PayPal Freezes Hurricane Relief Account

logan5 writes "SomethingAwful's forum denizens, on the call of site admin Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, raised over $20,000 dollars to be donated to the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. This was done via a PayPal donation link, and PayPal has now frozen the account on a twofold basis: one, that there have been reports of "suspicious behavior" from the "buyers," and two, that no shipping records have been provided for the donations." Since so many users are asking for it, SomethingAwful has provided a link for those wishing to still make donations to the Red Cross in the meantime.

Comments

PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Novanix]

You hate dealing with them the more you have to deal with them. Sadly this is not the first case of paypal outrageousness. They will happily do what they want and often may take money, they do not follow any real guidelines and you are often left out in the cold without them helping you. Sadly there is not a whole lot one can do when you run into bad luck. Unfortunately it can be hard to transfer money with others, and so you are left forced to deal with paypal. For a whole bunch of bad stories just visit one of the many sites like http://www.paypalsucks.com/ .

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Krach42]

One of my friends had a PayPal Visa card. He says that if he paid for a meal on his PayPal Visa, and left a tip, that paypal would end up automatically denying the payment.

Not his fault, he's willing to pay the amount. PayPal is being the jerk and not paying.

Sure, this worked occationally in my friend's favor (he avoided it, because it felt wrong to him.) But PayPal was ripping on the restaurants.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

I have heard about PayPal doing some shady things in the past, but should we be so quick to judge in light of scammers like those described here?

Unfortunately, when disasters strike, some people are eager to take advantage. You saw it in New Orleans with looters and other horrible violence, and you see it online with scammers everywhere.

The site in question is probably legitimate, but maybe PayPal had a legitimate reason to want to cover itself believe that it may not be?

Just a thought.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[John Seminal]

A friend of mine sold stuff on ebay. He had a perfect record, nobody complained.

One day, he went to his paypal account, and it was locked.

My friend did not worry, he did nothing wrong. So he sent an email to paypal asking for details. He got back something saying "his account was being reviewed". My friend asked when the funds would be released, and paypal did not respond.

6 weeks passed, and paypal kept his money frozen.

Finally, my friend went to get a lawyer, and had him send a letter to paypal. His funds were released the next week.

He sent another email and letter to paypal asking what caused the account to be frozen in the begenning. He got no response. To this day, he does not know why paypal did what they did.

It is nice to have a company to protect people. But the company should say why they take actions. If paypal believed my friend did something wrong, why not tell him, and ask for a response? Why keep everything secret, and keep the account frozen??

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[man_of_mr_e]

Well, this is actually somewhat understandable (somewhat). What likely happened is that the restaurant authorized a payment of $x.xx and then when you added on the tip, it came out to a different value that was authorized. PayPal likely saw this as either an attempt to fraudulently overcharge the account, or they simply had a policy of only paying transactions as they were authorized.

This has actually become a problem for banks. It's really easy for unscrupulous merchants to add on charges after the fact, and most people really don't keep track of their receipts so they don't notice.

I've seen lots of places that have started requiring you to fill in the amount of the tip before the transaction is authorized. I assume this is because of stricter regulations by the payment processors.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[yfarren]

I just have to ask. Would you rather paypal not suspend this guys account, and NOT suspend countless accounts of people who ARE scamming people, or that paypal try to shut down accounts that SEEM to be scamming people, and then, upon futrther investigation, decide "this one isnt a scam, we will re-open it".

I mean, come on people. You all know that paypal is big, and that it relies on a certain level of automation to protect itself, and consumers, and sellers. And you also, all know that there are a ton of people out there raking in what are, well intentioned peoples "Donations". So this guy opens up a site (new, cause he used to use his own credit card processors) and, if the article is telling the truth, in 6 hours had gotten $20k.

You are all telling me that you DONT want paypal to suspend that until they have time to investigate?

I mean, I am all for donations, and helping. But, doesnt paypal have an obligation to protect people (from things like phishing blah blah blah)? How does paypal know this guy is legit (I, for instance, dont. Maybe you do. But does your knowledge neccessarily translate into paypal's knowledge?).

So you bitch when it doesnt do enough to protect people. And THEN you bitch when, in trying to protect people, it steps on somone's toes.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Rickz0rz]

The problem with this, however, is it's often a bitch to get your money when you're legit. Manytimes, it takes a lawyer to send a letter to see your money, and evenso, there's still no explanation as to what caused the account freezing anyways. It wouldn't be so much of a problem if it weren't for this.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[yfarren]

Then gripe about that. I mean, if there is a problem, gripe about it. But, seriously, How much of a problem is them suspending somone who recently opened and account after a natural disaster, and is raking in $3500/hour? Isnt that something which, ideally, you would LIKE to have get suspended for a business day or two? Until somone has looked into it?

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[dtfinch]

shut down accounts that SEEM to be scamming people, and then, upon futrther investigation, decide "this one isnt a scam, we will re-open it"

That might actually work, if they were willing to do the whole "further investigation" part. They firmly refuse to do anything. Perhaps they could actually try contacting a couple random buyers to verify their payments, and compare buyers' ip addresses to the ones they registered with. That'd tell them in 5 minutes whether the seller is scamming or if those are real donations.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Farrell]

It's true that there's a risk, but it had over $3k/hour pouring in, and they didn't freeze it till it hit 20k, and they say it's because he can't provide a shipping number? Precautions are one thing, this is something else.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Harker]

I've seen lots of places that have started requiring you to fill in the amount of the tip before the transaction is authorized. I assume this is because of stricter regulations by the payment processors.

Personally, I'd prefer this. I've not had any problems so far, but who knows what an unscrupulous restaraunt employee might do, given the chance.

I pay tips with cash whenever possible, so there's no way for the management to track it.

