We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business
blog.niteo.co
blog.niteo.co
Disclosure: I used to work in payment industry.
Unfortunately from the brand's perspective (Visa, Mastercard, etc.) it doesn't matter which of your product is using their channel to process payments, if the business is involved in doing something shady, the whole company will be flagged. If you already passed KYC 12 years ago, but your business _today_ won't pass KYC if you were to apply again, then it's a matter of time until you get kicked out.
Maybe you should focus on making your business run in the ethical clear first. You’re not getting any sympathy from me that your unethical practices got you cut off from financing.
I'm utterly sick of this kind of junk.
PBNs are garbagey, but trying to put them all down is unrealistic. And even if they could be stopped, it would only be a band aid fix, not addressing the real problems.
Spammers and their ilk, though, are not really famous for sticking to the truth.
I understand the dissatisfaction with half-measures. But I would argue as long as the actions have a meaningful impact and there isn't a promising alternative, it is still worthwhile.
So I came here to see if anyone looked up what sort of products and services they offer.
PayPal could have at least pointed towards the clause in their terms that is being used for the rejection.
My guess is either Google is encouraging PayPal to do this ban or PayPal is afraid of some societal backlash if people realize they are profiting off of spam.
I am honestly happy they are attempting to limit spam, but just surprised they are harming their bottom line to do it.
PayPal also does not do business with many Porn Websites, which are generally legal.
If you are subject to the whims and value judgments of individual PayPal employees, rather than policy documents, that is truly scary. Sell something that happens to offend a random employee's moral, political, or religious sensibilities? You might lose your account. What happens if a relative of a PayPal employee decides that you weren't fast enough with customer service, and tells them about it? Can that employee go searching for your account and kill it simply because they have a relative that wasn't impressed with the speed of your customer service?
The point is that these companies establish written policies for a reason. If those policies are not being followed, then businesses shouldn't use PayPal - not because they want to defend PBN sellers, but because their own business may be at risk even when they do nothing wrong.
This has always been the case. Paypal is extremely liberal with funds they seize or what accounts they shut down. At least, that's the image of them I've had for over a decade. Maybe they've since changed...but I wouldn't store any real amount of money in Paypal for any amount of time.
So if your policy documents don't actually govern your policies, then employees are banning businesses based on their personal value judgments. That is problematic for a large number of reasons.
Untrue. Often the exact breach is legally prohibited from being publicly shared, but if a company is banned, then a TOS breach has happened. There is an unbelievable amount of red tape and compliance within every process, both digital and human, that occurs with regards to money and transactions. Especially in the fintech space, PayPal internally is bound to governmental regulations and auditing far more strict than any regulations imposed on customers. To suggest that PayPal can just close accounts at whim for any other reason than enforcement of legally binding terms and confiscate customer funds is simply absurd.
Again, misplaced assumption and personal opinion. With some circumstances, especially if regulating bodies become involved, a company can be ordered by government to not share any further information with the other party, as well as freeze their funds. And even in the circumstances where that does not occur, I don't think a company is obligated to spell out for you what you violated. Sure, I agree that doesn't always look the best and it can seem like it happened "for no reason", but personally my opinion is that if someone told me I have violated TOS, I can read the few paragraphs for myself and figure it out. And they have over 250 million users, 8300 complaints over 3 years doesn't seem bad, and it looks like most of them were resolved. I get it, money gets people upset, and it's always tempting to see the "big bad corporation" turning its back on the little guy, but I personally feel like it gets blown out of proportion a lot. There's always more to the story... Being in the industry, it just frustrates me when people think these big companies can do whatever they want at will, when really their hands are often tied much more than you think.
I know my experiences with them very much fall in the “big company doing whatever it wants at will” category, and I am not alone. Scores of others over the years have wound up as frustrated as you are by these comments in their dealings with PayPal.
especially if regulating bodies become involved, a company can be ordered by government to not share any further information with the other party,
This would apply to an absurdly small percentage of the accounts that PayPal closes on a daily basis.
Let's just say that their credibility seems a bit sketchy.
Which is, a claim worth considering? I am not convinced yet.
I suppose that the fact that PayPal is a money transfer service, which is necessary for many kinds of businesses, and maybe kind of a monopoly, that could be a reason to treat them as more like a government than some businesses should be treated?
Hm.
That's no news. Many PP user are fully aware of that fact. There have been similar cases over the years, completely unrelated to PBNs. That's the deal with PP, take it or leave it.
I can imagine several plausible reasons, related to potential liability, but does that mean that if we're trying to outsource business functions to specialist firms that we can't expect them to be transparent in their operations?
In my opinion the reason for ban, even though mentioned that unrelated to their SaaS offering, is likely higher number of transactions with parties who have been also baned for some shady practices. Such rat clusters are usualy nuked in batch.
This sounds more like an excuse from Paypal, who I fear talking bad about in case they decide to ban me too :P
Attribute things to incompetence before malice and all that, especially when attributing it to malice requires thinking they made a fairly odd decision to outright lie to customers about why you are ceasing doing business with them.
> (poorly) made up excuse to ban undesirable users.
I suppose I'm not interested in debating the definition of malice as it relates to actions by a large corporation...
I was using odesk.com at the time and they basically banned me from interacting with the deva.
This sounds so similar to all other large tech companies, specially Google. Somewhere along the line all these tech companies lost user focus.
The account rep is just a marketing vector for Google to their paying customers.
* Cody Don on YouTube teaches the masses about science and regularly gets banned. His videos are rated G to PG. Despite millions of viewers and dollars of Revenue, there is nobody he can call.
* Uber charged $1500 to my debut card a few months ago. There's literally nobody you can call about it.
* Lose your Instagram/Twitter/Gmail? Too bad, because it's free, you're treated as cattle.
* Oh then there's the paying customers too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609
And here I thought small claims court was a thing in the US as well
I am not a lawyer, but I have sued out-of-state companies in my home jurisdiction.
Just customers, no, probably not.
Contractors? Yes. Especially contractors that are performing services there.
Your bank. You dispute the charge. Uber can deal with your bank. It doesn't matter it was a debit card. It means you're missing the money immediately, but doesn't stop you from disputing.
Is the convenience of an app so important to you that you're willing to deal with this nonsense?
Wait until Uber is the only option for a ride across town. Now what?
If you are a driver, a ban seems more permanent, but it's not like they really identify riders.
I would say, sending uber an email would work, or calling their number (which, they actually do - if you lost a phone in an uber, they have a number which lets you call them to get the contact details of the driver of the car you were in).
So it only applies to chargebacks of transactions you've previously authorized, not for fraudulent unauthorized charges.
If I took an Uber (or attempted to take an Uber) and I had a dispute with them about payment = attempt to work it out with Uber first.
If I didn't take an Uber at all = contact bank.
Your bank. You call your bank.
Always pay with a credit card, it's much easier to reverse this kind of stuff versus a debit card. There is literally no good reason to ever use a debit card.
Unless you're trying to get out cash from an ATM, or make any other cash-advance-like purchase. Then there's a really good reason to use a debit card instead of a credit card. It's the only time I use my debit card.
One source: https://monzo.com/blog/2018/08/08/better-credit-score/ , a bank’s blog, but I’ve seen it in other places. Never from the horse’s mouth, though.
As far as I can tell mortgages are dependent on you having OK credit, not good credit. You don't seem to get better rates dependent on your credit score.
