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Paypal Charged Under PATRIOT Act
A reader writes: "Yahoo has the story: Paypal has been charged under the PATRIOT act for accepting and profiting from transactions with illegal gambling sites. According to their new rules they will no longer allow gambling payments due to the higher chargeback risk. It's good to see them charged for something, even if they have never had to atone for the thousands of customer dollars they have stolen." I know of a number people who've had problems, but I will say that I've had no problems with PayPal - on both my personal account and on the Subscription side of things.
PayPal = Ebay
:)
Just keep that in mind when boycotting PayPal by buying your stuff from ebay using nochex
You mean your right to profit from drug sales, offshore gambling, ponzi schemes and wire fraud?
PayPal is a great litmus test to get some precedent behind PATRIOT.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
If you've got a big stash of illegal cash (drug money. crime money, terrorist money), what better way to legitimize it than claim you just got really lucky?
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
go read paypalsucks.com
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
Whatever you might say about PayPal and whether it was knowingly an accomplice or not, I can't figure out for the life of me how what they did could be construed to be terrorism.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
You missed the point entirely. PayPal is based in California. Therefore they must conform to the laws of said state and country.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
According to the linked article (which neither the editor nor the submitter took the time to read, apparently) Paypal has not been charged under the PATRIOT act. Instead, "the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Missouri claims the company's PayPal operation violated part of the USA Patriot Act", which is an entirely different thing.
Wake me up when the bat-shit insane puritan who runs the Justice Department decides to file real charges, instead of just sending out thinly veiled extortion letters.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
while I'm certainly not a huge fan of paypal, one should be fair to them.
while paypal did allow some money to get through to gambling sites - it isn't their universal policy to allow all gambling.
I konw from past experience that they do block some gambling sites - the problem is that they make it easy to exchange money without them (paypal) really knowing what you are doing.
This is a good thing.
But as a side effect, Joe User can give money to an online casino and paypal doesn't necessarily know that.
So now they are getting in trouble because of that.
They do have a list of casinos - and some casinos also won't let you use paypal - but it is a matter of them being aware of each other - it isn't something that will automatically work in the current system.
So technically paypal isn't 100% BAD - they were/are doing something the right way - it is just that the legal community isn't happy with that.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
I've used c2it.com in the past and it is great (and follows bank laws) - but the problem is momentum.
PayPal has a huge user list and people aren't likely to switch over - so if you use c2it, you then need to convince others to sign up for it as well.
Which is not terribly hard if you are trying to get a friend to pay you back and you live in DC and he lives in Wyoming...
But it is an issue if you are trying to sell something on ebay, or if you have an online business - you need to go with what the majority of people will use.
Just like a majority of sites don't accept diner's club - not many people have it. so no reason to bother paying to support it.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
It was amended to the Patriot act like many other things before it was finalized, because no one would actually oppose the patriot act, and it everyone knew it would be approved quickly. The actual regulations concerning gambling fall under the "Bank Secrecy Act" part of the bill. More details can be found here.
but I can't discuss it, lawsuit pending.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone