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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.
I've never had any problems with PayPal, though I know about and recognize the horror stories about people having their money borked wholesale by the service, and how their accountability is next to zero.
But I don't think I share the submitter's glee about PayPal getting screwed - the "PATRIOT Act", which is supposed to be fighting terrorism.
In any case, I've said it before and I'll say it again - PayPal is NOT a bank. If you must use them, never "deposit" money with them and always, always use credit cards.
I think that argument is coming to an end soon. Claiming international entity to cover for the fact you are processing illegal transactions is BS legal double speak. The fact still remains this company is based out of CA and will be procecuted as such.
As for the US Mint Post, that is not the same thing. The US Mint does not have direct knowledge of any transactions and they dont skim a percentage off the top.
Str8Dog
using System.Darkside; public
" The auction service operator said a letter received Friday from the attorney's office claims PayPal violated a part of the law that prohibits transmission of funds known to have been derived from a criminal offense or intended to be used to promote or support unlawful activity."
Oooh, sounds scary! Those evil PayPal people are criminals, huh? Well, let's see the details:
"EBay, San Jose, said the attorney's office offered a complete settlement of all possible claims and charges covering a purported amount of earnings PayPal derived from online gambling merchants between Oct. 26, 2001, and July 31, 2002, plus interest."
Ah, so we're talking about gambling! Sure, let's keep that revenue with the state-run lotteries, and riverboat casinos. We don't want to share our gambling takings with anyone else. So let's crack down on non-government gambling sites. What's that? "Online" gambling sites? Why that's the magic combination: the evils of the online world, and the evils of gambling. Let's get a big stick to use on them:
"Hey, look, we got this here PATRIOT act we can use on 'em!"
"PATRIOT act? They ain't terrorists."
"They are terrorizing our bottom line, it'll work."
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I CAN'T BELIEVE IT!
Why don't we just burn the Bill of Rights? That PATRIOT act has just about taken away all the rights we used to enjoy.
From the article: The auction service operator said a letter received Friday from the attorney's office claims PayPal violated a part of the law that prohibits transmission of funds known to have been derived from a criminal offense or intended to be used to promote or support unlawful activity.
Now how am I supposed to go about transmitting funds that are known to be derived from a criminal offense or are intended to promote or support an unlawful activity??? The Founders must be rolling over in their graves!
Forget the whales - save the babies.
If my bank charges a transaction fee for checks I write, and I write a check for black-market goods, is my bank "profiting on illegal activities"? How is that logical?
Whether they are legally a bank or not, PayPal's role in the transaction was as a bank, and they are profiting on the transaction, not on the goods. It should not be the responsibility of PayPal to audit all transactions.
Then let's assume I use my MasterCard (I don't know where they are based, but for the sake of argument, let's assume they are based in a state where gambling is illegal) at a casino in Vegas, to get cash to gamble with. Should MasterCard be held criminally liable for what I did in Las Vegas?
A modern day witchhunt.
I use it for our online billing and have had no problems. The main thing I head people complain about is that amount of fraud however the person recieving money has to take some resonsiblity to check that the other end is legit. We've learnt to some degree to check who's serious, who's not.
For example we always check the IP of the person who is ordering and compare it to their postal address. Now this cuts out about 75% of the fraud. Now on top of this people do use open proxies and these are harder to find. The basic rule is that if someone doesn't seem to check out we just refund the money with an explanation.
Rus
Cheap UK and US VPS
My favorite method involved a wealthy playboy, a card counter, and a dealer on the take, the playboy loses, the card counter wins and the three split the laundering fee. The biggest idiots in money laundering were these weed growers back home who tried to plow millions in profit through a combination driving range batting cage in a town of 10,000. Lets see at $2/bucket of balls everyone in town is buying two buckets a week for all of the season. Any tax investigator could see that the place was always empty. They had a pretty good system for growing it, too, and probably could have lasted quite a while, if they hadn't gotten busted on their dumb money laundering plan.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
Actually, it is people with attitudes like yours that are the real threat to the freedom's we have in the US
If you recall, there is something called the 1st Amendment which guarantees the people of the United States the right to assemble, Freedom of Speech, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances
It is people like you who would try equating Protesters, exercising their rights guaranteed under the Constitution, to Terrorists so that you and your kind can pass laws under the guise of "National Security" to abridge those freedoms.
