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https://www.paypal.com

PayPal had in it's Acceptable Use Policy since ages forbidding any use of its services for erotics and some other stuff - no weapon "parts"...

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/AcceptableUse_full&locale.x=en_US

Nothing new, actually.

Not trying to defend PayPal, but the underlying reason may be to avoid becoming part of something illegal somewhere. The erotic thing may have other reasons.

If you are using a functional bank account with any reasonable amount on it with PayPal, your own problem.
A - open account with bank
B - use it to open PayPal account
C - close bank account
D - always chose payments from Credit Cards @ PayPal

If you need to use PayPal to receive payments and a bank account - just keep your funds low on that account.

This isn't something new or arbitrary, Paypal has an Acceptable Use Policy and sexual material isn't accepted:

You may not use the PayPal service for activities that:
[...]
relate to transactions involving (a) narcotics, steroids, certain controlled substances or other products that present a risk to consumer safety, (b) drug paraphernalia, (c) items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity, (d) stolen goods including digital and virtual goods (e) items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance, or the financial exploitation of a crime, (f) items that are considered obscene, (g) items that infringe or violate any copyright, trademark, right of publicity or privacy or any other proprietary right under the laws of any jurisdiction, (h) certain sexually oriented materials or services, (i) ammunition, firearms, or certain firearm parts or accessories, or (j) ,certain weapons or knives regulated under applicable law.

That of course doesn't make it any better, it shouldn't be Paypals business what people are buying over their system.

Comply with PayPal's shipping requests in a timely manner.

For SNAD Claims, PayPal may require you to ship the item back to the seller - or to PayPal - or to a third party at your expense, and to provide proof of delivery. Please take reasonable precautions in re-packing the item to reduce the risk of damage to the item during transit. PayPal may also require you to destroy the item and to provide evidence of its destruction.

For transactions that total less than USD $250 (or local currency equivalent), proof of delivery is confirmation that can be viewed online and includes: recipient's (seller's) address, showing at least city, postal code, state, or country (or equivalent), delivery date, and the URL to the shipping company's web site if you've selected "Other" in the shipping drop down menu. For transactions that total USD $250 or more, you must get signature confirmation of the delivery.

Emphasis mine. Note, I found this at the original article over at Regretsy along with a picture for those of you who are lazy.

Well, at least everyone involved has a crazy story to tell: "Gather 'round children and let me tell you about the time I had to destroy a hundred year old violin in a timely manner. FuhrerMarks had instructed me -- back then they were known as 'PayPal' -- to destroy the violin after a dispute about its label ..."

Where do you get 20%? PayPal charges about 3% at the most: https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=marketing_us/fees

I use PayPal a lot to get paid, so I know these fees aren't 20% :)

> but this summary just does it - it makes so much "no sense" that
> i have no fucking idea what is it about and i'm just going to skip
> the topic.

which is real a shame, because what is happening is nasty, evil, theft (in the correct IP usage of the term) from a long established volunteer community by newly arrived greedy corporate. Or just take a moment to listen to the linked 2 minute mp3?

here is the real project's "about" page: http://koha-community.org/about/

"Koha" is a Maori word meaning gift (often in a quid quo pro sense). Note that Wikipedia lists it as a custom. It is a truly wonderful name for a GPL'd project for the public good.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koha_(custom)

read the mailing list plea from the librarian here:
http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/pipermail/openchat/2011-November/008940.html

a blog post:
http://news.tangatawhenua.com/archives/14545

and the thread that follows.
http://lists.nzoss.org.nz/pipermail/openchat/2011-November/thread.html#8943

favourite quote from the ensuing thread:

Oh, and that you can't win a Wikipedia fight against librarians.

listen to more audio from NZ public radio than what's in the /. submission here:
(Scroll down to the Ogg @ 9:44 am)
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon

The project was founded by a small country town library in 1999 when the Y2K bug was taking out their existing solution and they couldn't afford to buy another one. Since then it has grown to be a large and wonderful FOSS success story. Until last year, when an associated company that held the domain name and provided commercial support got bought out by a big corporate bully, who took ownership of the DNS and domain name, taken over the home page, obfuscated links to and existence of the community (which has had to rush out and register http://koha-community.org/ instead of their original koha dot org site), and now are trying to block the community from being able to use their own name, on their own turf. It seems that Liblime has grabbed the trademark already in the US; the original koha-community.org group after they got over their shock was able to get in first in the EU, but not Liblime (a US company) has moved in to grab it in the community's home country of New Zealand.