H.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Harker]

Pay pal probably emailed him and it got eaten by the spam filters.

I get a couple of pay pal and ebay account suspension notices a week on my gmail account, and they always end up in the spam box.

I don't have either type of account. :P

H.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Rickz0rz]

Yes, but using silly excuses such as 'shipping numbers' to do it, when you clearly said you were taking donations shouldn't be the way to do it. Also, locking the account is unnecessary if that would be done. If they wanted to check the account, they should do it when it's open to allow more donations to be recieved. PayPal just handled the entire situation in a very sloppy, unprofessional manner.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[yfarren]

Meh. Yea. I would have to agree the description of the problem is pretty stupid on Paypal's part. But I got to disagree with you about leaving the account open longer.

Not to be rude, but "yes, lets let this guy bilk several hundred thousand dollars, and then take the money and run. Then we will investigate. Oh damn the money somehow dissapeared" Seems a really bad policy. If something is suspicious, first make sure there isnt a theif at the other end. Then go on. Dont wait for the theif to take lots of money from lots of people on $5 increments. Stop him first. Then, when you have the time, investigate. Hopefully sooner rather than later. But, do stop the suspected person from using your service, BEFORE they have a chance to use your service to steal lots of peoples money>

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Rickz0rz]

Locking the account from further donations is stupid. If they lock the account, they should investigate it right then and there. There's no reason to lock it and check it 'a few days later'. Don't have the time to investigate? Don't lock it. Mark it as suspecious and investigate it later. It's not like those funds are one-way, only. If they found the money to be fraudulent, they shoudl take care of it then. They know where the funds came from, and if it came down to it, they could simply return the funds to the original payee. If it was REALLY suspecious, they can query the government if it was super suspecious. But locking the account to check it a few days later is asinine.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[MrResistor]

I know, every time I think I might be ready to bite the bullet and use them again, they do something fucked up like this.

I don't normally wish this on anyone, but Paypal is badly in need of some Federal Regulation.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[SenshiSteph]

Something Awful didn't 'just' open an account. They have had a Paypal account for a long time. And they have used it for fundraising efforts before, too.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[skold]

Aside from a PayPal logo on the front, the PayPal Visa card has nothing to do with PayPal. It's issued by Providian, and they manage the card according to their own rules.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

You should always leave a cash tip when possible. Lots of restaurant owners are even bigger dicks than Paypal so it's the only way to be sure the staff get the full amount they should.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

Not entirely true. Something Awful's been using a real payment processing system for some time now since Paypal closed their account previously used for forums registrations and the like. So I suspect this is a new account.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

If paypal believed my friend did something wrong, why not tell him, and ask for a response? Why keep everything secret, and keep the account frozen??

...because that would proactively encourage communication (which would simply end up costing PayPal money) and make it harder to get away with stealing that money in the end?

If PayPal had a policy to randomly steal the money from 1/2000 of its accounts every year, it seems likely it could get away with it. Most of those accounts probably have little cash value, but enough to add up to large profits in sum. Carefully worded policies and and quickly releasing funds when confronted with legal challenges would effectively nullify any downside-liability. And for every time someone responds with a lawyer, PayPal could simply raid another account.

I'm not saying PayPal actually does this, but I'm not sure why the company wouldn't get away with it if it wanted to.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds more like phishing attempts than genuine paypal account suspension alerts

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[dnoyeb]

Sounds highly unlikely. The amount reserved on the CC when you first start a transaction and the amount finally issued/charged are not the same thing. Most likely they authorize a bit over the meal amount to account for the tip. And this is the amount reserved until the transaction is complete.

I doubt filling in the tip before the transaction has to do with any 'strict regulations.' First I have never had to do that. Second, if the charge is $50 you don't even have to sign for it. Let alone all the unsigned charges over the internet...

sidenote: You pay with the CC immediately, but if you want to return something they get 30 days to return the amount to your CC. Thats BS.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Haeleth]

I pay tips with cash whenever possible, so there's no way for the management to track it.

God YES. If you want the money to go to the staff who you're trying to reward with your tip, you give them cash, and do it quietly. If you just want to line their managers' pockets even further, go ahead and use your card.

See this if you don't believe me. Federal minimum wage is about $5/hr, except for employees who receive tips, in which case the employer can cut the "direct" wage as low as two fucking dollars an hour. They have to actually pay them the $5/hour, of course, but by making $3 of each $5 come out of tips, they basically make sure that the employee isn't actually going to benefit at all from your generosity - unless you're an unusually high tipper, they're just going to get $5/hr whether you tip them or not.

Nice one, government. Way to motivate low earners.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Krach42]

This is kind of why I personally think that tipping is bullshit. Of course, I realize that these people require tips to make a living, so I leave a tip.

But that doesn't change the fact that I think that waiters should be paid a real wage, and not have this bullshit run around them where their employers can do this.

Have a slow night, and awesome. You just had a pay cut. Sure, you might have some good days where you earn quite a bit of money more than normal. But you're still being dicked by your employers.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[darksith69]

Why keep everything secret, and keep the account frozen??

Because they can invest that money. When the account is frozen you have to do something to actually unfreeze it, like you said, calling a lawyer to send a nice letter to them.

The point is, if you keep money in paypal it doesn't do anything. It's like keeping money in a bank, you are losing money due to inflation. OTOH, even if you invest in the lowest risk fund of your bank, you will get about 1% income, and you can cancel the investment in less than a week. Actually, my current bank returns 89% of the money immediately and the rest in the next two days.

So Paypal is being the middle man: they invest YOUR money, and when you want it back, they give you the money back, but they get to keep the interests it has generated. As other posters are saying, for big quantities of people, the amount of money can sum a lot, and 1% of "a lot" with practically no risk is a nice bonus. Wouldn't you do the same if you had the chance?

