Comment by mdavis6890 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mdavis6890 | Hacker News Reader

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This is devastating to those users affected by this, but I believe that the blame doesn't lie solely with PayPal. Unfortunately there are many laws they must comply with that delegate enforcement to private companies like PayPal rather than where is belongs - the government.

From the article: PayPal allegedly sent his wife a letter that says she "violated PayPal's User Agreement and Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) by accepting payments for the sale of injectable fillers not approved by the FDA."

If PayPal DOESN'T freeze the account and hold the money, they can get in far larger trouble with the government. Why should PayPal be involved in this enforcement at all? If the FDA doesn't like what this seller is doing, let the FDA themselves go after the seller and leave PayPal out of it. But the law doesn't work that way.

I had $10k's in an account with BofA that was frozen and nearly killed the closing on a house I was buying at the time. Because they had a mailbox address on file for me, rather than my home address. It was horrible for me, but that's what the says that they had to do, and if they didn't the could end up in trouble with the feds facing huge penalties.

Let's try to empathize with all parties and think rationally about the incentives and constraints that they face.

I have (almost) no issue with accounts being frozen. At the end of the day, it's a private company, they can chose if they want to do business with you or not. Likewise, holding for 180 days is aligned with most credit card chargeback limits, so they protect themselves. (There are other ways to go about this, which most other processors handle in a frictionless fashion, ie Stripe).

Having an account frozen is more than annoying, but it's their choice.

However seizing (stealing) funds is completely unacceptable, no matter how it's dressed up. Hell, even if they gave seized funds to charity it'd be slightly more palatable than lining their pockets from proceeds they deemed as "risky".

> It was horrible for me, but that's what the says that they had to do, and if they didn't the could end up in trouble with the feds facing huge penalties.

Except that most likely isn't true. The law does not require banks to have your home address. The law does require banks to verify your identity, but there are many ways to do this without requiring a "home address".

The "home address" rule is self-imposed by banks and is yet another way that our country makes life unnecessarily difficult for homeless or itinerant people.

Edit: This is regarding USA law, and I realized I am not where you reside. I assumed USA because of the FDA mention but I realized that was referencing the article so may not be a good clue.

No sympathy here. They've been steali..err..seizing funds for decades, and dodging the lawsuits by leveraging their clout. Sure, maybe they have some regulations to follow, but they willfully choose to ignore the folks they're stealing from, instead of helping them to understand the process of getting their stolen money back, and prevent money from being stolen from them in the future. I hope they're squeezed hard on this one.

> think rationally about the incentives and constraints that they face

The incentives never justify unethical behavior, ever.

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