Credit card rates are irrelevant, you shouldn't be carrying a balance.
What else do you really need a credit score for?
A good reason would be if you don't have credit cards because you have serious problems controlling your spending and you're at a place where you can't pay with cash, such as an unmanned gas station, payment terminal, on a plane, a cash-less business, etc.
I agree with the overall point, either use cash or use credit. Debit only if cash and credit aren't available.
Any reason this couldn't work? Does it exist already?
Lets you generate new debit card numbers with hard limits on the amount the card can spend. I really like them for tracking repeating payments.
You mean a regular bank transaction card? Is that not something that exists in the US?
I always find the American reliance on credit cards somewhat bizarre. Not having an alternative would explain it, I guess.
People like using credit cards (or charge cards, like some Amexes) to buffer transactions between the bank and the merchant, so if the merchant screws up there is time to resolve the issue before the credit bill comes due.
If a merchant screws up with your debit card, or it gets skimmed/stolen, the only limit to abuse is how much money is in your checking account. If you just got a direct deposit from your employer and are expecting your rent payment to pull from that account today, but your account was drained because your debit card got skimmed at a gas station... not much you can do.
The problem with debit cards is because certain transactions aren't instant in the US if there's fraud on your debit card at just the right time then your rent check can bounce, your external transfers are returned, etc, and all that stuff comes with fees and headaches.
Credit cards also come with rewards whereas rewards on debit cards are rare and not as good if they exist. Credit cards usually have auxiliary benefits like (depending on the card) return protection, purchase protection, extended warranty, travel insurance, and more, whereas debit cards have nothing of the sort. THere's no interest due on credit cards if you pay your bill in full every month.
The problem with credit cards is, of course, you have the ability to spend more money than you have, and you can dig yourself into a hole if you don't use that power responsibly.
Bank transaction cards in Netherland, presumably all of Europe, and I would hope the rest of the world, authorise the transaction in a reasonably secure[0] way between you and your bank, and the merchant only gets the money.
[0] The main insecure part is that keys are short, because they need to be memorised. But with modern automatically-blocking chip cards, there's no way to brute-force that as far as I'm aware.
What is confusing you is probably that European banks push 3D Secure really hard, so most online transactions are further verified, and that chip&pin cards and online readers are prevalent - the same thing Americans call “Apple Pay is supported”.
All that works on debit OR credit cards.
* don't have the credit card like information like card number, verification number or CVC code.
* They are directly linked to a bank account like you described.
* They have the account number (IBAN) printed on them. Knowledge of that number doesn't get you closer to the money in the account, though.
* To actually use them on an ATM or at a POS, you usually use chip and pin. In the POS case, the POS randomly chooses between PIN and your hand written signature as proof of ownership.
* You can't directly pay with them online, though (ignoring extra features some variants have).
* To pay online if you only have one of those cards, you usually pay by wire transfer using your account number, the pin number from above and a tan (a single use number created for this transaction only). Money reaches the recipient between a few minutes and a day later.
* Practically everyone with a bank account has such a card.
The 2FA used to be done with one-time TAN numbers on paper, but many banks switched to a special device that generates these numbers on the fly based on your account, the amount transferred and some random number, and in recent years many banks are switching to a mobile app for dedication. But authorisation always happens through some form of 2FA between you and the bank, and never relies on sending any kind of sensitive information (like credit card numbers) to third parties (merchant, PayPal, whatever).
Sadly, iDeal is only supported by Dutch banks and Dutch merchants (and international merchants that care about the Dutch market, like Steam). I really wish there was something like this that was internationally supported. Relying on sharing credit card numbers, seems really backwards and terribly insecure. Well, it is terribly insecure, as evidenced by all the panic when a company leaks a million credit card numbers. You never get that kind of panic when someone leaks a million account numbers, because in a secure system, that's simply not enough to get any money out of that account.
If you have serious problems controlling your spending, might as well spend someone else's money that you can discharge, versus just have no money in your checking account all the time.
(And, I have money in other accounts for emergencies.)
Credit cards are also subject to holds.
It might be convenient today, but it's like driving around without your seat belt on. It might allow you to enter and exit the vehicle quicker, but that's not really the point.
The bank that offers me 0.2% more interest isn't worth it because their customer service is reprehensible garbage.
When something goes wrong my good bank - First Direct - are going to answer in 2-3 rings, and they're going to fix it, their founding philosophy (I happen to know some of those founders by chance) is that customers must feel "totally taken care of", if the customer wants a £2M mortgage at 2am on a Sunday, then you can't tell them "Oh I'm sorry the mortgages team only works 9-5". I have never come off a call to them thinking they should have done more or done it faster, on the contrary I'm often surprised how effective they were able to be.
Everything about this approach can be replicated. If every bad bank loses its customers we all get better banks.
What is a debit card exactly in the US? I'm familiar with US-style credit cards, and find them horrible, expensive and insecure. I normally pay simply with my bank card, and online I prefer to with through iDeal bank transfer. Unfortunately that's not supported internationally, so I have a credit card only for international online payments. I would not own a credit card otherwise.
A credit card is different. If a transaction is submitted for reversal within the allotted time period, the charges are simply reversed.
In the case of a fraudulent debit transaction that gets disputed, your bank has to file a claim with the other bank, and somebody (possibly other than the merchant) is taking a loss. Banks don't like that. Credit card reversals mostly result in the merchants taking the loss, and the banks will usually side with a consumer.
The reason their is very little customer service in SV is due to fact that it is extremely expensive to provide customer service...
Why build products for customers if you aren't going to provide service to them, oh wait, it's because it's not as profitable.
If only he sold out to NBC, PBS, Disney, or a Viacom company, then he could do whatever he wants and never be banned. ;)
If you're in the U.S., I would think your state's Attorney General. It's potentially either theft or fraud, I would think.
Or if your A.G. won't pursue it, go after Uber in small-claims court. Not only are you likely to recoup your lost money, but you'd cause them some pain and/or lawyer fees.
Every Friday go online and withdraw all-but-the-necessary £€$$ to your bank account (transfer wire or via card number). I do get some revenue via PayPal, and the very same day (or the next) I 'download' comes it to my bank account (connected to PayPal via card) and IMMEDIATELY is shipped to another account that has all the controls to make money (relatively) unmovable.
I perceive PayPal as my wallet. I do keep 'some' money in it but I keep the motherload away 'layers' deep.
My money flow diagram, in the back end, includes "tax", "expenses", and "vault" (alarm Scrooge McDuck) accounts.
I see PayPal as the envelope that I am given the cash in. It doesn't stay there for more than 24-48h.
Edit: someone below mentioned they do spam.. if e.g. USA authorities has alerted them about doing shady things, PayPal would also receive a gag order with it to a) freeze their $$$$ and b) gag them. If I was Niteo I would get my pencils sharpened and wake up my lawyers.
PayPal does have a feature they don't advertise named Auto Sweep, which withdraws any balance in your account each day. You need to contact support to enable it.
Like PayPal, a bank also will not tell you why it has frozen your account (to avoid ripping off others in a crime ring). PayPal (like banks) give you an opportunity to fight it, but like banks they can't simply let you have the money if it is frozen.
Also, working in banking - banks and financial institutions will go out of their way to avoid false positives but do still need to remain compliant.
https://monzo.com/blog/2019/04/04/why-we-block-freeze-close-...
