How is (a) claiming you accept donations on behalf of a charity and (b) not passing them on anything other than blatantly fraudulent? Surely at the least those charities have a claim against PayPal as well.
PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
61–70 of 92 posts
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because when you have lots of money, you can afford to use the threat of expensive libel lawsuits to keep people in line. The prospect of dragging someone into litigation is enough of a chilling effect they don't even have to commit to it for it to be effective.
Like a Universal Health Care you could have a "Universal Law Care", a per se legal costs insurance for every natural person. You might have to pay low fares measured in daily rates calculated from your rate of income/wealth for any legal action you take, but nothing that would put your way of life at risk. With automated processes in law becoming more and more of a thing, it would be possible to handle cases faster a…
Legal aid (and no-win, no-fee class action lawyers for "obvious" cases) already exists. But that doesn't mean that corporations don't have deeper pockets and a stronger interest in winning in many circumstances. And unless you've got hard AI, RoboJudge isn't going to understand the intricacies of how PayPal markets its donation service to consumers and distributes revenues and whether its disclaimers were sufficiently clear and obvious to its intended audience
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#63It looks like that the Humble Bundle is also affected by this. On their webpage, it says "Charitable contributions administered by PayPal Giving Fund" and "PayPal Giving Fund retains ultimate discretion and control over the use of the donations it receives from Humble Bundle." Is there a way to know which charities are registered with Paypal?
Humble Bundle co-founder here. This does not apply to us. The lawsuit refers to a feature PayPal Giving Fund launched a few months ago on their own website, to let people pay charities that are not yet registered.
On our side, for charities that are paid via PayPal Giving Fund, we require them to be fully onboarded. For our "choose your own charity" feature, which lets you customize which charity you are supporting, we only allow our customers to choose charities that are fully registered with PPGF. You can verify this by noting that we only support a fraction of the charities listed on PPGF.
Why use PPGF (or Tides.org, our backup) in the first place? There are regulations that require you and the charity to do a fair amount of paperwork and register with various states. When you are tiny, you can probably fly under the radar, but when you are approaching $100M raised for charity, it is a good idea to be fully compliant.
PPGF is an easy way to maintain sanity, because we can focus on fully complying with every state with the PayPal Giving Fund 501(c)3. PPGF then handles maintaining compliance with the states (+ UK) on their side.
However, for this to actually legally work, the PPGF needs to retain control over the funds, hence the scary disclaimer on the site. If they didn't actually pay a charity we work with, which has never happened, we would obviously let the customer know and make it right. We will be updating the disclaimer next week to be less opaque.
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#64So basically PayPal itself would call it fraud if somebody else would be doing it, right?
Bingo
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
@nolok what is the value of this regulation? Some recent/current examples. 1) During the banking crisis after 2007 EU banks loose 100billions of euro's and the taxpayer mostly payed for their losses. 2) They get 80billon euro's for free every month ( quantitative easing ) from the ECB which goes down the drain, iow into their profit, not into supporting the economy. 3) Up till the Greece crisis, Greece had to pay hig…
I don't think the parent said that Paypal is nice and good in Europe. It merely said that they might be under a stricter regulatory control in Europe, so unhappy customers have more tools available to keep them to account. [Edit/add]: However, American citizens have often stronger tools available in class action suites. EU countries trust the authorities, and it is then up to officials to control parties like Paypal.…
Except class action lawsuits get you absolutely nothing unless you are a lawyer. Enjoy that voucher for a free pancake, only redeemable between 4.30 and 4.32 AM at a single restaurant.
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#66Why is it, when an established company does something like this, the headline talks about "redirecting contributions", instead of calling it what it is? Why not just say "Paypal Defrauds Donors"?
I remember that several Xorg developers alleged that Paypal robbed Xorg. I think Xorg never got anything back. https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1417033.html I recall reading a bible quote or might have been another religious book. It said, when a powerless man breaks the law, a crime has been committed, but when a powerful man breaks the law, the law was unclear.
PayPal absolutely steal money from people. A community I run once tried a donation campaign to pay for hosting costs etc. At some point paypal decided this was fraud (right after someone sent a larger sum of money) and locked the account. Locking an account means they take the money, and there is no way to get it back, apparently. They kept coming up with excuses as to why no one was allowed to access the money and refused to refund people.
I wanted to try my hand at fighting them a year later and the account was gone entirely. Bye money.
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#67If they are a money "transmitter", then how are you allowed to keep a balance? I am ignorant of the lawsaround that, but it seems that's a womp rate sized hole?
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#68If a human were to do something like this he would get prison time. Instead since it has been done by "a company", nothing will be done. I wish we, the humanity, would start to treat limited liability only as a financial tool. If something like this is done, it's not the company that must be sued, but the people who made it.
Agreed in principle. Limited liability is created by statute, and can and should be rolled back as needed to prevent pathological outcomes.
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#69So my parents run a non-profit and a recently letter we got from Amazon Smile explains what is happening here. Amazon Smile is a service were you can choose a charity for Amazon to donate to. When you shop at Amazon, a small percentage of that money goes to the selected charity. Recently they got a letter in the mail explaining they had been chosen as recipients of this Amazon Smile money. The thing is, they never ch…
Wow. That just sounds arrogant on the parts of Amazon and PayPal.
Re: PayPal Redirects Charitable Contributions Without Consent, Lawsuit Says
#70So my parents run a non-profit and a recently letter we got from Amazon Smile explains what is happening here. Amazon Smile is a service were you can choose a charity for Amazon to donate to. When you shop at Amazon, a small percentage of that money goes to the selected charity. Recently they got a letter in the mail explaining they had been chosen as recipients of this Amazon Smile money. The thing is, they never ch…
Dammit. I've been using Amazon Smile to donate to a small non-profit. It's obscure enough that I was surprised to find it listed as an option, but given that it was there, I just assumed that they would get the money set aside for them.
Is Amazon doing the same thing (withholding donations from charities that don't register for their service)? Is there any way to check?