161–170 of 196 posts
This IT company bans are always like out of a Kafka novel. We ban you for your wrongdoing, you can't do anything about it and we won't tell you what you did wrong.
I 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…
"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…
> This should be illegal for Paypal to do, period. Absolutely illegal. In the US, it *is* illegal for any bank or other regulated financial company. But PayPal claims that they aren't that. There are lots of other ways to send or receive money and most of them don't have the reputation that PayPal has.
Holding the money hostage for half a year on a 20 year old account? Not surprising. Paypal and their other entities like Ebay are pretty shit when it comes to nuance and their impact on others. Had a 15 year old Paypal business account (parent started it and I took it over ~7 years ago) and last year they shut it down because I, as the new owner, was not 18 when the account was created. Nothing from the support but "…
A while ago I used paypal for transactions and I left some in the account so there was 100 grand. Six months later I tried to take some of it out and they froze the account despite no other recent activity. They said they'd keep it six months. Eight months or so after that, I asked about it, and they said they needed to freeze it for another six months. So soon we'll be at basically 18 months after the funds were ear…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How do you reverse paying someone with cash? You don't. Exactly, that's why centralised systems with moneyback guarantees (PayPal, Stripe) exist for online payments where you can't see the goods in person - online fraud is still a concern in 2021. >So you keep most money secure in a cold wallet, airgapped and password-protected, and some money secure in a hot wallet, PIN-protected. I'll admit I'm not super familiar…
> online fraud is still a concern in 2021. Sure, but this is why you transact with trusted people and businesses, just like you would when using cash. To be honest, I don't know a single person that relies on PayPal's protection when making a purchase online from an individual or business. Every single person I know that uses PayPal does their due diligence on the seller before buying. None of them assume that PayPal…
What, like paypal and ebay?
The problem is that in reality there are (a) small businesses whose trust is difficult to verify and stability may not be guaranteed and (b) large companies who have a proportion of incidents of very bad customer service. For many services there may only be (b).
> do your due diligence before buying
How much do you do exactly? How long does it take, what does it cost (do you pull company financial reports?) and shouldn't the extra time it takes to do this be counted as a transaction fee?
> Just like online payments and credit cards had their "wild west" period
Not really? It's been the same customer-not-present process since the days of export-restricted SSL. In fact that's kind of the problem, it's the same insecure process designed for paper and card transactions. There was certainly never anything comparable to "exchange absconds with customer funds" that happens every few years in crypto.
The "large company payment database was compromised and now all their customers are being defrauded" problem does seem to have improved recently.
I 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…
So in the end do I want to get into arguments with either malicious people or people who already have their mind set, get called names, have people deliberately portray what I am saying as something else and call it stupid when that was not what I said at all. Most of the time I really don't want to deal with that BS. Most of the people want to post about this are reluctant to do so and in many times don't, this is not just extrapolating from my experience, but what I have observed from other sources as well (such as asking whether they agreed with something shown, seeing no hands go up, then asking whether the didn't put there hands up because they were afraid and seeing almost all the hands go up).
"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…
Way back in 2011 they did this to me. My marketing agency had been running most of our customer payments through PayPal for several months, and we were growing fast. At some point they took the $50K we had in the account and froze it for 180 days with no recourse, claiming it was to protect against charge backs (despite us never having a single chargeback). I explained to them that if they didn't release the funds th…
Did you stay with Paypal after that? I'd have run for the hills.
Holding the money hostage for half a year on a 20 year old account? Not surprising. Paypal and their other entities like Ebay are pretty shit when it comes to nuance and their impact on others. Had a 15 year old Paypal business account (parent started it and I took it over ~7 years ago) and last year they shut it down because I, as the new owner, was not 18 when the account was created. Nothing from the support but "…
It took three months to resolve the issue. I'm not saying that we had to _wait_ three months: we discussed almost every day with the support, for three months.
The process was a mix of infuriating exchanges, bugs on the PayPal site preventing to send documents (so serious that even the support was aware), and at the end we were wondering if this was on purpose or because of a total lack of intelligence/skills and process from PayPal.
Each day we would have a different support people on the chat, with the dialog summarized:
- Paypal Human Bot: How can we help you ? - Me: Our account is restricted and we don't really understand why. Would you mind telling us how to solve the issue ? ( Skip long re-explaining everything from the beginning; PayPal has no history of previous exchanges apparently) - Paypal Human Bot: You are not registered as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, can you send us the papers ? - Me: Indeed, we are outside the US, we can't do that. However we can send you the official papers from Europe - Paypal Human Bot: Okay, so you need to be registered as a commercial entity, please send us your commercial ID - Me: We are not a commercial entity, we are a small non-profit organisations, and we don't have such ID - Paypal Human Bot: Okay, so please send us the papers that prove you are a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization - ...
We probably sent dozen of various official papers, etc. in the meantime. We had to guess what were the probable causes, as (once again) the PayPal site is riddled with bugs that may (or not) display warnings, ask for fields but that are read-only, etc.
If this was a bank, they would have been sanctioned by banking regulations.
And I am still unsure if this wasn't some kind of twisted social experiment made by some psychopath.