At least, that's how I understand the banking situation in Netherland, which seems about as reasonable as you can get. American companies do seem to be much more likely to play police.
Not the case. They're obliged to freeze the account when they suspect suspicious activity, and then submit a SAR if it is proven to be suspicioue. Freezing the acct is part of the investigation, and they usually now use automated tools to do so.
They're obliged to work every alert generated and unfreeze if the activity is proved to be legitimate.
How many lawyers do you think a bank will have to retain to deal with the flood of preliminary injunctions they would have to deal with if they locked accounts at will?
Edit: I'm replying to a really low odds scenario, where:
1. You auto sweep all money out of paypal
2. You regularly empty the checking account it sends to
You have at risk maybe $1000-$2000 in the chequing + less than $100 in fees.
For something vanishingly unlikely to happen. The risk seems rather low compared to the exposure.
I mostly use stripe and have PayPal as a backup. Never had a problem with either, and if I did have a problem with one the amounts are fairly low. (Probably more of an amount risk with stripe as they take longer to sweep out the money. But I don't think they freeze as often)
It is an interesting angle to try a civil suit for.
This speaks about keeping 7 accounts: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=auzLhKvsxnQ
There is a Tom Ferry (real estate guy but has some sound tips) also has on a video a VERY good flow diagram on how to distribute money in different buckets/accounts. Apologies but I couldn't find it on my phone.
I was "inspired" by the above and once I organized my accounts/flows and stopped using "single account for all" my life became so much simpler. And of course PayPal wallet is not a permanent parking space for £€¥$.
Overdraft is a loan. Would you get a loan with insane interest rate and fees just to get a payment go through? Not me.
You probably want this as a generic fail safe for any account that you disclose the account an routing number to an outside entity.
I'm not an expert on this, but I believe there are ways to set up business accounts where money can't be taken out in that way, at least not by the standard electronic means. You can also manage accounts in such a way as that there's no money to take out, although that does not necessarily prevent the account from going into the negative. Checking accounts can go into significant negative balances if the bank chooses to allow it.
As to prevent the overdraft, just ask the bank to NOT have overdraft capacity on your account(s).
If something bounces, then I will handle it within 24h. Again, this is the setup that covers my needs. A different organizations with different needs should have different process/controls to match their liquidity/easy-to-access-cash needs.
the 3rd parties I'm referring to are things like work marketplaces like upwork, even gift cards or undeposited checks.
Giving PayPal an interest free loan and control over you balances rather than sweeping them into a (potentially interest bearing) account controlled by you is one example of this.
Another is having a second account at a different bank that you sweep money from the first one. That second bank account should be set up to reject automated ACH withdrawals so that you can push money into it but PayPal, your payroll company, your bill payers, or even other companies that ACH payments to you cannot withdraw from your account without your permission.
This is a thing? How do you do this?
> The first sentence is throwing me off so much
I didn't go to check because the mystery is more intriguing, but if the OOP's username is NO ONE, then maybe NO ONE literally did write that?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/nobody
The first line ("Literally NO ONE wrote the below:") introduces a hot take.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/origin-and-mea...
Anyway, long story short. Someone managed to access my paypal and request a sum of money around roughly $40. That account had about $38 in it at the time. Paypal flagged the transaction as fraudulent, stored the money 'in my paypal account' instead of sending it to the requester, and froze my account. But this overdrew my bank account by roughly $2. Needless to say, 2-3 years of late fees added up to a substantial amount of money - two separate accounts - one for about $280 that I owed the bank and another that was about $350 that i owed to their 'overdraft' company. I didn't find out about either until they were about 2-3 years old and in collections.
I realize what I'm explaining is totally my own fault for not monitoring that account and keeping it up to date, but if paypal would have either redeposited that money into my account or sent some emails, instead of freezing the assets in a holding account, I could have avoided that.
In either event, that left a bitter taste in my mouth, and i severed all ties with paypal and that old account at that point.
I had to explain this multiple times to different government and military agencies throughout my career - it still comes up on background investigations.
We never had any issues, but we were very vigilant about transferring funds out of PayPal every few days just in case. We did finally stop using them, probably about 2009 or 2010, when stories like OP's started to become widespread.
For us, having them "hold" our funds for 6 months or cancelling our account would have bankrupted us. The hotel wants to be paid on Monday after the event. Vendors need to be paid within 30 days. Things like that would have been impossible for us to do if they decided to sit on the money or can us. We were a volunteer fan convention; we didn't have the financial cushion to withstand something like that.
Not to mention the fees were higher than a standard merchant account. We finally did switch to a merchant account through Elavon and, after I left, I think they switched to Stripe. Either way, they don't accept PayPal now because the financial risk to them that could result from PayPal freezing or canceling the funds is significant.
Regardless, I would not recommend any business accept PayPal unless you are large enough to get their attention. There are far too many stories out there like OP's, of individuals, as well as small and medium sized businesses, getting absolutely hosed by some automated algorithm at PayPal and having zero recourse to even find out what happened. Customer "service" is nonexistent there. In my opinion, the only thing PayPal is good for is sending money between people.
Short of filing a lawsuit, and you probably can't even do that because they now have an arbitration agreement in their terms.
Reasons: No risk of credit card info misuse (by vendor), I only need username and password and I get certainly at least some kind of receipt for accounting.
You are not responsible for card-not-present fraud (without 3D Secure). You can dispute any fraudulent charge with your bank, and I’d bet good money the bank has actually better customer service in that regard compared to PayPal.
I worked for a fraud detection company in the UK that existed precisely because chargebacks work so well, here. So this is definitely news to me.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes the networks rules are stronger than the laws for other reasons. Last I checked in the US the customer was legally out $50 in case of fraud, but all networks reduced it to zero figuring if they were already out potentially a large sum of money they may as well eat the last $50 too for goodwill reasons.
I'm not quite sure what pattern the agent recognized, but she sure didn't like it and they weren't going to put up with it for a second. I'm not sure why it wouldn't be in their interest to be this vigilant globally...
It's a pain in the butt when it happens.
A prime example was when I subscribed to NYTimes, and a few months later wanted to cancel. The only way to cancel was to make a phone call, navigate a phone tree, and wait for an agent. That was absurd, not only because I'm international and find it less convenient to call a US number... but particularly because I signed up and created the subscription online. NYT knew what they were doing by making it difficult for people to cancel.
With PayPal in between, I was able to easily just terminate the agreement. NYT could no longer suck money out of my card.
NYT has since upgraded to allow managing your subscription online, including upgrade/downgrade/cancellation.
The last time I had to deal with card fraud, my bank was extremely reasonable to work with and didn't hesitate at all when disputing the charges. But the process can still be fairly annoying. Having to wait for the card to be replaced, having to move any auto billpay using that card to another, etc.
With very few exceptions, if the merchant isn't using a decent external payment platform, you might as well be posting your credit card information on Hacker News. I'd much rather run my card information through PayPal if that is the only option other than entering card information on the merchants dodgy website.
Most banks can be decent to deal with, and one can certainly take steps to mitigate the impact of it when it does happen (Like not using your debt card for purchases, ever. Using a different credit card for bill payments vs online purchases vs offline purchases, etc.) But I can understand why people would prefer to avoid card fraud when they have the option to do so.
I am not surprised. You have obviously never stood in Ethiopia or wherever and have gotten a call from your bank: " This is the fraud department, unfortunately we have to block your card but we send you a new one".