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

Aussies don't tip but more and more places are pushing the tipping. Most of the staff think better tipping would be a great idea until they are told that while they can make $15/hr doing their job now, if tipping go American style, they would be lucky to get $5/hr.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

Paypal does indeed suck. They have stolen $3500 of my money for no good reason at all. My ebay feedback stands at 99.7% with a score of over 2500. I only used Paypal with my ebay account. Paypal can freeze the account at any time for any reason, even if there are 100 items ending tomorrow that state 'I accept Paypal'. They fuck you. They just totally FUCK you.

FUCK YOU PAYPAL.

Still waiting for the day when Google come and make an alternative internet payment system. I have to say it again

FUCK YOU PAYPAL.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[blahplusplus]

"That might actually work, if they were willing to do the whole "further investigation" part. They firmly refuse to do anything."

They do this because 1) it costs them money and 2) there are way too many people abusing paypal already, no company on earth could effectively deal with in a timely manner millions of users fucking around on their system.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[malelder]

I don't tip because society says I gotta. I tip when somebody deserves a tip. When somebody really puts forth an effort, they deserve a little something extra. But this tipping automatically, that shit's for the birds. As far as I'm concerned, they're just doin their job.

Look, I ordered coffee. Now we've been here a long fuckin time, and she's only filled my cup three times. When I order coffee, I want it filled six times.

These ladies aren't starvin to death. They make minimum wage. When I worked for minimum wage, I wasn't lucky enough to have a job that society deemed tipworthy.

Hey, I'm very sorry that the government taxes their tips. That's fucked up. But that ain't my fault. it would appear that waitresses are just one of the many groups the government fucks in the ass on a regular basis. You show me a paper says the government shouldn't do that, I'll sign it. Put it to a vote, I'll vote for it. But what I won't do is play ball. And this non-college bullshit you're telling me, I got two words for that: "Learn to fuckin type." Cause if you're expecting me to help out with the rent, you're in for a big fuckin surprise.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[brandanglendenning]

so maybe this is a job for leonard j. crabs?

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Kamiza Ikioi]

"If paypal believed my friend did something wrong, why not tell him, and ask for a response? Why keep everything secret, and keep the account frozen??"

Maybe the government runs a "No Paypal" list, and your friend's name was similar to a guy who's the friend of a guy who's the second cousin once removed from a man in Eqypt who's wife babysat for Bin Laden's sister-in-law's baby.

On a serious note, is it just me, or is this "Ask all you want, but we won't tell" mentality spreading like a cancer. Everyone figures, well, if you can't do anything to us, why should we even attempt to be curtious.

That's why I like dealing with banks I can actually walk into. People have a much harder time ignoring you face to face. That, and you can be very, very vocal when other customers are there.

I don't use PayPal, though I keep an account around for the occasional transfer that I can't do any other way. It's easier than Western Union to send small amounts like $5 to a friend. Other than that, PayPal is worthless for any large sums or for business purposes, imho. If you are a business, go through a real payment processing service (who does real fraud protection, and gives you control to flag bad sales as well, along with other tools like recurring billing).

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

These ladies aren't starvin to death. They make minimum wage. When I worked for minimum wage, I wasn't lucky enough to have a job that society deemed tipworthy.

You realize that minimum wage is drasitcally lower for workers who receive tips, right?

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[PortWineBoy]

I've worked in many restaraunts and I've never had a manager steal my tips, credit card or otherwise. I made quite a bit of money waiting tables even @ $2/hr + tips. I don't this this rate of pay is really an issue. I don't understand how you belive waitstaff makes only $5/hr with tips? Are you using some sort of anecdotal information for this? A waiters tips are his tips. There is no offset with the hourly wage, nor in any place I know of or have worked in does management take most of your tips away and give you back $3/hr. Waiters are not low wage earners. Yea the benefits are usually nonexistant and the job certainly isn't any dream vacation, but I certainly made more than $5/hr.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[unitron]

"These ladies aren't starvin to death. They make minimum wage."

And you know this to be an absolute fact how, exactly?

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

This one is going to fly over the heads of many people. (as of now two have already missed it)

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do I have to be Mr Pink?

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[tolan-b]

That's complete crap. People pay tips in europe, the difference is that if the waiter doesn't get good tips he still gets to eat, if he does then he gets a bonus.

If someone gives bad service they get complaints and they get fired.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[AndroidCat]

and compare buyers' ip addresses to the ones they registered with

Will that tell them very much? With dynamic IP addresses and IP proxy pooling (AOL and others), it's not always going to zero in on people.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can it is always better to leave the tip in cash.
Some restaurants do not pass on tips left via credit cards to staff.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[malelder]

Jesus...I'm glad there are at least TWO intelligent people who read Slashdot, besides myself. Thanks for redeeming nerdhood (;

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

go to hell and die old man.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

> These ladies aren't starvin to death. They make minimum wage.

Actually, usually they don't. Because tips have become so accepted, in most states there's a different minimum wage for waitresses that factors in the fact that they will probably be making tips.

I had a friend that used to waitress...she made approximately $3 an hour before tips. After tips it averaged much higher, so I'm not saying you should tip for bad service, but you should tip for adequate service and more for good service.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

For doing what? Bringing a few plates, opening a couple of bottles of wine, taking the plates away again. Maybe 5 minutes work. That's £240/hour.

From all people who have ever waited tabels, Fuck You you arrogant ass. You know jack shit about what your talking about.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[delirium_9]

There is no tipping in Japan, and the service is of a much higher level than either Europe or North America. When the Japanese go abroad they know they have to tip, but it really must feel like a waste of money for them considering they have to pay more to get less service.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[beanball75]

Pass. This is why service in Europe sucks - the wait staff are paid a set rate, regardless of their ability or the service you get.

