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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.
Yet more evidence that the PATRIOT act had little or nothing to do with actual terrorism...
..those americans SURE like the word patriot...
How is illegal gambling a matter of national security unless "terrorists" are directly profitting from it?
PayPal has been used for quite a while in the grey market... DSS hacking hardware, Drugs by mail, Betting... It was only a matter of time they got busted for it. They are profiting on illegal activities.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
Paypal has had it coming to them for a long time. A stiff penalty may wake them up somewhat. The real question is, will Paypal's policies improve sufficiently to correct their behavior and unethical withholding of funds?
I hate to be a cynic in this case, but probably not. The magnitude of the average consumer's problem is likely far larger than the Patriot act allegations.
I don't like PayPal. So seeing them nailed under the Patriot act if kind of funny, But, using the Patriot act this way is confirming the worst fears of everyone aout this act.
It is truely sad when the fight for our rights is being led by companies like PayPal.
Work bio at MMWD
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.
It's good to see that Joe Smith was charged with felonious assault, because I *did* see him jaywalk that one time.
Entrepreneur : (noun), French for "unemployed"
What Paypal does is actually quite difficult, and I suspect it is a constant battle for them to prevent their service from being used illegally, and without them getting landed with massive liabilities. This is primarily due to the braindead way that credit cards work. I suspect that people that have had bad PayPal experiences might simply have become victims of the fact that Paypal has to be extremely aggressive about fraud just to survive.
Before everyone hangs them out to dry - perhaps stop to think, for a moment, what their side of the story might be.
I dunno about paypal. I've never had any problems with them, but this new User Agreement is fucking LONG and split into like 13 pieces spread over many files. And here's the best part:
At the BEGINNING it reads:
We may amend this Agreement at any time by posting the amended terms on our site. Except as stated below, all amended terms shall be effective 30 days after they are initially posted on our site.
So you think, okay, if they put something bad in there, I'll at least have 30 days until I read it on some PayPal watch site or something.
But you'd be wrong! At the END of the User Agreement it reads:
Each of these policies may be changed from time to time and are effective immediately after we post the changes on our Service, except our Privacy Policy for which we will provide you with thirty days prior notice.
Isn't that sneaky?? Kinda like a "plot twist". The lawyers must've really high-fived each other over that one!
And of course the now-common "survivability" clause:
Sections (3) Fees, (2.4) Release, (8) Access and Interference, (2.6) Limit of Liability, (2.7) Indemnity, and (16) Legal Disputes shall survive any termination or expiration of this Agreement.
You know an Agreement has "come of age" when it gets the Survivability clause! I'm still trying to figure out how parts of a contract can remain in effect after the contract is terminated. Kind of like cancer: the gift that keeps on giving!
Anyway, I think I hate the PATRIOT act a lot more than PayPal but this new Agreement makes me weary. I still haven't agreed to it and I think I'll just let my account lapse.
PS: I too wonder what gambling has anything to do with terrorism. Then again, I've noticed a lot of states are requesting Homeland Security funds to "control protestors". The NBC reporter covering the story said with a straight face something like: "Many of the protestors target the same facilities as terrorists and therefore we need funds to protect them.".
That's right folks! Protestors == Terorrists. You saw it coming. Anything can be terrorism, if you try hard enough.
Currency is a tool, a means for improving the barter system. Electronic currency would at frist seem to only the same requirements. But alas, no.
Credit card companies, banks, etc., have all be indoctrinated with the restricting domestic "illegal" activites, in the areas that demand it. Paypal has just graduated into the same realm. No crying foul here. Electronic or online currency/exchanges/banks are indeed going to be responsible for tracking, preventing, and reporting on any activity a government wants.
If this scares you, then realize the standard has been in place for quite some time; purchase histories are fair game during federal investigations. Even anonymous cash itself has been under this pressure for quite some time, from serial numbers to embedded symbols. Someone at a certain level wants to know how the money flows.
mug
Not so. They'll charge the bank if they can prove the bank was knowingly assisting in a crime. Which is generally the case, as it's pretty much impossible for the bank not to know what's going on.
Go apply for a mortgage at your local bank, see how many questions they start asking if you tell them you're self employed and plonk down a large cash deposit. They wind up neck deep in it if it turns out the cash was cocaine profits, the house and liquid assets get siezed (the house of course is the banks), and many times the loan officer who approves it will face charges.
This isn't about money-laundering, btw. This whole thread is offtopic.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I am torn on this one. I use PayPal and have transferred a lot of money back and forth - but never at one time (meaning many small - max under $1000 transactions). They have been just fine for me.
It is great if you have a household of shared rent and bills and you want to easily pay one central person without any paper checks.
But I don't think that it is fair that PayPal is allowed to bypass the bank laws for the most part.
I do know (not personally as in "my mother" but personally in the sense that I have "spoken" with them on the net via e-mail and discussion boards) people that have had 10s of thousands of dollars get locked up by PayPal.
I trust PayPal for my small $300 transactions, and I even have it hooked up to my bank without too much worry on my part. But from what I have heard of others, I would not keep large sums of money in there (the few people that I know had over $50K in there when it was frozen and then basically taken from them).
To be fair, the people I know that had their money taken were doing illegal things - so it became very hard for them to seek legal action against PayPal. It would be amusing to approach the athorities and try to explain that PayPal stole from you money that you were not going to claim on taxes and was obtained via non-legal ways.
Whether or not PayPal kept that money when they realized what was happening, or if they just freeze any high $$ accounts (I had heard that they freeze them all if they are high $$ and/or high traffic so that they can investigate them and then unfreeze them if they are "okay"... not sure what is "okay" and who determines that).
I know a close friend that used a credit card only once in 2 years, and the one time that they used it was to sign up for a website subscription (not slashdot) via PayPal.
She then quickly had many charges run up on her card - it was someone that had stolen it. She had to run through circles with PayPal and the cc company to resolve it - in the end, it was someone at PayPal.
And then the gambling. I personally have no issues with gambling - I don't have a moral issue with it - and the only reason the states really doesn't like it (no matter what moral claims they state), is that it is not something they can tax.
So I don't personally feel that gambling should some get in trouble for this.
Were I for some reason allowed to make decisions on all of this - I would want PayPal to be treated legally like a bank, and I would want gambling to be allowed to stay on the continental states and then taxed.
As for the drug dealers that lose their money... I'm pretty ambivalent on that one.
There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
Since when is it adult to celebrate an unjust law being used against someone your not very fond of (that particular moment)? Every once in a while a story like this gets posted and I remember what a mixed up bunch we are.
Quack, quack.
But every time a $20 bill changes hands, the mint doesn't take a 1-2% cut, unlike PayPal.
My other first post is car post.
Everyone calm down, put away the torches and the pitchforks. No one was charged with anything.
Apparently the DOJ doesn't have enough real crime to prosecue and fills its spare time writing harassment letters to companies it feels it can use to further its neo-republican goals.
The DOJ isn't stupid enough to ruin a good scare tactic like the PATRIOT act by making a test case out of PayPal. They've got a couple more years of cease-and-desist type activity until they either try to use the law or are voted out of office.
-Ryan C.
-Ryan C.
I was thinking the same thing, but then it occurred to me that it would not only be really unpopular, but would not prevent a black market in -- you got it -- money!
Besides, they don't have any good substitutes for it. SmartCards require electronic readers and can be hacked, traditional mag stripe cards suffer those defects as well as needing access (at least occasionally) to a whole infrastructure. And neither one is economically viable for $.50 purchases.