Trick question: How many CC do you carry at a given time?
Hint: based from experience it should be at LEAST 3.
If the bank is bad it’s one thing but then the solution is to choose a better bank, not hack around the problem with a (shady) middleman like PayPal.
When I was abroad one guy was enjoying a decent McDonalds meal in the states with a cloned card.
International consumer finance is a mess. Not everybody who shops on the Internet is a US citizen with a credit card account in a first-rate bank. There are other options.
I got all the money they'd charged back but it was still a stressful time because I didn't have any other card at the time.
For me, Paypal looks disgusting. Like it's stuck in 2002. I'd much rather buy if there's Apple Pay via Safari or Gumroad or literally anything else.
It's a shame virtual cards never got more traction through the CC industry. For those who aren't familiar, some banks/cards offer you a tool that let's you set an arbitrary spend and expiration date (+2-12 months usually) and then generate a credit card number (with CVC) with those attributes (Bank of America branded theirs "SafeShop" for one example). Since it's a fully backed card number it'll transparently work on any site a normal CC would, but it cannot be charged more then the small limit (so you can set it just to the checkout price of one item and it's done), it can be trivially cancelled at will (useful for fighting dark pattern subscription services), etc (some of them can bind to merchant too). It's very effective for preventing misuse from online purchases. However for whatever reason it never seems to have spread or evolved really. BoA never added it to their mobile app for example, which seems like the most logical place, but rather kept it as a little Flash tool tucked away in their website. Plenty of banks do not offer it at all, and it never got much PR. It is more work to use and while that could have been reduced through better UIs (mobile again could really help there) it would always have been somewhat more work.
Maybe options like Apple Pay/Google Pay will ultimately fill that role, since they're essentially an automated version of the above (tolkenized per-purchase card numbers). It'd be nice if the industry would work harder though on some standards for the hardware ecosystem needed.
Have a look at Revolut (however, you need a monthly subscription to use disposable virtual cards).
I also social engineered my way in to my own account via a brand new Twitter account, so ... beware.
For something small or temporary, I might overlook it. For something that has direct access to my bank account, no go. They need to accept some liability if they want that level of access to my financial life.
To be fair, Paypal has an arbitration agreement too. But, if you're using Paypal as justification for your own policies, that's not exactly a strong starting position.
Despite what the banks claim, they usually will NOT prevent recurring payments from being honored. Even if you don't have enough money in your account. (The bank will just collect it from you)
I used to use a service called Entropay, which would actually let you pre-pay money into a disposable virtual credit card. But banks would never let you do that, because it would undermine their own system.
90% of the problems that I have had over the last ten years have not been with credit card info being stolen, but with misleading or outright fraudulent behavior by merchants, and BoA virtual credit cards have all of the exact same problems as real credit cards and will do nothing to protect you.
You will still have to always keep an eye out that 90 days later you aren't charged again for the same thing. And you are still on the hook for charges made by the merchant you paid, and it is up to you to dispute any charges through the same process as with a regular credit card.
What I want, is to give a merchant a credit card number, pre load that number with $30, have them charge it, and then be completely done with it. This especially makes sense for low stakes low cost recurring monthly payments. I should just be able to stop paying a $5/month fax service that I never use, and have them terminate my service. Banks would never let you do that. Services that used to let you do that have been mostly shut down.
I understand that I may be technically agreeing to pay each month with recurring payments, but the onus should be on the provider to stop servicing me if I cannot come up with the money. The system that we have today for recurring payments makes no sense.
I simply want to be in control of how much money gets taken from me. It is the same reason I take bills out of my wallet to pay a clerk at a store, and do not simply hand them my wallet and ask them to take the money out. I don't care if I can call the bank and dispute things with them, I want to be the one to dole out the money for the transaction.
And I haven't tested this, but apparently if some scummy vpn service you did a 30 day trial with a few months ago claims you owe them, and you miss the window to dispute it, or the bank sides with the merchant, the bank is obligated to go after your money from other accounts.
No thanks.
Privacy.com offers this service, but you have to pay from your bank account.
All I want, is the digital equivalent of a personal check.
A one time promise to pay money. If the merchant has a dispute with me, or thinks I owe them more money, they are free to sue me.
If my utility company wants automatic recurring payments, I have to sign paperwork which makes it very clear that I am authorizing recurring bank transfers.
The system we have now makes no sense at all.
They block charges over the limit.
You can "turn off" a card after you use it.
They have "single use" cards that turn off automatically two minutes after the first charge.
You can set the spending limit on single use cards or for non-single use cards on a per month basis or per year basis.
You can use any billing name and address with the merchant.
the minor annoyance for recurring payments is totally worth not having to actively be on guard for random people withdrawing from my account.
why is this so hard? i suppose its because of some perverse incentives that I dont understand.
PayPal has done the world a favour by banning them.
> The most interesting thing is that we’ve moved away from PayPal in the last two years and have only been receiving some minor payments and paying for a few online services.
We've stopped using PayPal for our SaaS business a few years ago.
It matters very little how despicable the company is, monetary services must not hold opinions unless explicitly told one by a local government.
For example, I don't want my bank to provide services to organised crime because I both feel that would be morally wrong and I think it'd open the bank's staff to influences that aren't in the best interests of other customers.
Also, your argument isn't with PayPal; it's with the entire FS industry.
A better example might be highly religious community not wanting their bank to do business with companies focused on the gay and lesbian community.
This is a good example because: it is not illegal for a company to cater to the gay and lesbian community, it is not illegal to discriminate against gay and lesbian people in many states, and there are communities that would dislike this sort of company.
Either way, I gave the example of organised crime not in an attempt for people to take it as a literal suggestion of equivalence but to argue against the idea that a financial institution has no place being choosey about its customers.
That sounds like a very interesting idea, but how about this one?
> "You must follow PayPal's terms and conditions or should expect to have your account terminated"
Because that's how every payment processor in existence works. Don't like it? Use bitcoin.
For one example, see American Express's Merchant Operating Guide
https://icm.aexp-static.com/Internet/NGMS/US_en/Images/Merch...
See section 10.2 Prohibited Merchants. There's a whole list of them. Here's a select few:
Multi-level Pyramid Sales, Prostitution, Payday Lenders, Timeshares, Gambling, Virtual Currency, Escort Services and Non-Licensed Massage Parlors, Mortgage Payments.
Lots of people would simply think "It won't happen to me" and move on. But this is just another example that if it can happen to people using Paypal for years, it can happen to you too. It's better to offer other payment channels to customers so you can diversify. And if possible, move away from Paypal entirely.
https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full
>Providing file sharing services or access to newsgroups
Activities Requiring Approval > Providing file sharing services or access to newsgroups;
Looks like he didn't seek approval and got flagged for it.
> Do not kid yourself – your business is never, never
> safe with PayPal. Move away or at least have a plan B
> in place so that you don’t lose your business over
> their arbitrary actions.
They all read like riff on The Trial: you've been banned, we're not going to tell you why, this is going to cost you money.
I have had a couple of customers for which I set up both PP and another PSP (such as stripe). Then it turned out that about 90% of their transactions came from PP.
So even if I set up 10 different PSPs for them, if PP bans them, they will still be out of business.
Also, was PP the default/first payment option by any chance?
