Slashdot Mirror
Paypal Deals Blow To Freenet
hankaholic writes "I was checking into the latest progress of the Freenet project when I noticed a disturbing note on their homepage: 'Paypal has frozen the account we use to accept donations over the web, they refuse to give any reason other than "use of an anonymous proxy" [...] all of the projects subscriptions have been canceled which is a significant setback. Other means of accepting donations, including E-Gold, are still active.' Paypal is sending them a check for their remaining balance. The news update on the Freenet homepage also includes contact information for some people at Paypal."
Paypal is certainly a shady company. To find out why, go to www.paypalsucks.org
of screwing over companies. Personally I don't trust the company at all. http://consumeraffairs.com/online/paypal_02.html is the consumer reports complaints page on the many problems paypal has given "customers". Caveat Paypal!
From the Freenet page
If you are concerned about whether your account might be at risk due to your political opinions you may wish to speak to their PR contact Hani Durzy at (408) 376 7458. If you are an investor and you would like to see what other political opinions Paypal doesn't like, you may want to speak to their Investor contact Tracey Ford at (408) 376 7205.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
PayPal has grown increasingly hostile towards anyone accepting payments via their service if they do anything "out of the ordinary". Not long ago, I heard about a woman complaining because her PayPal account was suspended after she accepted donations to help keep her "size acceptance" web site going. (PayPal seemed to be afraid it was pornography-related in some way, since you had a female collecting money from her personal web site.) In reality, she was trying to boost the self-esteem of overweight women and let them know about events where they could meet guys interested in larger women.
They're also scared of anyone or any business that doesn't provide full disclosure of their whereabouts (complete address, phone/contact numbers, and so on). To put it in perspective though, don't forget they're just one of the arms of eBay nowdays - so their primary interest is simply being a facilitator for their own auction buyers and sellers to complete transactions. If you even so much as look vaguely like you do things in a similar way to eBay auction scammers, you'll get cut off in an instant.
This website was established because of paypal doing this kind of crap.
I've never dealt with Paypal, but some of the stories over at PaypalWarning.com are pretty scary. Apparently Paypal has a habit of freezing accounts with almost no reason given, then sitting on the accounts which have hundreds of dollars tied up in them. Some of the stories also explain that it is nearly impossible to clear up the problem promptly, and that the best way to get your account unfrozen is to say you're going to complain to the Better Business Bureau or your local district attorney. Of course most of the stories I read were from two or three years ago. Maybe they've changed.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
PayPal was recently fined $10 MILLION for violating the US Patriot Act.
It's not a company I do business with.
Paypal does have a habit of scamming its customers. Attrition.org has a good article about one person's experience here.
I run a mid-sized jewelry shop on the web and have been using paypal for over a year. I actualy switched from using MerchantServices because of the constant headache with fraud and chargebacks. As much as people hate to hear it, PayPal is on the side of the merchant not the customer and in 9 cases out of 10 (at least for me) the customer is the one trying to screw me over. Before I get flamed, I would like to say that I am in no way trying to deffend their actions in this case, however I have learned that their verification techniques are always based on some specific activity.
Maybe they're being assholes because they think freenet might land them another "patriot" act violation? Don't see how it would, but the whole 'anonymous' thing might be catching their eye...
Whatever they are thinking, I'm probably going to be closing my PP account out soon...
And profit? Are you out of your fucking mind? Toad makes the equivalent of US$1500/month. He could earn more working at McDonald's. Twice within the last six months, the project has had to send out pleas for donations just to afford to pay him that much... And now PayPal, in its infinite wisdom, has gone and screwed the project out of - at the very least - the time it's going to take to find a new method of accepting donations.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Hacked?! Oh, please. You're one of an innumerable number of fools who responded to a "please verify your account" email or a "security update" email that asked you to enter your eBay or PayPal userid and password.
Arguably, scammers are getting very clever at their email attacks. They'll send you an email with a link like this: http://www.ebay.com/cgi-bin/verify.dll?Acct=1234
At first glance, it LOOKS legit. And when you click on the link, it takes you to a page that LOOKS like the real thing. Many even have links to the real site. The only way to know that it's fake is to look in the URL bar, and keep your head straight about them asking for passwords and credit cards.