That's just a myth.

However, I read an article recently in the NYTimes that the waitstaff really likes tipping. They have the possibility of getting a monster tip if they perform really well even though nearly all people just leave the same amount regardless.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[garett_spencley]

I've always wondered why more restaurants don't pay their waiters/waitresses more.

The waiters / waitresses are often the only people to deal directly with the customers. Therefore, it would make sense to pay them generously. Better wages for the employees means happier employees and better service for the customers which directly translates into better business.

I'm not in the restaurant business so I might be missing something very important .. but if I ran a restaurant one of the most important points in my business plan would be to pay my waiters / waitresses more than minimum wage.. even though the law allows me to pay them less. I would have no trouble finding decent help... and my customers would be happier because my employees are happier.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[bottlerocket]

I was just hired as a "food-runner" at a moderately upscale restaurant/bar. I'm paid $7 an hour, plus 4% of the waitresses' tips. It's hard work (carrying trays with eight plates of food up two flights of stairs gets old real fast), but my co-worker managed to gross $1100 in his first ten days. On the other hand, that was the result of working 12-hour days and getting 90+ hours during that time.

I hear the waitresses get $2.15 an hour. But assuming that there's five waitresses sharing 4% of their tips with my co-worker (working by himself, not spitting that 4% with another food-runner), each waitress earned ~$550 in tips in a 12-hour workday.

Understand that this is a high-volume establishment, with two floors, a patio, and almost a hundred tables, and we all bust our asses every day. But they're making far more that $5 an hour and smile cheerily the whole time. :)

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Bobby Infinity]

The tips are usually entered when the batch is sent to merchant services. The money doesn't come out of your account immediately when they run your card. The only thing that happens when they swipe your card is verification that you have enough money to cover that transaction. The debit usually happens later in the night when they close, or even the next day. I have no idea why a problem like you discribed would be unique to Paypal. After all, it is still a Visa card. Shouldn't it behave like all the other Visa cards?

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[HD Webdev]

Yea the benefits are usually nonexistant and the job certainly isn't any dream vacation, but I certainly made more than $5/hr.

Location Location Location.

It's fine that you made quite a bit of money. But, then again, it matters how much spare money people have in the area you work at, the type of restaurant (classy?), and the local view on what tip percentages should be.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[matfud]

You will not get "proper professional waiters" until waiters get paid "proper professional wages"

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Blkdeath]

I'm not in the restaurant business so I might be missing something very important .. but if I ran a restaurant one of the most important points in my business plan would be to pay my waiters / waitresses more than minimum wage.. even though the law allows me to pay them less. I would have no trouble finding decent help... and my customers would be happier because my employees are happier.

Actually, it would have the opposite effect. Your staff would be fat and happy so there's no incentive to excel at customer service. Good wait staff can receive upwards of $100-200 in tipout per night in a blue collar restaurant/bar. That's why they earn less than minimum wage - the cheque is often less then their tips. Holidays can see good bar staff earn $200-500 apiece in a single night.

Wait staff in upscale restaurants are only paid as a matter of formality. Serving one good party in a night can garner over $200.

Now in a typical tip-out you have to consider the dishwashers and cooks, but that's only a small percentage.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

I was waiting for somebody to quote that in this thread... +1 QT reference!

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[destiny71]

I use a credit card regularly to pay for dinners.

What happens everytime I use mine is that the restaurant authorizes a payment of the bill PLUS xx%.

I'm not sure of the exact amount, but it's always more than the amount of the bill. From that point, they have up to 3 days to run the final charge thru for whatever amount they want up to the authorized amount.

I thought it strange the first time I used one to pay for a meal, and didn't put in a tip amount. Then checked my account online the next day, and the pending charge was for more than the bill.
3 days later when it became final, it was just for the amount.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

That explains why the service in most European restaurants is terrible - there's no real incentive to please the customer.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[rekoil]

If they're going to automatically shut down accounts overnight, they should have staff on hand to immediately unfreeze said accounts as soon as it's determined that it's legit. I can understand paranoia, as long as the wrongs can be righted quickly and expeditiously. Apparently that is Paypal's failure.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Suppafly]

paypal credit cards are usually through providian which is one of the most shady cc companies that there is. When we were applying for our home loan, the lending agent noticed that my wife's cc was through providian and told us that they were pretty well known for messing up people's credit for no reason.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Suppafly]

shut up, shut up, shut up.

no one fucking cares what you think about the tipping situation in america, this topic has been covered at least 10 times in the past on slashdot.

there is a reason that the only people that think waiters are getting ripped off is people who have never worked as a waiter.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[oxnyx]

This is one of the reason I'm glad I live in Canada where currenty min wage in is 10 somthing an hour. I agree that it is unforunate that if you want to DFT online as a normal person that Paypal is the only major option. I really wish that the major world banks would go after this mark and try to make the systems work a touch better. :(

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[fbjon]

Yes, it's the same in Finland. Waiters don't need tips to survive, since they get paid enough. The only time I "tip" is when I tell someone to keep the change.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Ptraci]

But they aren't really paying more, because the cost of the meal here is less. The full cost of the service is included in the cost of the meal there.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Ptraci]

I don't know why my reply to an above comment got misplaced, but i was referring to the lack of tipping in Japan. I hit the "Reply to This" link under that comment, so my reply should have gone there, but I'm seeing it in the wrong place.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[andrewman327]

Because of PayPal's issues, I use money orders for online auctions. They are cheap and easy to get, and you can avoid PayPal.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[skeptictank]

The longer they keep your money, the more money they can make off of it. Anyone that does business with a bank that isn't federally insured or regulated is asking for a screwing.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[cffrost]

Most of the plates they clear away still have bits of food on them, so at least they're not starving to death.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[shawb]