I've done these tests, repeatedly; removing the PayPal payments option consistently leads to a statistically significant increase in cart abandonment. Some customers strongly prefer PayPal (especially on unfamiliar sites) and some don't have a credit card.
If your customers are from Europe, it's not some, but most customers that don't have a credit card. Credit cards are uncommon here (probably hard to imagine if you are from USA).
Online payments are a fragmented mess in Europe. Most countries have their own preferred online payment method (like iDEAL or bancontact), Paypal is basically the only reliable method that works everywhere.
This is not a great approximation. In the UK you can assume almost every person has a payment card that works on the internet (debit and/or credit). In Poland on the other hand, the number of systems gets silly (https://m.lot.com/us/en/payment-methods-on-lotcom)
My debit card can't be used online except via iDeal, and only sites in this country (largely) support iDeal. I can, however, use it via paypal.
No, they are not. With a credit card you can pay by entering the card number, expiry date and CVC. With debit card you can't do that. The payment must go through your bank. It's a completely different payment flow.
It depends on the debit card. I have both Visa Electron and Maestro, and they have 16 digits, CVV number and they behave like a credit card with 3D Secure when doing online purchases, while taking the money from the account right away.
There's also multifunction credit and debit cards (Mastercard and Maestro, or the Visa equivalent). They are branded like credit cards with a tiny Maestro logo on their backside, so I had to explain and ask the cashier in a grocery store in Amsterdam to try it as it would magically work as a debit card.
Not only do both have completely different payment processing workflows, but there's another key takeaway:
With a credit card the money going out is the issuer's. If you have a compliant or need to handle a charge, it's not your neck on the line.
With debit? Once the cash is pulled it's pulled. Yes they have protections as well, but while you're fighting with your bank to get your money back it's gone.
WRT. your number of paying systems, note that there's exactly one Polish payment system there - DotPay. Every other system there is to support other countries (not surprising, given that you've picked up the site of the national airline).
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190416-why-the-swiss-stil...
Paypal is because it's safe. I don't give that website I don't know anything, I give paypal a send order. Vastly different; I know paypal, I know they don't screw with the buyer in case an issue happen, and I know they're a bank here and can't drain my funds.
I hate them when I'm the seller, but my personnal experience with them as a buyer makes it clear as day why I need to deal with them.
Until you're big and known enough buyers don't trust you, but they trust PayPal.
And now ‘had’ has lost all meaning for me. I forgot which verb it was conjugated from for a second there
That isn't the case. You can use your credit card directly, without it going through paypal
https://get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/360007803294-Pay...
https://get.bandcamp.help/hc/en-us/articles/360007902213-How...
I thought a dog whistle in current popular use was a headline or sentence meant to imply something hidden, usually racist/sexist/other-ist. Like the phrase 'those people' or something like that.
How is this headline implying anything other than what it says, or is my interpretation of that phrase wrong?
A dog whistle headline would therefore be attempting to round up a bunch of people to fight their fight for them.
And had they been doing good, wholesome things at their company instead of creating spam tools, it probably would have worked. Unfortunately for them, people are starting to learn to dig a little deeper before getting out the pitchforks.
I'm wondering if they could pull the same shitty here. Considering that any bank, which freezes your account, doesn't provide you with any reason and actually refuses to talk to you may draw quite some ire from their respecive regulator.
One instance from search: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/feb/03/natwest-closed...
You’ve been a loyal customer for years, but then a letter arrives saying your bank has decided it will shut your accounts, and you will have to take your business elsewhere. No reason is given and the decision is final.
So, yeah; a bank can get rid of you for any and no reason at all. But they can't just keep your money and stop talking to you.
That's nothing really new. Ask any American citizen trying to open an account abroad. They may be having an unusual hard time thanks to FATCA.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...
Try add the word Bet next time in the transfer's detail...
It might seem like the bank is "judge, jury, and executioner" but that's really not the case. In addition to freezing your funds the bank has to alert the federal government of the account. The government then decides whether to move forward and try to seize the funds or whether the bank can release them to the account owner.
There is absolutely no reason to use PayPal at this point and any place that only takes paypal should be boycotted.
> PayPal will also stop letting you refund the percent they take out so you will be holding the bag when you refund a customer.
When I refund a customer, I wouldn't expect the power company to refund the electricity spent serving that customer, and I wouldn't expect UPS/FedEx to refund the delivery of that customer's package. Why should PayPal refund the costs of the customer's transaction ?
A good reason to get interchange plus pricing from your CC processor.
This will be particularly true for a large payment processor like PayPal, since they will have a lot of negotiating power when it comes to the transaction/interchange fees they pay.
Even as a consumer I now no longer transact business through PayPal if it is at all avoidable. If I want to buy something from an online vendor that only offers PayPal, I will go to great lengths to find another vendor that offers a payment mechanism other than PayPal.
Paypal has a history of doing this sort of thing. I've seen articles about it with Google services as well.
This is one of the many reasons why I suggest using open standards. You could accept bitcoin or eth for payment, but that is possibly too impractical for some customer bases. There are alternative payment gateways to Paypal, but many of them have allegedly done similar things, including Stripe.
Here is an article with advice on selecting a payment gateway for your startup, from the folks at Chargify.
Paypal is decidedly not free
So I'm not surprised that people continue to think "It won't happen to me" if they don't think they're doing anything "wrong".
Bottom line is, its a huge risk. I wouldn't want to base my business on such a significant risk and at least have a fallback in place.
We were banned without explanation after being a customer for 8+ years and had our PayPal balance (not yet transferred to a bank) frozen.
We left a high balance with PayPal because at the time the interest rate they provided was high.
No explanation was given at any point and the whole process took about 3 months to get our own funds back that we needed to operate the business.
Why can they afford to pay such a high interest? Because they can ban you whenever they feel like it.
If an offer's too good to be true etc.
Neither on my private account nor business accounts.
Not even with the paypal account for my burning man camp.
Just my 2c
In many ways, I'm surprised either company still functions without massive blackouts all the time. That's quite the testament to the founders' code, I guess.
I would absolutely never, ever, ever run a business which relied on Paypal.
As a shopper, it works okay, though. I got scammed once, and Paypal did nothing, but the risk isn't very high. It was probably twenty bucks or something, but if it were more, I could raise it with my credit card company.
However, it's also a risk with Google and Facebook. I'm not sure if Apple and Microsoft are as bad.
One must assume that some automated systems are involved in these terminations because no reasonable human would slam the door and refuse any attempts of discussion or reconciliation.
Short of getting some significant press (here on HN where there are staff from each of these companies), one's chances of getting a termination resolved reasonably is practically nil.
The problem I see is that these companies have become so large and have acquired such relative monopoly positions that they can afford to lose/screw some customers because it's cheaper expense-wise than managing human staff to resolve these issues. That's not reasonable.
PayPal has much less of a monopoly position than Google, Facebook, and Apple do (because of the two app stores and the center-of-all-social). We know better than the use or depend on PayPal, but we have no choice but to depend on Google (Android) and Apple.
I really was hoping that React Native and other webbish technologies would kill the mobile "app" system and return the power to the people who actually create things. So far it doesn't seem to be working that way.
After asking around they told me the reason, and after implementing a system that stopped orders to the UK of said product they unfroze the account.
Yes they could have given me a warning and been more transparent, but overall not too mad.
In my nearly 20 years of usage of PayPal, I've a 100% success rate on all of my claims (a few, I suppose about 4 or so). I guess my buy:claim ratio is in good standing.