PTFS/Liblime's actions here are truly despicable, and if I were a customer I'd have to wonder if they are willing to screw over the people who built up the project from nothing, what is stopping them from screwing me over too?

Please visit the Koha-community.org site, read the plea: http://koha-community.org/plea-horowhenua-library-trust/

and help out their non-existent legal fund with a small donation:
https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=FQ6JH3L48LV5Y
(your dollar goes far here; they are a registered legal non-profit, paypal's freezing of funds typically happens to unregistered projects who are basically ignoring tax laws, so they should be safe from that)

written article here:
http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/91830/lawyer-labels-overseas-trademark-of-'koha'-offensive

Except that when I get an apparent phishing email from Paypal, It's nice to be able to look at the link and see it's to http://istealyourdata.wkrf45.paypal.com.cx/ rather than https://paypal.com./ I wouldn't be able to tell at a glance whether http://29.154.87.233/ is a legit site or not if it were only ip.

I really don't know why anyone would use the PayPal app.

It's simple really: Facebook is becoming like a separate internet, where lots of people do all their business and personal activities. Many people, for instance, don't even use email any more, as they do all their messaging on Facebook. If you're thinking I'm wacked, consider how old you are: are you over 25 (or better yet, 30)? If so, then yes, this would seem utterly crazy to you, but this is actually exactly how much of the under-25 crowd thinks; they really do think email is "obsolete".

So if FB is like a second internet, with messaging, games, news, etc., it's only natural to think that people who spend all their time on there might also want a way of transferring money on there too. Sure, it's easy enough to just go to http://www.paypal.com/ and do it there, but again, we're talking about people who don't use the internet outside of Facebook.

Google is absolutely HORRIBLE at making APIs. Microsoft is better at making APIs than Google and Microsoft isn't good at anything. Bing has a superior map API than Google.. When Google+ came out? One API. Ebay/Paypal has better APIs than Google (http://developer.ebay.com/common/api/ https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/howto_api_reference) Go take a look at https://developers.google.com/ it's really depressing.

About two years ago my daughter broke my PS3 BluRay laser. She was shoving change in the disc slot. Otherwise, the PS3 worked. You could stream Netflix or home theater content. You could play games installed to the hard drive, access PSN, etc.

I listed it very clearly on eBay that what it could and couldn't do. Someone bought it from me, and then immediately disputed the purchase through PayPal. They said that I didn't make it clear it was out of warranty. If it was in warranty, I would have had it fixed/replaced. They apparently though they could buy a cheap broken PS3 on eBay and get a free replacement via Sony.

I showed my listing, that I shipped the PS3 and that the buyer received it. PayPal sided with me as the seller. So I don't accept the notion that PayPal always sides with the buyer, or that they don't have a dispute process since I've used it myself.

****

I've had to deal with dispute resolution with PayPal only once. My mother was the victim of a phishing attack and I tried to help her out. We contacted PayPal, and they got all her money back in 3 days and then went after the phishers.

I currently work in the customer service division at PayPal and I can tell you with absolute certainty that we do dispute resolution on non-eBay transactions.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/general/PPDisputeResolution-outside

Now, there could be several mitigating factors, such as if you waited too long to dispute the transaction, or if you weren't willing to do your part to provide evidence. But that would be standard practices for any company. What you're really saying is that a vendor screwed you over, and somehow you think that is PayPal's fault.

I'm officially calling you a shill on this one. Get your story straight.