Apparantly Paypal's problem was that the donations were going to Red Cross. Paypal will only allow donations going to the United Way. Links in TFA show that about 85.8% of money donated to United Way goes to the actual programs they are collecting money for, while 91.1% of the money donated to the Red Cross actually go to help people. While United Way apparantly has lower administrative expenses (3.6% versus 5.4% for Red Cross) the much higher fundraising expenses (10.5% for United Way vs. 3.5% for Red Cross) mean that for every dollar spent, ten cents goes to fundraising. This fundraising expense can easilly be abused by the organization's administrators for their own personal gain. That fundraising expense also goes to basically telemarketers who cold call everyone they can, treat their employees like shit and often skim a larger percent off the top than they are reporting.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[HermanAB]

Actually, I have found that about one in ten restaurant credit card tip payments never appear on my credit card bill. So this is not just a PayPal problem.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[mxyfruvoos]

Nooo... you're full of shit.

• In many European countries, the server's wage in bundled into an extra charge tacked onto the bill ("servizio+VAT" sometimes.)
• Or, it's bundled into the price of all items on the menu.
• Or, it's broken out as a charge for "silverware" and/or "plates" ("coperto").
• Or the people serving you are nuns and to tip them is to offend them.
• Sometimes it's built into the price of food or drinks and then extracted, plus the "thirteenth month" (pension plan for poor people.)
• Or the custom is to leave one or two guilders or deutschmarks / euros.

Complaints equals fired? Rare. Never saw that happen, in the countries I lived in. Bad attitude is just part of the experience.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[man_of_mr_e]

That's was my point really. They *SHOULD* be the same thing. The charge is tied to the authorization via a reference number. If the charge is different from the authorization (or more importantly, MORE than the authorization) then there's no way to know if that's a valid transaction. Sure, there's the signed slip, but they're not going to even bother requesting them for the amounts you see in a restaurant.

From what I understnd, Merchant Fraud (either by the Merchant itself, or it's employees) is one of the largest sources of fraud out there. You can make a ton of money by simply adding a small amount to each transaction, and most people will *NEVER* notice.

Paypal, being owned by Ebay is MUCH more in tune to fraud, and it simply would not surprise me if they would deny any transaction that is larger than the authorized amount.

Note: I'm not saying this *IS* the case, just that it makes sense if it is the case.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[delirium_9]

If by the full cost of the service you mean the $8-12 an hour which these guys get paid then yes, you do pay the full cost.

As for meals costing less here, check out a grocery store here and one in Japan. Then you'll be surprised that meals there don't cost more than they do (ie meals are cheaper relative to the cost of groceries in Japan than here).

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Krach42]

Of course they like tipping. It's just like all the bullshit that people get fed, like recycling, and sales incentives.

I worked for a ISP sales department. When I got there, they had no sales incentives, and people provided fair and accurate service.

Then, a new manager comes on board, and is like, "Why aren't we paying sales incentives?" Suddenly, the job switches from being a relaxed customer oriented job, to a high-pressure if you're not selling the service get of the damned phone job.

I'm not kidding. It completely turned around the way that people were expected to treat the customer, and it was *NOT* towards the customers benefit.

Meanwhile, the employees were fed a line telling them that they had the chance to make awesome rewards out of the program. The first award period someone earned a ridiculous amount of money extra. But this was *one* person, who was probably as enjoyable to deal with as a used-car salesman. The majority of the people earned nothing.

So, let me break it down. Company gets $X to pay out in rewards, but since only Y number of employees even qualify for a reward they only pay some A amount less than X out to those few employees. Thus, rather than pay everyone $X/Y more money and improving everyone's disposition, they only spend $A where AX on a few people who really worked their ass off, but more so than they're being paid extra.

So, let's lay this out. Option A where everyone gets more money, everyone is better off, except the company paying. Option B which is sales incentives, "everyone" who wins is the company and the few sales associates who work their ass to the bone, but worked more than they got back. Hm... let's see here... call me stupid, but I think the company likes Option B, and will try and convince everyone that Option B is better.

How? Just point to the top rewards-earners and say, "You could have earned more money, if only you had worked as hard as him/her!" Which is total bullshit.

The whole idea of commisions and tipping is bullshit. Pay the waiters $10 and hour, and they won't complain about their "loss" from tipping. Stop telling people that tipping and commissions are better for them, because statistically, they're not.

It's like pointing at Bill Gates and telling kids that if they try really hard, that they can be just like him. Bullshit. Statistically, there's a very limited number of children who will turn out to be the next Bill Gates.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Gob Gob]

" I don't tip because society says I gotta. I tip when somebody deserves a tip. "

Should there be another reason?

What is so wrong with paying staff what they are worth. I've done my time in hospitality - in Aust. - and I have always been paid fair money. Each time I go a tip (or even verbal thanks) it was just a bonus. This "need-to_tip_in_the_US" is crap - pay people waht they are worth, price accordingly and allow patrons to say THANKS! When they want to.

Knowing what it is like to work in hospitality when I tip I tip very well - I know the effort the staff have put in to make my experience what I wanted.

This and the finger prints are keeping me from visiting a great part of the world.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[yrogreg]

Umm, have you ever taken economics?

If the overpaid wait staff become fat and happy and lazy, what's to stop you, the employer, from hiring someone else? If you pay well and treat your employees well, then your job should be in-demand, relative to other jobs of a similar nature.

So, if your staff is fat and happy it would be just as easy to let them go- it's not as though these jobs have low turnover to begin with- and hire people who are willing to work harder. If they're lean and happy, though, they're going to be more willing to work hard to make sure they can keep that well-paying, competitive job.

Viola! you've just created an Efficiency Wage!

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Blkdeath]

Umm, have you ever taken economics?