And your comment "dipshit hippies" further re-enforces your ignorance, by trying to stigmatize people who disagree with you, so that you can silence their speech. Most of those people are not "dipshit hippies" as you put it. Many of them are from both sides of the spectrum of political ideology. Lets not forget, the Catholic Chuch is openly against the War and they are far from a bunch of "dipshit hippies"
I may not agree with the protesters either, but I sure as hell am not going to encourage the federal government to pass laws, like the Patriot act, that abridge those freedoms.
Finally, your remark to 9/11 makes no sense and trivializes the meaning of that day. Hypothesizing there would of been more deaths if there were protesters down there that day is offbase and uncalled for. Let's not cater to that "blame America" attitude.
and let us not reduce our freedoms with reactionary laws. That, is exactly what Bin Laden and the rest of those nutcases want.
One, the PATRIOT Act was something than Atty. Gen. Ashcroft came up with as a result of an order from dubya not to let 9/11 happen again. The problem is, he sat in his office and came up with all of these wacked security ideas that he never checked with anyone in the administration to make sure it wasn't political suicide. He even wanted to suspend habeas corpus(look that one up on your own) for the first time since the Civil War(all of this is a summary of an article in Newsweek a couple weeks ago). Remember, this guy is Attorney General because he lost the Missouri U.S. Senate race to a man who died a month before the election. Two, in California, there has been a ruling that if you use your credit card to gamble online, not only has the credit card company broken the law, but you can sue them because they "gave" you a method to break the law(not to mention you don't have to pay that part of your credit card bill). So, kill all the lawyers. People need to learn to be responsible for their own actions. It's not PayPal's or your credit card company's responsibilty to make sure you don't break the law. The three biggest lies. 1. Yes, I'll respect you in the morning. 2. The check is in the mail. 3. I'm from the government, I'm here to help you.
PyPal has gone way out of there way to prove they are NOT a bank. they can't have it both ways.
If they were a bank, and regulated as such, they would not have this problem.
If I give YOU a 100 bucks and someone else gives you a package, and you hand they guy 95bucks, and give me the package, you are part of what happened. Other wise people would use this technique to avoid crimes.
Now a bank just handles the money, not what you do with your money. delivery companies charge a few for moving goods, not exchangeing the money for the goods.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
This is the same logic recently used by NOW and several other abortion-rights groups in Scheidler v. National Organization for Women : sure, using RICO to prosecute anti-abortion protestors was an unprecedented expansion of racketeering laws, but at least they're using that unprecedented expansion against the right kinds of people.
The logic was flawed then, and it's flawed now: if PATRIOT gets a successful prosecution, or even plea-bargain, out of PayPal, then the feds will be emboldened to prosecute more PATRIOT violations. Each prosecution feeds upon itself, until, like conspiracy or wire-fraud laws, PATRIOT will be "low-hanging fruit," attached to a great many cases with only tenuous ties to the ostensible goals of PATRIOT.
You may not like PayPal, you may even have legally-actionable issues with them -- but file a class-action if you do. Don't cheer them getting prosecuted under a vague section of an overly-broad statute, because the next time they issue an indictment, it could be for you.
"Freedom is kind of a hobby with me, and I have disposable income that I'll spend to find out how to get people more."
No but I could think of "an except if"....for example, the very long arm of RICO (Racketeer Influenced Criminal Organization)and conspiracy statutes in general.
In civil litigations, there's a body of case law affectionately known as Shoe and its progeny. The question is "under what circumstances can a defendant expect to be hailed/hauled into a 'foreign' court? Answers range from "when defendant avails himself of the protection of the laws of Illinois, Vermont, New Mexico..." or "when the defendant's products enter the stream of commerce."Volkswagen(Germany) found itself a defendant somewhere in the mid-west along with a New York auto dealer because that was where the accident happened. OTOH, Diane Keaton, if I remember correctly, couldn't convince New Hampshire courts that she could sue Larry Flynt & Hustler simply because there were subscribers in NH.
Interesting here is why that particular D o J regional office.