I don't have a huge beef with ebay or paypal, though I do think both charge higher fees than are necessary for a reasonable profit. Fortunately for ebay I don't get to define what is a reasonable profit for them, their shareholders do. I'll even say that you are likely correct that some people have misplaced their hatred. To say their customer service is "good" against all the naysayers, however, is ridiculous.

According to their guide here:

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=security/chargeback_guide#

They leave final resolution of the chargeback at the discretion of the buyer's bank.

So it's not a case of them just being dicks for no reason.

They're just pussies who won't stand up to the buyer's credit card processor.

I've had to deal with dispute resolution with PayPal only once. My mother was the victim of a phishing attack and I tried to help her out. We contacted PayPal, and they got all her money back in 3 days and then went after the phishers.

I currently work in the customer service division at PayPal and I can tell you with absolute certainty that we do dispute resolution on non-eBay transactions.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/general/PPDisputeResolution-outside

Now, there could be several mitigating factors, such as if you waited too long to dispute the transaction, or if you weren't willing to do your part to provide evidence. But that would be standard practices for any company. What you're really saying is that a vendor screwed you over, and somehow you think that is PayPal's fault.

I have no way to dispute your statement. If it happened, that is pretty shitty.

While I'm a Software Engineer, our side of the company supports Customer Service. So I deal with that side of the business exclusively. I know we handle chargebacks every single day. I'm curious if you followed the chargeback process documented on the site.

https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=security/chargeback_guide

http://www.paypal.com/

I can pay for U1MS with Paypal, but I can't store more then 2GiB of mp3s in there because that requires a CC.

In which country do you live? A PayPal debit card may be available in your area, and it's accepted anywhere MasterCard is accepted.

Actually, yes I did. Perhaps you can point out where in the T&Cs it says that PayPal can remove funds from linked accounts at its own discretion?

https://cms.paypal.com/au/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/UserAgreement_full

Yes it is : https://www.paypal.com/helpcenter/main.jsp;jsessionid=27lXK42Qgh4s77YLQngx7xXRG9GDptpWJYJYK46QGrZ7hQRQpnQ8!-76375182?t=solutionTab&ft=homeTab&ps=&solutionId=11935&locale=en_US&_dyncharset=UTF-8&countrycode=US&cmd=_help&serverInstance=9012

Stupid reference about goggles doing nothing. That's one hella ugly url.

Well, sorry the GP didn't use some fancy URL tweaker to make it look like a happy prancing clown that'll wink at you and tell jokes while he reads off the contents of the linked page. Put on your big boy/girl pants and deal with it.

Yes it is : https://www.paypal.com/helpcenter/main.jsp;jsessionid=27lXK42Qgh4s77YLQngx7xXRG9GDptpWJYJYK46QGrZ7hQRQpnQ8!-76375182?t=solutionTab&ft=homeTab&ps=&solutionId=11935&locale=en_US&_dyncharset=UTF-8&countrycode=US&cmd=_help&serverInstance=9012

Stupid reference about goggles doing nothing. That's one hella ugly url.

Yes it is : https://www.paypal.com/helpcenter/main.jsp;jsessionid=27lXK42Qgh4s77YLQngx7xXRG9GDptpWJYJYK46QGrZ7hQRQpnQ8!-76375182?t=solutionTab&ft=homeTab&ps=&solutionId=11935&locale=en_US&_dyncharset=UTF-8&countrycode=US&cmd=_help&serverInstance=9012

Speaking of deciding what one can buy, how is PayPal getting away with this?

You may not use the PayPal service for activities that: [...] relate to sales of (a) narcotics, steroids, certain controlled substances or other products that present a risk to consumer safety, (b) drug paraphernalia, (c) items that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity, (d) items that promote hate, violence, racial intolerance, or the financial exploitation of a crime, (e) items that are considered obscene, (f) items that infringe or violate any copyright, trademark, right of publicity or privacy or any other proprietary right under the laws of any jurisdiction, (g) certain sexually oriented materials or services, or (h) ammunition, firearms, or certain firearm parts or accessories, or (i) ,certain weapons or knives regulated under applicable law

It's not only blocking some customers, but blocking whole industries from its service and essentially trying to enforce morals via its payment service.

