Slashdot Mirror
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...
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
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
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.