of financial trouble for people and institutions. What are the complaints with LinkedIn? As far as I know, it's more of spammy contacting behavior. Which I get that's annoying, but not even in the same ballpark as PayPal.

The claim I heard is (from the perspective of the complaint), that they "use your gmail account [with your nominal permission] and get the names of your contacts, to whom they then 'impersonate' you." (scare quotes because I don't view it this way.) i.e. your contacts will get a message "from you" as though you were asking them to do something. Even though you have not actually taken that action. Personally this is n…

> they use your password to log in to your gmail account

and that is a federal crime. Why do they go unpunished?

There sure are a lot of products and services I'd like to create if I knew laws were just suggestions. Every massive-growth startup seems to have some underlying "we did these five illegal things to get started" backstory.

Almost every garbage social media company either directly tries that (password-proxy to other services for scraping) or they use a scam to trick you into "consent" by offering so many forced options to click through you eventually accidentally hit a "yes don't not contact my un-friends with not my unconsent" button. (Or the super jerk version: "If you don't opt-out of this feature within two days of creating your account, we will take actions X, Y, Z on your behalf" in fine print.)

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#132

Post by juliangregorian »

atourgates wrote: post #64
fonnesbeck wrote: post #60

I closed my PP account 2 years ago and would never consider using the service again. Once upon a time it was a necessary evil, now it is no longer necessary (just evil).

Doesn't this significantly impact your ability to use eBay?

Use what now?

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#133

Post by r2pleasent »

Paypal has so many things wrong with their company. The majority of employees, even in the business support department, have absolutely no clue what is going on. They will give you an answer to a question, you will call back later, get a new agent, and then you'll get a completely different answer to the same question.

Half the time the customer support is clearly just improvising, because the system is such a mess that there are no clear processes for fairly common situations. Let me give an example. A customer on our website makes an order for digital goods. We collect photo ID, check their IP, call them. The customer then opens an unauthorized claim. We call in and outline the information we have.

Half the time, the agent will tell us that the information we have collected is irrelevant to an unauthorized dispute. Let me clarify that. The photo ID documents, IP address on file, and phone number of the buyer are considered irrelevant in a claim where the buyer alleges they did not authorize a purchase. Absolutely ridiculous, right?

Then magically, if you call back and connect to the right agent, they will actually look at your evidence and use it to help determine the case. These cases can be upwards of $500, and must be extremely common. And yet, somehow, there is no clear standard for what proof we need to collect in order to win an unauthorized dispute.

The company is a headache to work with. Half our time is spent verifying and doing risk management in our business, simply due to the horror that is PayPal.

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#134

Post by techaddict009 »

r2pleasent wrote: post #133

Paypal has so many things wrong with their company. The majority of employees, even in the business support department, have absolutely no clue what is going on. They will give you an answer to a question, you will call back later, get a new agent, and then you'll get a completely different answer to the same question. Half the time the customer support is clearly just improvising, because the system is such a mess t…

Why dont you quite them and use service like stripe?

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#135

Post by myth_buster »

marcosdumay wrote: post #73
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, he stopped having any influence on PayPal behavior years ago. Similar to how Apple decays into senescence when Jobs is not there running it.

When did he get out? PayPal is misbehaving since essentially forever.

Wasn't it Max who worked on Fraud detection/prevention?

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#136

Post by fs111 »

arenaninja wrote: post #12
seiji wrote: post #10

Related: why doesn't anybody take down LinkedIn? They run consistently obviously illegal spam/marketing practices. Why do they get a free pass? Is the "mafia" part of PayPal mafia too strong? Too many cross-bred investor attachments all the way down making some services "untouchable" no matter what they do? We need something like the EFF but for out of control tech companies needing to be denounced for the public goo…

LinkedIn has some niche competition. I've seen at least two oil-oriented ones based out of Houston, and a few others elsewhere

xing.de is bigger than linkedin in the German speaking world and has been a profitable business for years. They are way less spammy.

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#137

Post by [deleted] »

seiji wrote: post #131
logicallee wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The claim I heard is (from the perspective of the complaint), that they "use your gmail account [with your nominal permission] and get the names of your contacts, to whom they then 'impersonate' you." (scare quotes because I don't view it this way.) i.e. your contacts will get a message "from you" as though you were asking them to do something. Even though you have not actually taken that action. Personally this is n…

> they use your password to log in to your gmail account and that is a federal crime. Why do they go unpunished? There sure are a lot of products and services I'd like to create if I knew laws were just suggestions. Every massive-growth startup seems to have some underlying "we did these five illegal things to get started" backstory. Almost every garbage social media company either directly tries that (password-proxy…

[deleted]

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#138

Post by nish1500 »

railsisfails wrote: post #84

Right now, any other payment company could hold your money, kill your cat, fill your car with stinky waste, spoof rude emails to your friends and family, and finally blow raspberries at you, and it would still be heads and shoulders above the stinkfest of paypal.

I am paying my payment processor 10% - 15% of each transaction in processing and cross border fee, because, I am told:

1. They are small, and don't get good exchange rates 2. My location makes for a long money route, so I pay between 4% - 8% in cross border fee on every transaction

The above fee doesn't even include the final transaction and conversion fee when I withdraw the USD balance to my home currency.

From where I stand, I would be saving 3% - 5%, or more with PayPal, on every transaction. I am willing to take the risk.

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#139

Post by troncheadle »

techaddict009 wrote: post #134
r2pleasent wrote: post #133

Paypal has so many things wrong with their company. The majority of employees, even in the business support department, have absolutely no clue what is going on. They will give you an answer to a question, you will call back later, get a new agent, and then you'll get a completely different answer to the same question. Half the time the customer support is clearly just improvising, because the system is such a mess t…

Why dont you quite them and use service like stripe?

Stripe isn't better. Dispute processes with digital goods are really hard. I'm fairly sure that the evidence that you submit (to paypal or stripe) is actually evaluated by the bank that the customer filed a dispute with. I don't think this kind of thing can really be held against the payment processor. Every bank probably has it's own processes and standards and every payment processor likely feels the same frustration that we do.

It used to really frustrate me when we would get stripe disputes. Now I have a collection of materials I go out and get, and then just send it out hoping for the best. I try to look at it more like rolling the dice than a business process. It seems to be consistent (in that sending the same materials for similar disputes yields the same result) but it is not at all transparent or an exact science.

Re: PayPal penalised for 'deceptive' practices

#140

Post by FireBeyond »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #41
Chinjut wrote: post #40

Wow, nothing but complaints about PayPal here. Interesting to keep in mind next time the Elon Musk hagiography starts up again...

Hey, he stopped having any influence on PayPal behavior years ago. Similar to how Apple decays into senescence when Jobs is not there running it.

Maybe so. On the flip-side, let's not pretend PayPal was this once benevolent entity that's been corrupted since Musk departed. It has always been sketchy and the subject of much complaint.
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