The sad part is that companies seems to be doing very little to prosecute these scammers. I've received emails for both eBay and Citibank. Both times I've gotten no response on my fraud report.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
what about simply getting a merchant account?
surely it would be worth it with a 50,000 member site, even if the individual sales were only relatively small amounts.
i used to accept credit cards inhouse for a subscription type online business and at the time i introduced that i only had about 25 customers.
after the initial setup costs (which were reasonable anyway), a merchant account offered a far better deal than that offered by people like paypal and this way you are in control.
and re; passwords etc; the point is you process inhouse, so all they are entering is their credit card details. there are no new passwords etc to remember. personally, i prefer that method of online sale any day to something like paypal.
i would talk to your bank, it may not be as expensive as you think.
Freenet is going to get their $550 and can no longer use Paypal.
Anything beyond that is "Paypal said/Freenet said"
We may not understand exactly what happened. The nature of the closing leads me to speculate that someone was trying to access the freenet Paypal account repeatedly by browsing through an anonymizing proxy server. See Anonymity and Paypal (and other online businesses) from the Anonymity 4 Proxy Support Pages to get an idea what might happen when you try to access paypal from an anonymous proxy. I'll quote: "So if paypal finds out that you are using a proxy to fool their logon system into allowing you in, you are quite likely to find your paypal account closed. If I'm not mistaken, they clearly state in the user agreement that you can't connect from an anonymous proxy."
The Anonymity 4 support tech is correct. On paypal.com in the User agreement, Under "Closing Accounts and Limiting Account Access" paragraph 2 - "Any of the following events may lead to your account being limited: " "item xvii (Use of an anonymizing proxy;)"
This is not censorship news, it appears more like carelessness on the part of someone at Freenet.
Have you Meta Moderated t
"One person's experience" does not constitute a habit. I have used Paypal for years -- since its inception -- transferred tens of thousands of dollars with it and never had a serious problem, and only a handful of minor ones (most during the first couple years). Talk about YMMV. It all comes down to how much you trust Paypal...my money's never there for more than a week. Nor should it be...they make no claim to be a bank, so why use them as one?
It's more likely that they shut down freenet because they were using an anonymous email address. I'm sure you can see where an anonymous email address could be a bad thing for a company that wants to make its money transfers secure and trackable. Paypal recently placed a hold on my account for my use of fake DNS information on my domain unlogged.org (the whole idea of which was to create a form of private computing by not logging anything). I removed the account, verified my other email addresses, and everything was flowing again within the week.
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Paypal does suck sometimes, and they do have many examples of using dubious business practices. So what? Big deal. I don't think they lost any money, did they? Why doesn't Freenet just publicize that they can accept money through NetworkForGood.org? From their website:
You can donate to their 501c3 organization here, I believe.
PayPal, you are free to consider me a "lost customer" at this point. I will take my business elsewhere.
Easier said than done, they like to consider you a customer for life. I loged on once and found that they wanted me to agree to a new user agreement which I found objectionable. Well when you call them up they transfer you to different agents who all say they can't close your account unless you accept the agreement. Very Kafkaesque, consider yourself lucky and wise if you never accepted the $10 sign-up bonus. Now I have to change my regular bank so that they don't have any current information and another security breach there can't haunt me.
Somewhat offtopic, but while your bank will not freeze your account at the request of a random third party.
Something fairly nasty that they will do, is automatically debit your account and pay any company who runs through a check-by-phone type transfer. All that is needed is the information on the bottom of your check and no authorization whatsoever. It's happened to me 3 times now, each time for somewhere between $250-$500.
This is 100% automated. The first time I did a check by phone to pay my monthly providian bill, not only did they charge that, they also charged me for the full $500 balance of my mother-in-law's bill (she lived with me and I guess they figured I'd surely want to pay the credit card bills of everyone!).
Sure enough, the charge came through automatically, no review, not even so much as a check to verify that the name it was put through under was on the account!