Instead of recounting your fingers and toes, perhaps you could check paypal's fee schedule and see that for anything under $3000 a month merchant fees are 2.9% + 30 cents. In an ISP setting I only had a few % of clients pay with paypal, never paid less than that percentage. So yes, 3%

Nope. If you do it this way, your PayPal/eBay accounts are suspended and you are banned from signing up again.

No, they don't. The CC companies would yank their merchant account if they pulled that.

And in fact, PayPal describes the chargeback process.

You are not RSA's customer, people like Blizzard and PayPal are their customers. You are a customer of their customers.

Blizzard and PayPal are VASCO customers. More likely US govenement agencies are RSA customers.

You are not RSA's customer, people like Blizzard and PayPal are their customers. You are a customer of their customers.

At our prompting Peter has set up a Paypal account where you can make donations. I invite you to chip in to reward a man whose work let so many of us open the door, for the first time, to an important part of our lives.

Thanks, Peter.
--
Donate to payments@petertattam.com

http://Paypal.com

suspicion != possibility.

Yes, it's possible the page is being MITM, but there's no reason to assume that. A broken certificate, on the other hand, is a reason to be suspicious.

Which is probably why Chrome in fact does flag the page broken, and I'd hope Opera does too.

Firefox 4, on the other hand, just happily goes on like nothing's wrong...

Firefox does not treat the page as safe. It treats the page as unencrypted, which is the right thing to do.

If you go to https://paypal.com/ you'll see that the URL bar has a green zone with Paypal's logo. Yet, in the Web O' Wonder there's no such green zone.
So yes, Firefox 4 does recognize that the page isn't safe.

What Firefox 4 does not do is stupidly treat it as less safe than any completely unencrypted page, because it's not.

Also, where was this original claim that they're refuting? I don't see it. As I understood (as of yesterday), the issue WAS that PayPal froze their accounts for non-compliance in this respect

from PayPal's blog:

"We recently placed a temporary limitation of the Courage to Resist organization’s PayPal account as they had not complied to our stated policy requiring non profits to associate a bank account with their PayPal account (for the vast majority of non-profits, this is not an issue)."

So PayPal is claiming that this was only because they wouldn't 'link' a bank account with their PayPal account. No explanation of why this only happened after 3 years and coincidentally closely followed CTR sponsoring Manning.

Next you have CTR's spokesman saying that after the account suspension, they did provide the bank info, but that PayPal wanted even more - the permission to withdraw funds directly from the bank account. This is the relevant part that PayPal has not addressed. Did they actually request this? If so, they haven't mentioned it in their blog post. They simply cite the 'link an account', not grant us debit authorization on said account.

No one is going to give a 3rd party processor that type of permission and it is not in PayPals User Agreement. They specifically say they will take you to collections if you owe them money but do not remotely mention they will dock your account directly.

From the PayPal User Agreement Actions They May Take

"10.3 Reimbursement for Your Liability. In the event that you are liable for any amounts owed to PayPal, PayPal may immediately remove such amounts from your Balance. If you do not have a Balance that is sufficient to cover your liability, your Account will have a negative Balance and you will be required to immediately add funds to your Balance to eliminate the negative Balance. If you do not do so, PayPal may engage in collection efforts to recover such amounts from you."

So even if you OWE THEM MONEY they aren't saying they can go directly into your bank account and take it. Yet they asked for this very permission of CTR.

It is, and they did say so

please cite where they said this.

From the PayPal User Agreement Actions they may take

"10.3 Reimbursement for Your Liability. In the event that you are liable for any amounts owed to PayPal, PayPal may immediately remove such amounts from your Balance. If you do not have a Balance that is sufficient to cover your liability, your Account will have a negative Balance and you will be required to immediately add funds to your Balance to eliminate the negative Balance. If you do not do so, PayPal may engage in collection efforts to recover such amounts from you."

So even if you OWE THEM MONEY they aren't saying they can go directly into your bank account and take it. Yet they asked for this very permission of CTR.

