eBay finishes PayPal Acquisition

Aidenn writes "As some may remember, eBay was in the process of merging with PayPal. It is finally finished. eBay has information here. news.com has a more complete story."

Comments

Re:Will they revamp paypal?

[turnstyle]

Personally, my experience with PayPal has always been very good. I use it to sell my software. Whenever I've called their free support number, I get a human within a few minutes -- and a human that can answer my questions.

Re:Less Competition

[King_TJ]

Another alternative I don't see used much, but which I've been relatively happy with myself, is c2it. (www.c2it.com)

They charge absolutely no transaction fees (well, at least so far -- but I'm sure that'd change if they got popular enough).

Honestly, I think much of PayPal's bad reputation would have been mirrored by any of these alternative online payment services, had they grown as large and as quickly as PayPal did.

It's easy to claim your cust. service is "much more responsive" when you only have 1/20th. the number of users.

E-cash cannot be independent of some authority.

[Christopher Thomas]

What we need is something that is trustworthy, anonymous (private from the prying eyes of 3rd parties), indenpendent of a government monetary authority or any centralized authority, easy to send and transfer electronicly, and with general predictability and liquidity in value.

The only thing that gives any form of money value is endorsement by some large entity. The pieces of paper in your wallet are called "notes" for a reason - they're statements by the government to the effect that the bearer of the note has control of a certain amount of capital. Once upon a time this actually correlated with a certain amount of gold (e.g. for the US) or silver (e.g. for England), but even without the correlation, the principle remains. The reason paper money has value is that the government says it has value.

Similarly, the reason a cheque or money order has value is that your bank says it has value.

Take away the backing authority, and you lose the value of any e-cash you'd implement. Whether it's the government or a bank or a company like PayPal or Ebay, you need _someone_.

I'd personally prefer it be the government, but I'm one of those communist Canadians ;).

Russian hackers / PayPal scam

[StuffYourReligion]

Yesterday, I received this scam e-mail from "service@paypal.com"
The sending IP was an AOL address: ACC1D4A2.ipt.aol.com [172.193.212.162]

The "click here" links, which I've broken for obvious reasons in the email below, led to this URL:
http://www.paypal.com@%77%77%77.%61%7A.%72%7 5/%70% 70%64

Which, unencoded, is:
http://www.paypal.com@http://www.az.ru/ppd/

And sure enough, it is an (insecure) page on www.az.ru asking you to enter your PayPal email address and password to "confirm" your account. If this is an old scam (this particular one; I was spoofing login screens on my college network in the 80s!), I haven't heard about it.

Here's the e-mail:
----------------------

Dear PayPal Customer,

This e-mail is to inform you of a recent update we have made to our systems. To avoid service interruption we require that you confirm your account as soon as possible. Please click here and take a moment to confirm your account.

Please follow the following steps:

1.) Click here to confirm your account.
2.) Your account will be updated in our system and you may continue using PayPal services without any interruptions.

Please note: If you fail to update your account, it will be 'flagged' with restricted status.

Thank you,
The Paypal Staff

***
Do not reply to this e-mail. For assistance, contact the customer service team.
***

mandatory link

[URoRRuRRR]

paypalsucks.com