No, but I've worked in the bar and restaurant industry for years. I love it when econ grads come in and try to "fix" what's wrong with a store. Typically they throw around a lot of numbers and in the end customers and staff alike are less happy.

So, how long have you been a server?

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[megarich]

I do agree waiters should get a real wage BUT I don't believe in tipping if the service is that bad. Even if the service is a little below average I'll leave a good tip but if you're that bad, why should I leave you a tip for not doing your job right?

On that note, I did not read into the full story so forgive any erroneous comments. I'm just throwing my 2 cents in. Maybe paypal really are assholes but I can see the other side too. You do have unscrupolous people out there who'll do anything or use any excuse to make a buck. If paypal genuinely felt that this could be suspicous activity then kudos to them.

Personally I'm skeptical to donate money to any charity. It's not that I don't want to help, on the contrary I do it's that I don't know who to trust or if my money is going where it's suppose to. Many "charities" won't even donate most the money to the cause making you wonder where does the money really go to.

If anyone knows any reputable charities out there I'm all ears....

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[meme_police]

The restaurants are being stupid then. Every place I go gets auth for up to 50% more than my meal cost and then charges the card the appropriate amount after I fill in the tip. This is also standard practice for online purchases and gasoline:

"Sometimes, though, the merchant doesn't know how much you'll charge until after the authorization must be made. A good example of this is at the gas pump.

When you swipe your credit card, a request for authorization is made immediately. Because the amount of the purchase is unknown at that point, the merchant asks for authorization up to a specified amount. For this example, the authorization request is for $50. This amount also shows in your Account Summary as a pending charge.

Your gasoline purchase ends up being $22.50. That's the actual charge that will be paid to the merchant."

And it's not the banks responsibility to check your credit card charges. I hope I'm not the only person that keeps CC receipts until my statement comes.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Doug97]

Oh man, are you serious? Where can a Scotsman in Montreal get one of these cards?

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

You think that's bad? Paypal raped my dog.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[man_of_mr_e]

I really don't know where you shop, or eat, or get gas, but it's nowhere around where I live.

All gas stations around here authoize (at most) $10 on your card (usually it's $1, just to see if the account is active or not). The problem is, since these authorizations stick around for 5-7 days, you are denied access to your money if everyone over-authorizes your account. And with check cards being so common (and most places no longer accept checks, so check cards are a requirement) that would be bad news.

Hell, I have so many $3-7 charges on my card that i'd only be able to use half (or less) of my paycheck if this were the case.

Further, if a restaurant authorized 50% (or even 20%) on top of my bill without asking me, i'd never go there again. I've never seen that happen and I eat out almost every day.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[meme_police]

Wow, I guess it's so rare that Chase, one of the largest credit card issuers in the USA, is stupid for including this practice in their FAQ because according to you know one does it? Tell me, what good is a $1 auth for $50 worth of gasoline? Sounds like your gas station proprietors are opening themselves up to a lot of grief.

I've personally bought 8 thousand dollars worth of computer equipment over the course of a week with almost double that amount in auths and never was denied.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[CohibaVancouver]

But that doesn't change the fact that I think that waiters should be paid a real wage, and not have this ******** run around them where their employers can do this.

I agree with you in principle. However, the problem for me is this: The places where tips are accepted invariably have better service. Here in Vancouver there's a popular restaurant chain where some of the locations are unionized, servers are paid more, and have tip pools, and some are non-unionized and the servers keep the tips. The latter restaurants always have orders of magnitude better service than the former.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[Anonymous Coward]

So, PayPal gets to take a break from tracking fraudulent activity over the weekend because the staff isn't working? What happens when someone committing fraud has already got the money in their bank account, and taken the cash out? Gee, guess all that money just disappears.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[iocat]

Check out Charity Watch . The Red Cross is consistantly one of the best to donate to. United Way is consistantly one of the worse. The religious organizations vary. Charities quickly set up to help one cause, like a specific natural disaster, are usually run by amateurs or scammers, and either way most of the money gets frittered away, either through avarice or incompetance. And, I guess this goes without saying, ever give money to a "charity" that cold-calls you.

Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob

[TheoMurpse]

I pay tips in cash so that way, in case there is a tipping pool, my money potentially could sneakily stay in MY waiter's pocket, and not go partially to some shitty waiter that didn't get tipped at all just because he's employed there.

No good deed...

[ari_j]

No good deed shall go unpunished. I really don't like Paypal, for this and many other reasons. What ever happened to e-Gold?

Re:No good deed...

[Wolfkin]

Still there. There's also Pecunix, NetPay, GoldMoney, eBullion, webmoney, and a whole bunch more.

Re:No good deed...

[Anonymous Coward]

Still around. Unfortunately, they seem to have gotten tangled up in a mess, coincidentally also due to account freezing. Go google for "costagold" and "e-gold" and read up on the fun.

Editorialized version for the lazy:

Back in 2001, "Costagold" promises 180% return on your money in 8 days. Morons transfer money to them, and 8 days later, costagold transfers it back plus the return percentage. As it happened, e-gold was used as the conduit for these transactions.

Obviously, the 180% return to old investments was being funded with new suckers' money. At some point it had to burst, and just before it did, Costagold submitted a transfer request to move all their funds out of e-gold into various bank accounts. (i.e. take the money and run) E-gold decided this was odd, and tried to contact the costagold account owners to confirm the transaction. The costagold crooks never responded (and probably took off for the hills), and e-gold froze the costagold account.

All sounds good, except now the idiots who gave their money to costagold wanted it back, and wanted it from the frozen costagold account. They filed a class action lawsuit against costagold, and this was where things got weird: e-gold decided to side with costagold in the suit and refused to release the funds to the "investors." (Maybe they were holding it in case the costagold owners came back?)

