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Comment by yani | Hacker News Reader

The services mentioned have more or less the same terms of use policies. Can (Transfer)Wise lock your account? Yes Can (Transfer)Wise keep your money for 6 months? Yes Can (Transfer)Wise take money from you due to damages? Yes Also, if you want to dig deeper, look up where/who is doing their customer support, who has access to your financial records, and who makes decisions to approve measures against you. My personal experience with (Transfer)Wise - an intern with 6 months of experience (according to their LinkedIn) locked my personal account together with 4 business accounts. Why? Lack of training and a bad day at work/home.

I've seen plenty of stores selling stolen merchandise and pirated goods via PayPal so these terms of use make a lot of sense to me.

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Any of these companies can lock you down including any bank. I am sure Wise made damages to many people. Paypal does this as core of their bussines strategy though. It happens to everyone. Especially if you can afford to pay (which they see).

My personal experience with both Paypal (we are forced to use) and Wise is that Paypal does is setup completely against users. There are many hidden fees, no guarantees and they just exploit their position. For example if you are based in country with different currency than the one you are in (somebody sends you USD and you use EUR) Paypal will automatically convert the money to EUR with their outrageous fee (basically taking 5% just on top of all other charges). There is no way to avoid this, you cant send money to USD account even if it’s in country you are based in.

Wise on the other hand saves people money. The fees are visible. Conversion rates are better than what most banks give you. Their services evolve (like you can get debit card now).

Paypal and Wise in my experience cannot be further from each other.

Wise simply does not work on many countries because of the way that they use to send the deposits, it is not a direct bank transfer, far from it, so it just doesn't work to receive money (speaking from Uruguay)

Not sure about the other payment apps, but few financial services consider it a violation to use them to receive payments for services that "depict or appear to depict nudity", "depict [...] illegal drug use", "depict [...] hatred or discrimination of protected groups or individuals".

If PayPal is actually going to enforce this, it will obviously have to remove Netflix, Steam, any book store from their platform, since they run terribly afoul of most of the above.

I think you might be right about the policies as written, but one can make a reasonable argument that behaviour in practice is relevant, and that one might generally like to promote diversity in the market place instead of one powerful incumbent.

So if Transferwise and PayPal are equally bad, you might still want to give your business to the smaller company?

> So if Transferwise and PayPal are equally bad, you might still want to give your business to the smaller company?

Actually, it is not that straightforward. One should check what kind of customer service is available, where are they located, who has access to the account and information and yada yada yada.

PayPal is a much safer choice than Wise in this aspect.

They are not equally bad.

No opinion on that implied. My argument was purely conditional.

(I found Transferwise easier to deal with than PayPal, but I never had any dispute with either.)

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