In general, PayPal has been losing a lot of traction over the years, and is one of the reasons eBay spun them out a while back. Lack of “decent” support and a week to reply to a critical email just isn’t acceptable in 2019 + the UI really isn’t that user friendly when you look at Square Cash or Apple Pay in iMessage.
I won’t be surprised if they don’t exist within the next five years. Sure, they’re still integrated into a lot of things, but one competition becoming much bigger can change all of that quickly.
I don’t think they’d be missed...
I don't remember how/why/when it was unsuspended, or maybe I just opened a new one.
Not telling people what rules they supposedly broke is unreasonable, even if it lets bad guys figure out how to get around them.
Albeit it would be really, really nice to do so, there is absolutely no incentive for a payment provider to have someone look into a case like this when the salary of that person (for the time spent on the case) exceeds the revenue made with the customer.
Maybe that’s the real reason for the ban? PayPal might not like people not being completely reliant on PayPal, so PayPal might tend to ban those who don’t use PayPal for everything, hoping to make all potential non-PayPal users go out of business before they become large enough to be visible? Of course, this is all paranoid speculations.
I haven’t thought about PayPal in years, but I had forgotten about this. When I did use it, I had a separate bank account, immediately transferred from money from Paypsl to the account and then transferred the money from the linked account to another account.
This isn't a good foundation for a business to depend on, so i would completely avoid having paypal as the only option.
Luckily for me I don't rely on PayPal so I put it in the "good riddance" category.
Switched to Stripe and I haven’t been happier.
Sellers should not trust PayPal, at all.
actually thats a growing business (bots to handle your customer service) which simply programmatically enforce a contract. it's terrifying.
It feels like people don’t want to actively move their payments processor and no amount of blog warnings are going to change that. The one thing I will say is that the growing amount of responses of teams that have similar experiences should be worrying to PayPal.
If they were subject to regulations, they wouldn’t be able to freeze your account without warning, nor hold your money for 180 days.
As they say internally: “we don’t make money by letting people have it back”.
I'm gonna need a source for that.
https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/16927/paypal-gets-banki...
And I didn’t say they were always successful, they just try really hard.
1)Breach this user agreement, the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, the Commercial Entity Agreements (if they apply to you), the PayPal Cash and PayPal Cash Plus Account Terms and Conditions (if it applies to you), or any other agreement between you and PayPal;
2)Violate any law, statute, ordinance, or regulation (for example, those governing financial services, consumer protections, unfair competition, anti-discrimination or false advertising);
3)Infringe PayPal's or any third party's copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret or other intellectual property rights, or rights of publicity or privacy;
4)Sell counterfeit goods;
5)Act in a manner that is defamatory, trade libelous, threatening or harassing;
6)Provide false, inaccurate or misleading information;
7)Send or receive what we reasonably believe to be potentially fraudulent funds;
8)Refuse to cooperate in an investigation or provide confirmation of your identity or any information you provide to us;
9)Attempt to double dip during the course of a dispute by receiving or attempting to receive funds from both PayPal and the seller, bank or card issuer for the same transaction;
10)Control an account that is linked to another account that has engaged in any of these restricted activities;
11)Conduct your business or use the PayPal services in a manner that results in or may result in; -complaints; -requests by buyers (either filed with us or card issuers) to invalidate payments made to you; -fees, fines, penalties or other liability or losses to PayPal, other PayPal customers, third parties or you;
12)Use your PayPal account or the PayPal services in a manner that PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover or any other electronic funds transfer network reasonably believes to be an abuse of the card system or a violation of card association or network rules;
13)Allow your PayPal account to have a negative balance;
14) Provide yourself a cash advance from your credit card (or help others to do so);
15)Access the PayPal services from a country that is not included on PayPal's permitted countries list;
16)Take any action that imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our websites, software, systems (including any networks and servers used to provide any of the PayPal services) operated by us or on our behalf or the PayPal services;
17)Facilitate any viruses, trojan horses, malware, worms or other computer programming routines that attempts to or may damage, disrupt, corrupt, misuse, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept or expropriate, or gain unauthorized access to any system, data, information or PayPal services; Use an anonymizing proxy; use any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor or copy our websites without our prior written permission; or use any device, software or routine to bypass our robot exclusion headers;
18)Interfere or disrupt or attempt to interfere with or disrupt our websites, software, systems (including any networks and servers used to provide any of the PayPal services) operated by us or on our behalf, any of the PayPal services or other users’ use of any of the PayPal services;
19)Take any action that may cause us to lose any of the services from our Internet service providers, payment processors, or other suppliers or service providers;
20)Use the PayPal services to test credit card behaviors;
21)Circumvent any PayPal policy or determinations about your PayPal account such as temporary or indefinite suspensions or other account holds, limitations or restrictions, including, but not limited to, engaging in the following actions: attempting to open new or additional PayPal account(s) when an account has a negative balance or has been restricted, suspended or otherwise limited; opening new or additional PayPal accounts using information that is not your own (e.g. name, address, email address, etc.); or using someone else’s PayPal account; or Harass and/or threaten our employees, agents, or other users.
These terms run the gamut from being bad with money (negative balance) to criminal. That is a wide swath of terms to action against you or your business, and leave plenty of room for arbitrary ban hammers to be wielded. I can agree that there are way better and safer ways to accept payments these days, and it seems PayPal hangs on with name recognition, and not by merit of it being the best choice.
Does that include criticism? Companies that try to ban criticism against them are irredeemably toxic.
In general, I'd like a payment provider to just be neutral infrastructure. With cash, I can just pay someone, and then they'll have the money, and nobody can freeze or ban that. Although if it's crime involved in some way, of course the police can still act against us. Similarly, if I've got a bank account and the other person has a bank account, we can transfer money. The bank may check for potential fraud, and if they think they detect it, I'd expect them to inform the police, rather than revoke my bank account without warning and on no real evidence.
PayPal wants way too much control over what we do with our money or even in our life outside of our financial transactions. That's not acceptable.
A few of these points are entirely reasonable, but others are not, or are things they should report to the police, rather than act on their own.
> The most interesting thing is that we’ve moved away from PayPal in the last two years and have only been receiving some minor payments and paying for a few online services.
We've stopped using PayPal for our SaaS business a few years ago.
I highly doubt that PornHub would be allowed to run payments for a side-business based on data analytics through Paypal.
If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck....
Edit: For me converting BTC in funds I can use to buy food (not just for myself but also my kitty), pay my bills (rent, electricity, gas, water, internet, mobile, AWS) is a pain in the ass.
Sure there are online stores they will accept bitcoin, but not my local supermarket, sure some isp’s will accept butcoin but then I’m limiting my options of who I can use.
With PayPal (yes I hate them just as much as everyone else) I can get an invoice paid and have the funds in my bank account seconds later.
I like the idea of a decentralised Payment process. But atm it’s not for me for a number of reasons not just acceptability.
Cryptocurrencies remove those fees and the risk for charge back fraud, so the merchant earns more when you pay them with cryptos. To incentivize this they could charge you less than if you paid with a credit card.
For example Bitcoin Cash has a next block fee of $0.0014. [1]
Anyway, I don't want to argue with you. Have fun with your s*coin.
https://medium.com/@jonaldfyookball/why-some-people-call-bit...