Perhaps they were trying to take a principled stand for property rights. Chances are there was no contract promising 180% returns, or anything really, so the money was "rightfully" the property of costagold, since the investors transferred it of their own free will. Maybe they were afraid of setting a precedent for allowing customer accounts to be seized (part of the reason they hold the gold in escrow in an offshore corporation). Or the cynic says they wanted to hold onto that gold indefinitely because costagold would never show up to claim it.

Regardless of motivation, e-gold came down on the side of a Ponzi scam, and when the case went to jury trial, they were obviously going to lose. They reached a settlement, and just this year the refund checks finished going out. They didn't go bankrupt, though. (There was talk of that during the suit, but perhaps that was just to convince the plaintiffs that the settlement was best since a bankrupt company could potential pay much less.)

Anyway, let this be a lesson to you that money is a messy business! Someone will always be pissed.

Re:No good deed...

[webteeth]

What ever happened to e-Gold?

eBay didn't buy them.

Re:No good deed...

[shawb]

Isn't there a difference between an investor and someone who falls for a pyramid scam? Aren't pyramid scams illegal (Well, I know it's against the law to use the USPS for a pyramid scam.)

Great job, PayPal.

[Stick_Fig]

Now you have a PR nightmare on your hands.

Re:Great job, PayPal.

[ottffssent]

They've done this sort of thing before. Often. To big and small. And yet, they're still raking in the dough. A quick search for "paypal sucks" brings up a quarter million or so pissed-off ex-paypal users.

As always, don't keep money at paypal that you can't afford to lose.

Re:Great job, PayPal.

[mikeb39]

Paypal knows that, but paypal doesn't care. They don't care at all about PR, because they know (or believe) that their massive ebay base is so unshakable that "a few bad apples" can just be ignored.

Re:Great job, PayPal.

[Metteyya]

Just closed my account with this /. link as "Other" reason of walking away. Never used it anyway, but after reading PayPalSucks.com I wouldn't like to use it even once.

Re:Great job, PayPal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you have a PR nightmare on your hands.

And how would a "PR nightmare" affect PayPal?

Nobody trusts them, and it's been like that for years. They've been living in a constant PR nightmare.

Re:Great job, PayPal.

[iSlak]

I knew it was only a matter of time until PayPal shot themselves in the foot with something like this. Better yet, it was a charity drive they fucked over. This company's business practices might finally receive serious media scrutiny over this.

Re:Great job, PayPal.

[DutchSter]

I knew it was only a matter of time until PayPal shot themselves in the foot with something like this. Better yet, it was a charity drive they fucked over. This company's business practices might finally receive serious media scrutiny over this.

No..I doubt it. PayPal's running their own "Donate to Katrina" effort on their homepage. Any bad PR would simply be countered roughly as follows: "As a company, we are doing what's right, which is why we provide a method for our users to contribute to the relief efforts. Those rumors of other people collecting money being locked out? Well, sad to say, the hucksters always come out after a disaster, and you can never be too cautious. We'd hate for someone to feel they're contributing to a good cause only to be taken advantage of. That's why we encourage people to only use our official contribution link."

Sad...but true. On the other hand, I can sort of, not totally, agree with that point. Personally, my contributions have been in the form of equipment loans, cash for gas/food, etc, for some of my friends who are helping the Red Cross with Amateur Radio support. I *know* that's going to a good cause.

Re:Great job, PayPal.

[Nasarius]

As always, don't keep money at paypal that you can't afford to lose.

Yeah. After hearing all the stories about people who got screwed, who in their right mind would treat PayPal like a bank account? As soon as you receive the money, withdraw it to a real bank account. Then, if you're paranoid, transfer it to your savings account that PayPal doesn't know about.

Re:Great job, PayPal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Somehow I'm reading all these posts in a mobster voice. (Don't ask)

Re:Great job, PayPal.

[mosch]

I've told my own personal "paypal sucks" story a number of times... every time i've posted it I get a bunch of repsonses that say "well they never did that to me, so clearly they don't suck. it was probably your fault."

I've given up. Anybody who deals with paypal is begging for annoyance.

Re:Great job, PayPal.

[Johnno74]

What was the story? Got a link to a previous comment or something?

Re:Great job, PayPal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Psst. Matt Haughey thinks you're a pussy.

And he's right. Go fuck your little brother, faggot.

Re:Great job, PayPal.

[mosch]

Post non-anon, Steve.

As a something awful member, this disappoints me.

[scrain]

While I haven't contributed to the fund in question, paypal's amazing ability to decide when and where to steal money for their own reasons is amazing. I really hope some attorney general takes them to task for this one.

i hate paypal

[silverkniveshotmail.]

this is fucking bullshit!
Paypal: Where the fuck is my $50 going now? What the fuck is this shit!?

Oh, and the article leaves out that we donated this $22,000 in about seven hours, and lowtax was giving people free shit for doing it out of his own pocket, which was the reason he wasn't just linking the red cross. SA is down from the hurricane (http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/) so there was no option to use their own credit card system.

I am never using paypal again.

Re:i hate paypal

[silverkniveshotmail.]

copy and paste snafu. I don't know how it happened quite like that though. http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor

Re:i hate paypal

[DrEldarion]

It's okay, we'll all go take pictures of their corporate HQ or something.

Seriously, though, this is bullshit. I was (am) honestly proud to be a member of a community that was raising over $3,000 PER HOUR to help the hurricane victims, and Paypal couldn't be arsed to spend 10 seconds looking into the issue instead of just shutting it down. They're notoriously hard to communicate with as well, so this is just going to put further delays on things.

Thanks, Paypal, and a big Fuck You.