I've switched banks twice since and had check by phone frauds nail me at each bank (and yes, the providian thing was the first and only time I actually used a check by phone legitimately) because they ALL process them automatically with NO review and no authorization. Anybody you write a check can charge your account without signiture for up to your full account balance plus whatever the bank will cover for you.
I thought the primary purpose of a bank was to lock my money up and insure in every possible manner that your money can only be removed with your authorization?
I never write checks anymore, I'm afraid to.
Since I am a non-US merchant, my PayPal account is verified via credit card. Welp, 2 months ago I got an email about "unusual account detail access", and the account was on hold, by PayPal admin.
Here's the kicker: I asked that the acocunt be shut and all account details deleted. They could not do that and needed to investigate.
Since that time, many transaction appeared on my car for Online Casinos etc Presumabely by the person that hacked the PayPal account..
It ended with cancelling my card with my bank and claiming back all the transactions I hadnt made.
Lesson: Unlike many online merchants that (supposedly) delete your CC details after each transaction, PayPal dont, and have your number and details.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Then maybe I should chip in with my experience too? I had my account disabled after I'd requested to have my name on file changed (as I legally had my name changed, and wanted my PayPal account to reflect that fact). They refused to change the name, even after I'd provided the various forms of documentation. Then once I told them to just forget I even asked (I was getting fed up with them - I have better things to do with my time, thank you very much), they disabled the account.
After quite some time of getting no response, I finally got told that to reactivate it, I needed to send in various documentation. Again. Same deal. Same stuff that I'd already faxed them a couple of weeks earlier (and I don't like faxing internationally). Alright, so I play along, give them their stupid papers. After another substantial wait, I get told they refuse to reactivate my account due to the fact that I have multiple accounts and that's against their policy, and that I'll need to close all of them except one. WTF? At this point I was getting seriously pissed off. Needless to say, I don't have multiple accounts. If I did I wouldn't be concerned about this particular one. And how in the blue f*ck am I supposed to close an account when I can't even log onto it?!
After another round of seriously narky emails, they reactivated it, but I've never used it since. I keep it for emergency use only, but as long as I have a choice, they're not getting my business any more.
Western Union's service has always made itself above board and auditable. They'll collect personal info when the government demands it, or when the money-sender feels like demanding it so that the receiver has to verify that they are the person the money is intended for.
They've got no way to revoke the transaction if it's fraudlent. That's your problem to figure out... they're just about getting the money from point A to point B.
That I think is PayPal's biggest problem... they're oriented to the buyer's advantage at the expense of the seller. However, that sender-side revocation capability esentially requires a credit check to even be possible, which means demanding the social security number upfront from everybody in a way Western Union never has to.
Western Union never cares how good you are at future payments of debt... they've got the cash in hand before they'll do their thing.
Not if you use MBNA'a "ShopSafe" credit card service. Please note that I have no vested interest in MBNA whatsoever, except as a happy customer. If you have a regular MBNA credit card, what MBNA does is provide software you can install on your computer that automatically connects up to their credit card "NetAccess" service (you have to log in with name and password each time) and lets you generate "disposable" credit card numbers as needed (much like Spamex.com does with their disposable email address service that I also use :-).
I generate a new credit card number for each and every Internet transaction, and the MBNA ShopSafe software lets me set the maximum amount that can be debited to each disposable credit card number as well as the expiration date (up to one year in the future). The way I handle PayPal is to generate a disposable credit card number with an expiration date of one year and a reasonable credit limit (say $500 for example, or whatever you want). If I were to ever want to rescind my credit card information from PayPal, I do not even have to contact PayPal at all - I just start up the ShopSafe software and tell it to delete the particular disposable credit card number that I provided to PayPal so that no further charges can be charged to that account number. I'm very surprised that as far as I know, MBNA is the only one who provides this type of service, so they have no competition in this area.
9/11 Eyewitnesses to Explosive WTC Demolition 1 of 2
Sorry to reply to my own post, but the other two providers posters have mentioned, Cahoot and Discover, also use Orbiscom, along with (to quote from their website) "Discover, MBNA, Citibank, ABN-AMRO, Abbey National, Credit Lyonnais, Swedbank, Citi EU and Nippon Shinpan".
Here's a list of their clients for anyone who is interested.