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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...
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
So what happens now, they get the death penalty?
Put patriot in front of something and it doesn't work as advertised:
Patriot Missle
PATRIOT Act
etc..
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.
PayPal = Ebay
:)
Just keep that in mind when boycotting PayPal by buying your stuff from ebay using nochex
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"
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.
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 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.
Careful now, Hemos, the advertisements go on the TOP of the page, and the stories go on the BOTTOM. Please be more careful in the future.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
go read paypalsucks.com
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
God bless John Ashcroft for protecting us from "roulette terrorists".
" 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."
----------
"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."
Sounds like someone has a bit of a grudge, eh?
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
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.".
The word terrorist is being thrown about by every talking head to get his message on TV, and will soon have no meaning. But what they're talking about is absolutely valid.
Think about it. A terrorist (a real one) attack would likely target a highly populated area, and something symbolic (like the WTC was, or maybe say, the Sears tower in Chicago or the Space Needle or just a big mall downtown).
Protestors are out in the street blocking traffic and impeding peoples ability to move in the exact same areas.
How many more would have died on 9/11 if there were a bunch of dipshit hippies having a 'die in' and dragging newspaper stands in front of the WTC, blocking not only fire trucks and ambulances, but everyone elses avenue to escape to safety?
Not only that, a big raucous crowd would make a great place for a suicide bomber to hide/move freely, if he so chose.
Noone said protesters==terrorists. Protesters (who act like assholes)==threat to public safety.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
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.
I thought terrorists only got money from pot? That's what all those TV commercials say...
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.
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.
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."
In the interest of pointless nitpicking, USAPATRIOT stands for Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism. (And I thought I spend too much time coming up with useless shit). Truncating it to Patriot is kinda like referring to TCP/IP simply as CP/IP (and there are probably just as few people who are likely to get really upset). Still, I like to think of it as the 'ooosa pat riot' act.