That word, "crypto" alone is cringeworthy. HN is very much pro cryptography...
[1] Yes, since cryptocurrency depends on strong cryptography. If the latter is broken, cryptocurrency is also, but so it the entire Internet.
The English language is ever changing, we re-purpose and come up with new words all the time. In daily use "cryptocurrencies" is long to type and say, so when the context is clear it's easier to just use "crypto".
Note: I actually try to use "cryptocurrencies" too.
> The English language is ever changing, we re-purpose and come up with new words all the time.
Except that my argument isn't that the old meaning is older (ie. no appeal to tradition, nor is appeal to novelty valid); it is that the older meaning is:
1) Far more important than the new one, and
2) Far broader, widely available and adopted (NOT a niche)
3) Is a dependency for the new one.
Those are 3 very good reasons why using crypto for cryptocurrency doesn't make sense, except perhaps if you're talking within the circles of that niche (hint: not here).
> In daily use "cryptocurrencies" is long to type and say, so when the context is clear it's easier to just use "crypto".
Use an autocomplete to make 'crypto' change to 'cryptocurrency'.
I just don't see the harm in this context when it's obvious what he's referring to.
> Use an autocomplete to make 'crypto' change to 'cryptocurrency'.
Yes, we should all install autocomplete in our browsers so we can avoid stepping on the toes of an opinionated commenter.
This issue is so overblown.
Browsers? Not necessarily browsers. iOS and macOS have native support for that. Not sure about other OSes but hey it isn't me who's too lazy to type what they mean.
An opinionated commenter? An? You're assuming I'm alone in this. The amount of upvotes on that comment alone suggests otherwise.
Overblown? The issue is widespread, and common.
I don't understand the point of your vehement sophistry. Everyone understands how societies work. There are laws. People get punished after the fact for transgressing them. Cryptocurrency is not somehow magically exempt from that reality.
Presumably, displaying a bitcoin address isn't illegal, and you are not in control of who sends you coins.
Both parts of your statement are naive and wrong.
Soliciting payment in any currency other than the national currency is illegal. No one is going to be fooled by claims of "oh I just put our corporate bitcoin address up for...uh...personal aesthetics; we weren't actually suggesting customers can pay us that way".
In any case, where is the documentation for the annual audit? When the tax department looks at the corporate bank statements, what do you think they'll see?
I own a company here, we are required by law to hire an external auditing agency. Do you think the auditing agency is going to, what?, just lie to the government for me when it is obvious to them I'm accepting payments in bitcoin since there is no documentation for local currency payments?
The tax departments come to our office every year and goes over the books. They are looking for tax evasion, money laundering, and so on. But it would be pretty trivial to spot if someone is getting paid in Bitcoin.
I'm trying to imagine how you think the conversation would go when they audit the company Bitcoin account, "Oh, gee, some bitcoin got transferred to the company account. Dunno how THAT happened! Ha ha. Guess it was just a DONATION! We were definitely NOT breaking the law! Don't look at our invoicing system that shows we marked that as a payment received for order #81351."
Yeah, I'm probably one of the people that you are describing.
Crypto-money does not work. I would love if it worked, I also would love if somebody learned how to reverse entropy growth or got time travel working in some way. Yet, none of those work. (And yes, crypto-money isn't on the same level of those two, maybe some day somebody will manage to make it work, if so, great!)
Be sure that your label of "anti crypto" is much more a tag over you than the large HN crowd.
https://www.pcworld.com/article/155984/worst_tech_prediction...
It's easy to say use decentralized solutions, like Bitcoin but then customers are more susceptible to fraud(no chargebacks for example)
Don't rely on PayPal. They're less professional than a kid selling juice next to the road.
There are no grace periods with PayPal to give you time to move to another service.
There is never more than a generic reason and stonewalling when they terminate you.
And yes, their decision is always final.
They'll happily terminate your only source of income on a friday afternoon, freeze your funds, then laugh at you as you scramble to get an alternative up and running.
Don't build on PayPal. It's no foundation at all.
Also like they say... Dont put ALL your eggs into one basket!
Perhaps their decision to close your account is always final, but don't lose all hope after having your funds frozen. I had 25-100k frozen (can't remember how much), and picked up the phone and called them and it was unfrozen within 48 hours.
Paypal is god-awful though and should be used as little as possible.
(Supposedly they don't operate fractional reserve, which means that Peter Thiel pinky-promises not to touch the principle. But it's still in PayPal commercial investment vehicles, earning away.)
-- Dr. Horrible
Stolen is more appropriate here.
It is to PayPal's benefit to use terminology that makes them look like a bank.
Ironically, the thing that saved us was that the PayPal revenue stream still worked just fine.
I don't know if you can in the US, but not in my country. A bank working like paypal would be in trouble, and quickly. Closing accounts without prior notice? Deciding unilaterally to freeze assets? A bank can't do that unless ordered by a judge. If they would, they'll be on the receiving end of a court order and will get a call from the regulator's office that they really don't like to hear from.
Paypal is shady, and there's a reason they run their operation from Luxembourg, one of the top places to do shady financial business in Europe.
A bank can freeze your account for suspected fraud, but they will try everything they can to contact you soon after to verify. They know that regulators will come after them if they don't have good customer service around this (plus good customer service can turn this into a customer loyalty win - customers like knowing their bank is watching out for them as long as there is only minor inconvenience).
Bank failure is sometimes a thing though. If the bank fails they probably don't have enough money to give everybody theirs back. You are insured for some amount ($250,000 last I checked) so the average person doesn't need to worry, but if you have more than that in your account you are out of luck. This would be once case where you can't access your money for a few weeks. You should have an emergency account with a second bank just in case - but this is a rare problem. This problem applies to all countries in some way, though the exact way it goes down can change.
I think every other case would be ordered by a judge. Real banks are regulated carefully. People have learned over the years of banking that they can be trouble if they are badly run and taken steps.
A bank would absolutely be expected to freeze an account if it suspected illegal activity as part of its AML obligations - filing a SAR would come later.
A judge wouldn't be involved until later on in the process to avoid tipping a potential criminal off and allowing them to move the money.
Neither should accounts like this necessarily be taken at face value - trying to apply social pressure through forums and social media is standard social engineering.
And this would take months, and the bank wouldn't be able to respond to inquiries?
> Neither should accounts like this necessarily be taken at face value - trying to apply social pressure through forums and social media is standard social engineering.
Certainly. I tend to lean towards believing them because I've witnessed a similar case with PayPal that nearly ruined the company of a friend. It got resolved after all, but it took around eight months, lawyers and our local equivalent of a DA to get involved before PP realized they might not want to pursue it any further and released the assets. That doesn't mean that everyone of these stories is accurate, of course, but it indicates to me that not all is well in the PP HQ.
Yes. Legally they're not allowed to give any more information other than that the account has been frozen. Money launderers would be quite relaxed if they knew they just had to wait six months and they could take the money out.
> "Being concerned in arrangements which the defendant knows or suspects will facilitate money laundering is also an offence. To put it crudely, if Dave suspects that the money in John's account might be dirty then the Bank cannot allow John to move or access the money and he must file a report to the NCA." [2]
[2] https://www.brettwilson.co.uk/blog/frozen-bank-account-no-ex...
[Example from a bank:] https://www.ft.com/content/96840328-3b6b-11e9-b856-5404d3811...
