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PayPal restores to its TOS $2,500 charge for any post they don't like

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Re: PayPal restores to its TOS $2,500 charge for any post they don't like

#131

PayPal doesn’t have a monopoly anymore so this just seems bizarre. Visa, Google, Apple, etc run similar services on a massive scale. Then there’s of course crypto. For how rarely they are likely to actually enforce this, it just seems like a rather stupid hill to die on. Not just the initial decision but the attempt to try and sneak the terms back in.

Paypal is well known for randomly stealing money from user accounts and has been known for this for over a decade. Their reputation is already rock bottom to anyone who would know about this latest debacle, and they make massive amounts of money for free by doing this. There is no reason at all for them to stop, unfortunately.

They are but the optics here are especially jarring. First the political angle which is bad when you’re trying to sell to the entire population, and now the just very obviously cruel move to small business during economic hardship.

It’s tempting people who shrugged their shoulders and used PayPal because they were a monopoly to re-evaluate if they should click PayPal in a checkout with Visa Checkout for instance.

Re: PayPal restores to its TOS $2,500 charge for any post they don't like

#132

How exactly do conditions like this work in practice? I can go ahead and write a ToS or even a contract that says "if you don't give me a blue M&M on Saturday 29 October 2022, you owe me $1M". I can get a client to sign it, perhaps it's part of my conditions as a freelancer. I can't realistically see any court enforcing that. As far as I can tell PayPal can only get away with this nonsense because they hold your mone…

I've wondered how far these TOS via clicks can go and what would actually stand up in court.

I'm also surprised an activist hasn't attached a TOS to sending payments such as "By accepting my money you agree to pay me $1 Million dollars for any time I spend more that 5 minutes with customer service without my dispute being settled."

I seem to remember a case where someone altered the fine print agreement on a credit card application and the credit card company lost the case with the consumer, but I forget the details.

Re: PayPal restores to its TOS $2,500 charge for any post they don't like

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prefaced with "You may not use the PayPal service for activities that:" It's not as if they're looking at your HN posts for violations, only payment transactions.

Imagine that you paid reddit using PayPal. Based on the language, it's not clear that every subsequent reddit post isn't fair game for enforcement.

Or suppose you have a t-shirt printing business.

Re: PayPal restores to its TOS $2,500 charge for any post they don't like

#134
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money laundering

But this could happen to any business, and surely does. Completely turning off a business because it receives one fraudulent payment is not appropriate. Indeed, this hasn't been my experience with other billing platforms. Of course, we're taking the posters claim that this is what happened at face value...

If it's your first payment, you're pretty much done for. One of their targets is any operation where an entire business/yt account/paypal account is made to launder a single transaction and then left to rot.

Re: PayPal restores to its TOS $2,500 charge for any post they don't like

#135

This is neither shocking, nor new. A decade ago I remember a friend who had a small business selling some niche collectors items. One day, he was scammed. The guy reported that the package was never delivered and, without even investigating, Paypal banned my friend's account and awarded the buyer their money back. Paypal has always, and will always be a shit company. Charging people $2,500 for wrongthink is simply as…

> I wonder what happens if I just say "lol, not paying" to them. Would they put me in collections? You can revoke paypal's ACH authorization to your accounts [0]. I would not want to deal with the headache of them falsely telling creditors that I owe them money, though. [0] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/how-can-i-stop-a-pa...

Good luck with that. I had some random bad actor somehow get ahold of my account numbers and debit ~$40 out of my account once via something called a "demand draft." My bank refunded me the money, but they told me they'd have to close my old account and open a whole new account in order to stop it from happening again in the future.

Re: PayPal restores to its TOS $2,500 charge for any post they don't like

#136
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are not. Cash was built using unlinked refunds over visa to do direct deposit onto visa debit cards. For ACH, it uses normal ACH rails. Zelle…was built by the big banks…

> Cash was built using unlinked refunds over visa to do direct deposit onto visa That sorta sounds like violating visa tos?

Nah, they just used a hack before working directly with visa to create a standard for this

Re: PayPal restores to its TOS $2,500 charge for any post they don't like

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I wonder what happens if I just say "lol, not paying" to them. Would they put me in collections? You can revoke paypal's ACH authorization to your accounts [0]. I would not want to deal with the headache of them falsely telling creditors that I owe them money, though. [0] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/how-can-i-stop-a-pa...

Good luck with that. I had some random bad actor somehow get ahold of my account numbers and debit ~$40 out of my account once via something called a "demand draft." My bank refunded me the money, but they told me they'd have to close my old account and open a whole new account in order to stop it from happening again in the future.

> open a whole new account in order to stop it from happening again in the future

Not sure how that would stop it from happening again in the future, if the bank isn't going to make the barest attempt at stopping people from debiting your accounts with just the routing number + account number...

Re: PayPal restores to its TOS $2,500 charge for any post they don't like

#139

This is neither shocking, nor new. A decade ago I remember a friend who had a small business selling some niche collectors items. One day, he was scammed. The guy reported that the package was never delivered and, without even investigating, Paypal banned my friend's account and awarded the buyer their money back. Paypal has always, and will always be a shit company. Charging people $2,500 for wrongthink is simply as…

I guess you're not in Europe. Paypal is huge here, especially in Germany. Has been useful for years here for free instant transactions without currency conversion fees (at least between some euro currencies)

SEPA payments and TransferWise are a complete replacement.

Re: PayPal restores to its TOS $2,500 charge for any post they don't like

#140
post #14

I used to use paypal for everything but it occurred to me that I haven't used it since 2018. What niche does it support that direct payments don't? When I think of paypal, I think of delays.

>What niche does it support that direct payments don't? For buying stuff online it removes the need to fiddle around with CCs (+ trusting individual websites with CC info) and lets you checkout quickly. It's also great if you get scammed out of your money somehow... Their chargeback system is stupidly easy and is infamous for always siding with the buyer. It sucks when you're on the other side of the transaction, tho…

> trusting individual websites with CC info

Websites don't keep CC info, and they haven't ever since PCI DSS has been a thing.

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