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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
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.
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.
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.