Anecdotally speaking, I know multiple people that have had funds frozen by PayPal after months or years of use. I know exactly nobody that has had a bank account frozen.
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/al27fr/bank_ac...
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/basfne/online_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/54zjq2/my_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/agpi87/bank_perman...
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/71kk4p/chase_b...
https://www.reddit.com/r/povertyfinance/comments/8ad73p/anyo...
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/9k7t1q/ano...
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/4sbqv4/my_...
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/9ty3fq/ban...
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/7n1hhl/ban...
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/ag9br2/suntrus...
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/3zct1m/my_brot...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/comments/8wgo...
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/acr0ig/all...
https://www.reddit.com/r/PersonalFinanceCanada/comments/ajrj...
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/3mxc2a/cre...
https://www.reddit.com/r/legaladvice/comments/8rb4dq/my_bank...
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/92mpg8/ban...
https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/comments/7un9nz/ban...
Contrast this with PayPal who needs no reason to freeze your funds and will hold them as long as they damn well please please federal banking law (for the most part) does not apply to them.
This even though they're regulated as a bank nearly everywhere else in the world. But then again this is the US and when do we ever do anything that makes sense?
I too, wish governments would get their shit together and regulate them. The corrupt governments (especially US) of today wouldn't even regulate regular banks, quite the opposite.
Don't rely on any single point of failure. Don't kid yourself. No payment processor is your friend, and if you think that, you're a fool. Have multiple payment processors, and be prepared for bad things happening. The reasoning isn't as simple as PayPal or Stripe are out to get you. Rather, there are many banks and many laws, both in your home country and internationally that can affect your business. And in the end, they won't risk their business for you, no matter how fair or unfair it is.
Google, paypal, plenty of other companies are lead by humans who are willing to just do that to other humans as a matter of doing business.
FWIW, PayPal has always worked for me and customer support gets the job done. Not sure what the problem is if your operation is legit.
freeze your funds
I am constantly surprised that in this age businesses are still surprised by PayPal shenanigans. I remember coming to the same conclusion almost 18 years ago.
Stripes, wants you them to be the center point of your relation with your customers.
We prefer no-big names, no information collection about my customers, almost a white-label payment processor that we could sub-contract.
We still have some time, and are searching for the right company as billing and payment processor. But we naturally eliminate companies that are VC funded and, or located in high-cost areas (so that eliminates most of the CA/NY/LDN places).
This moral policing by businesses is bad for society - and lets businesses dictate more than they ought to be able to.
PayPal is a private company. They do have business in regulating what types of customers they'd like to serve, and they are well-within their rights to create and enforce their own terms of use.
Certain types of customers (scammers, spammers, etc) are a greater liability and can end up causing more issues (and less revenue) than they are worth, so it makes perfect sense for PayPal to choose not to do business with them.
For example, if an industry has a humongous chargeback and fraud rate, then they become unprofitable and get dropped. This is why American Express stopped allowing porn (there was news articles about it at the time and they went on record saying massive amounts of chargebacks and fraud from porn sites were solely the reasons). American Express and Visa also don't allow you to use you to use your credit card to pay your mortgage (Mastercard does). I don't know the reasons why, but I'm sure it's not arbitrary.
They also have to conform to laws and regulations. This is an offshore company, PayPal is based in the United States. I don't know if its legal to sell this sort of spamware-as-a-service in the United States, but I think there might be AT LEAST copyright issues content harvesting that they appear to be doing (based on other comments).
These are businesses, not charities.
It's not just that: these are businesses, not the government. A lot of free-speech advocates and libertarian thinkers seem to think somehow that private businesses somehow have a responsibility to uphold free speech, and they simply don't. It's the government that can't restrict you from free speech (in the USA); but companies don't have to put up with it on their property or when using their service.
There's a simple saying about free speech: I'll respect your right to free speech, but I'm not going to provide a podium for you. If you want to speak freely, you can go to any street corner and do so, but don't expect my company to provide a platform for you if I don't agree with your views.
PayPal just needs to be more clear/transparent about that.
This is industry-wide policy and is mandated by the brand (Visa/Mastercard/etc.) Sometimes a brand will enforce a payment processor to suspend a merchant account because of violations. In case of a payment facilitator (like PayPal), failing to comply would result in suspension of payment processor's master account.
Even Stripe (which I believe is a PSP) prohibits some business from using their platform[1] (although Stripe is willing convince brand/acquirer on behalf of a merchant if they have compelling reasons).
[1]: https://stripe.com/blog/why-some-businesses-arent-allowed
I also think it's ridiculous to suggest that we should drastically increase the number of laws so that everything bad is explicitly illegal. Drugs are a great example. Can they cause a lot of harm? Sure. But the war on drugs has caused immense harm as well. Decriminalization and regulation are the right approach. But if that happens it still doesn't mean that PayPal (or anybody) should be required to participate in the drug business.
They are, but we are free to be mad at them when they do this in assine ways, as we are free to also decide not to associate with businesses that excessively invoke their freedom of association, for either reliability reasons (businesses that cut ties over ever changing reasons are not a reliable company to do business with) , or ideological ones (we don't like why they are invoking the right).
Companies aren't the government, and are allowed to choose who they want to do business with. They don't have a responsibility to uphold free speech, and only have to make sure they don't discriminate based on protected class (race, sex, etc.). Otherwise, if they don't want to be known as "the company that helps neo-Nazis accept payments" or something like that, they're free to not do business with them.
> After calling their support twice, explaining the situation and asking for a reason, we have received nothing but “the decision is final, and we will not provide more information”.
What happens if a multinational organisation based in one country has that right but doesn’t in another - but it’s a single PayPal account - could they get reinstated that way?
They also don't explain what they are accepting payments for, other than "receiving some minor payments and paying for a few online services"
I suspect there is far more to this story.
> We never thought this would happen and have absolutely no clue what they’re referring [to]. We have reviewed the user agreement multiple times and there is absolutely nothing there that we’ve engaged in.
A business, whether a company or a sole-trader, is not a consumer.
GDPR applies if you are a sole-trader.
Thus, de facto anti-consumer monopoly.
I agree that it’s not right for payment processors or banks (PayPal is, unofficially, kind of both) to pass judgement on what their users spend money on... but I also agree that it is not out of line for a payments company to stop offering their services to businesses designed to spam, defraud, mislead or abuse people. Gambling websites are also known to trigger these detections when you try and deposit on to shady accounts.
There is a world of difference between closing accounts that are used to pay for activities that are illegal and closing accounts because the client does something you don't like, especially if the service provider can't even point out which part of their TOS was violated.
>businesses designed to spam, defraud, mislead or abuse people
If you don't draw any distinctions between "defraud" (illegal and well-defined activity) and "mislead" (can be applied to almost anything), there is literally nothing to discuss here. You don't draw any objectively defined lines between what should and should not be bannable and your stance boils down to "I like when PayPal bans someone I don't like".
What do I want?
I want large payment service providers to have clear and universally enforced rules that pertain only to services they provide, stick to those rules when deciding whom to ban, provide exact reasons for their decision and have a process of redress. It's pretty obvious that PayPal fails at this, miserably, even if you can point out some individual cases where they might be "in the right".
I also want posters who act like corporate cheerleaders here to provide independently observable criteria for whatever bans they "approve". Increasingly often I see astounding hypocrisy when the same person cheers for banning of one organization and against banning another, even though both are banned for the exact same behavior.