Secondly, if they are not issuing credit, WTF is "Bill Me Later"??? Just because they don't CALL it credit, it doesn't mean it is not!

Even completely ignoring that, they do also have an actual credit card.

They said they would not unrestrict our account unless we authorized PayPal to withdraw funds from our organization's checking account by default.

This is standard procedure for Paypal, in the UK if not the US:

For security purposes or as part of the Verification process, you may be asked to add a bank account to your PayPal account and confirm ownership of this bank account.

You can confirm your bank account by following these steps:

• Log in to your PayPal account at www.paypal.co.uk
• Click 'Profile' at the top of the page.
• Click 'Bank Accounts' in the 'Financial Information' column. (Don’t see this step? Follow the alternative set of instructions below.)
• Select the bank account you wish to confirm, then click 'Confirm'.
• Click the ‘Set up Direct Debit’ button.

"Direct debit" is the authority to withdraw money from your bank account. Lots of people do this with their utility bills.

If you want 2-factor Paypal checkout http://paypal.com/securitykey

http://api.paypal.com/ looks down from here. http://downforeveryoneorjustme.com/http://api.paypal.com/

PayPal is a registered bank.

How about instead of copyrighting news, just put a donation link at the beginning of the story with a sentence reading, "Reporters who contributed to this story do not work for free. In order to continue enjoying reading stories like this, please consider a small donation to keep our business running. We appreciate you as a reader and thank you for your kind contribution!"

Maybe that would work better?

Golden Age Comics has many of these pre-code comics in friendly formats (i.e. not pdf) and available free downloads. Registration is required, however, as they are quite strapped for bandwidth, especially considering a single comic can easily be 30-50mb.

They also have a donations page if you're feeling generous wrt the free service they provide.

So check out some of these pre-code comics, they vary in quality immensely, but it's an interesting look back at what was considered vulgar and damaging to children 50+ years ago.

They're the only ones that offer:
1) easy website integration
2) thousands of programmers know how to setup advanced shopping carts thanks to the developer network
3) customers that trust them (that's very important)

and I thought of some more:
4) instant access to funds using the Paypal debit card.
5) 800 number where I can speak to a real person when I have a problem. Doesn't happen often but when the account is frozen (again) I want a real live person to tell me why ASAP

someone mentioned Amazon Payments which might be a great alternative since everyone's heard of Amazon and Amazon's fees are the exact same as Paypal's fees, 0 to $3,000.00 USD = 2.9% + $0.30 USD per transaction

I'll check out their API and see if we can use it.

I've only been with PayPal for 8 months. She got caught in a phishing scheme years ago. I had no influence on the events. PayPal contacted the banks that handled her checking account and credit cards, and had all the charges reversed in 3 days.

Their fraud policies are one Google search away.

https://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/Marketing/securitycenter/buy/Protection-outside

The OP suggested they are evil because they don't provide fraud protection. They do, and have for years. They also actively go after people for phishing scams.

If there is something evil about the company I work for, I'd like to know. It would certainly influence my decision to continue working there or not. But so far, I haven't seen anything actually evil about the company.

Based on the default currency of his donate page I'd say he's in the UK.

If that IP is blocked, you won't get through even if you use this method.

True, but if you block by IP, you risk blocking other sites on the same host. For example, a medium-sized business may think they're blocking access to http://ebay.com/, but suddenly discover they're also blocking the revenue source http://paypal.com/.

Technically, multiple sites shouldn't be on the same page, but...

Citibank, Bank of America, Discover and Paypal all offer disposable card numbers. American Express used to, but apparently stopped around 2004.

No it isn't.

PayPal isn't just a way to pay for stuff. It's a cross country and currency method to pay and it has an extensive list of options to integrate it with your front and backend. For example, we use it to: receive money for subscriptions, apply the applicable VAT rate according to user location and hook into the payment system for direct activation of accounts with IPN. Especially the last thing is a killer - I haven't seen any PayPal "alternative" to do that yet, and while integrating with my bank with a merchant account is probably possible, the monthly fee plus transaction cost is much more than just 2.5% + 0.30ct per transaction.

I'd love to see alternative for PayPal, but so far, nothing matches it in flexibility and reach. Most PayPal killers are a joke, the easiest way to identify that is to check the developers section. Instead of hundreds of pages @ PayPal describing everything in detail plus a sandbox, the Gunpal one is a forum with 4 posts? I rest my case.

Reading the posts above this one, where everyone is making a distinction between a bank and paypal, in Europe the situation is different then in the US, PayPal IS a bank here (so no need to make a distinction between the two), from the website:

PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. & Cie, S.C.A. (R.C.S. Luxembourg B 118 349) is duly licensed as a Luxembourg credit institution in the sense of Article 2 of the law of 5 April 1993 on the financial sector as amended (the “Law”) and is under the prudential supervision of the Luxembourg supervisory authority, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier .
link: https://cms.paypal.com/nl/cgi-bin/?&cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/ServiceDescription_full&locale.x=en_US

PayPal does offer loans. E.g.: PayPal Buyer Credit.

Why should they be a bank? Their primary purpose is enabling transactions not the usual roles of banks.

They hold user accounts - you can keep money there.
PayPal credit
PayPal Money Market funds.

Sure smells like a bank to me.

Why should they be a bank? Their primary purpose is enabling transactions not the usual roles of banks.

They hold user accounts - you can keep money there.
PayPal credit
PayPal Money Market funds.

Sure smells like a bank to me.

Hrmph. I used to use this when it was the PayPal Plug-In, which they cancelled: https://www.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/general/NewPayPalPlugin-outside. I'm less inclined to give them another go-around. With the plug-in, I was surprised by the complete lack of consumer unfriendliness. I'm not so confident their new version won't have a "screw you" clause in it somewhere. It is PayPal, after all.

Actually they do offer one great function. One time use credit card numbers. these completely bypass any scumbag tricks like this. The credit card number I give a site is good for only the amount I set the number for. Paypad had this feature 3 years ago and I used it on a lot of "iffy" sites. http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/account/VDCFrequentlyAskedQuestions-outside

They call it the virtual debit card.

Banks CANNOT Freeze your assets for no reason!

Stop trolling. I have been hit when they released debit cards for the first time. Getting a -$200 balance for just a few under $5 purchase made me scream, but it was clearly listed in the fine print and the "fees and schedule's" document. I keep track now and haven't had an overdraft since.

As long as you have a balance in the bank you have the right to go to that bank and take out all the money and close the account. Unless a COURT ORDER was obtained to freeze your account, the bank cannot just "take your money" Even then there is a list of exceptions and a process to get your money.

Paypal could hold your money for no reason other to protect other users agents "fraud" With the exception of putting a civil case to them, they can do anything they want. Take a look at the User agreement. Once nice clause in there "We may hold your funds for up to 180 Days if reasonably needed to protect against the risk of liability..." So if they "think" something is wrong, they lock you out for a quarter and there is nothing you can do and kill your business. A bank can't do this arbitrarily.

Paypal is nice for sending small funds from one person to another, but you NEVER keep your business balance in that.

**ALL organizations collecting for disaster relief in Haiti are eligible to receive fee waivers. Please send an e-mail to nonprofit@paypal.com for fee waiver consideration.

Too bad they don't mention this on the http://www.paypal.com/ page.

I don't know about the US, but in Europe PayPal's User Agreement says that it is "licensed as a Luxembourg credit institution". Also I don't really get where all the hate for PayPal comes from.
Yes I read a dozen times that they froze the account of SomethingAwful or some loud-mouthed bloggers under dubious circumstances, but for me it always worked just fine. Actually I really like PayPal because it allows me to send a seller money that is instantly credited to his account, without trust issues on either side or credit card processing for the seller.
I also like the security of going to PayPal's site so I can verify the payment, which is why I am quite sceptical of this API change. But apart from that I really don't see how PayPal is bad in any way for me as an ordinary customer.