Re:i hate paypal

[yfarren]

It is odd. You are telling US that Lowtax did all this stuff, but the article fails to mention where you told it to paypal. Did you get a receipt for the red cross? Did you show it to paypal? I mean, you tell us how you cant show them a shipping invoice. But what DO you show them? I mean, you have to know there are a ton of scammers out there, just taking in people's "Donations". Dont you think Paypal had some level of obligation to protect those who are giving to the relief effort? To make sure they aren't giving relief to "line my pockets"? You are pissed that your account is suspeneded. But you dont tell us what you have done to show paypal you ARENT scammers. Just having read your article, I dont see why I should think you arent a scammer. Give me a link to who you donated the money too. Have THEM show me that you did. Give that link to paypal. Then, give them a business day. THEN bitch and moan. Right now, all I hear is the bitching and moaning. Which, while popular on slashdot, isnt very helpful. To you, or the Hurrican Victims

Re:i hate paypal

[silverkniveshotmail.]

oh fuck you.
They could at least do some form of investigation. something, anything. instead of just pulling the plug.
Oh, and P.S. the "enter" key is useful.

Re:i hate paypal

[Anonymous Coward]

The link was up for less than 12 hours, the money was accumulating to be donated. They're aren't able to prove the donation because PayPal didn't even give them time to actually donate it.

Re:i hate paypal

[yfarren]

Cause "fuck you" is so helpful. How long ago did they suspend tha account?

Would you rather, in General, they do the investigation (at least one business day, most likely more like 4-5) first, and then Suspend the account, after a scammer has fleeced several hundred thousand dollars, or that they suspend the account, and THEN investigate?

I mean, seriously, if you were making the policy, and you wanted it to protect people, which policy would YOU adopt?

Re:i hate paypal

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see how the person could provide proof of a donation to whichever organization when the donation could have never occured due to Paypal freezing the account.

Re:i hate paypal

[jez9999]

Why did you use Paypal? Why didn't you find some other merchant service? Why didn't you tell the guy to do this? Seriously, you know what Paypal is like, yet you all chose to pay money to them willingly.

Re:i hate paypal

[yfarren]

So, in Fact, they HAVENT GIVEN A DIME TO ANYONE?

And the only assurance that paypal has, that they will, is cause, well, they say so?

I am sorry, but I, for one, am glad paypal has something in place to minimize the damage done by scammers. Does it sometimes step on a real organizations toes? Probably. Sad that they world isnt totally trustworthy. But, in a world where people DO scam, isnt it better to try and keep that a little in check?

Or would you rather paypal let scammers Go on taking peoples money, until somone has the time to getting around to looking at it?

Or is your Gripe "OMG! Paypal hasnt INSTANTLY fixed my problem, OVER THE WEEKEND?"

Re:i hate paypal

[Anonymous Coward]

paypal's problem isn't that they think they're taking the donation money and pocketing it. they're asking for shipping information you idiot.

Re:i hate paypal

[silverkniveshotmail.]

right, paypal has to keep their wonderful reputation in regards to 'protecting people'. They're great at 'protecting people'

Re:i hate paypal

[yfarren]

Paypal Has a bunch of heuristics, as to what is suspicious. No PERSON suspended this account at all (I am pretty sure. I dont actually KNOW. But paypal is pretty big, so it is a good guess). One of those is, If somone is making lots of money really fast, lets make sure they are a real entity. So the error message is a little off. The bottom line is, in 12 hours, shortly after they opened, they got $20k. Paypal wants to make sure this ISNT a scam. One way, see the reciepts that something is sent. You want to tell me this guy is bitching because the ERROR message is so screwy? How often has your compiler told you to look at the wrong line, cause several hundred lines later you missed a semicolon? The account is suspicious. One solution, show us you are shipping stuff. OK. Fine. Bad solution. Stupid Error message. But the underlying "your account is suspicious" seems, to me at least, emminently reasnoble. So a person needs to look into it. People take time. Unfortunate, but True.

Re:i hate paypal

[AnimeFreak]

My work is accepting donations for the Canadian Red Cross, and I do not see our bank shutting us down because we're pulling in donations to give to some charity.

Paypal fucked everyone over, and it is unfortunate.

Re:i hate paypal

[silverkniveshotmail.]

google search: paypal+frozen

Re:i hate paypal

[yfarren]

Right because the First unverified story from an anonymous source who is trying to get you to give HIM/HER money, to use HIS/HER credit card payment service it TOTALLY reliable....

Re:i hate paypal

[yfarren]

and the third link, yet another horror story, by, Frank, Who wait, links to the exact same paypal alternative. You know what, I think I will use that alternative from now on. Cause so many people are having problems with paypal....

Re:i hate paypal

[Anonymous Coward]

congratulations. you clicked three links. you win teh intarweb.

Re:i hate paypal

[Velsk]

I'm no expert on charity fundraising, but I'm under the impression that you raise the funds and then give them to the foundation. So since this happened in under 7 hours, and the funds are now frozen, how is he supposed to send the money to the Red Cross and get a receipt for PayPal?

Re:i hate paypal

[NickFortune]

So, in Fact, they HAVENT GIVEN A DIME TO ANYONE?

Well, they've done previous charity fundraisers it seems. I'm assuming the cash got there on those occasions. They haven't given any cash in this, but then they haven't had much of a chance what with paypal freezing the account, have they?

And the only assurance that paypal has, that they will, is cause, well, they say so?

Well, yes. Surely most of paypal's ebay transactions fall into that category.

Does it sometimes step on a real organizations toes? Probably. Sad that they world isnt totally trustworthy.

Unfortunately, paypal has a history of such behaviour. People are beginning to add paypal to the "isn't totally trustworthy list". Personally, I lost faith in PayPal after they tried to abscond with the tip jar for the AbiWord project.

But, in a world where people DO scam, isnt it better to try and keep that a little in check?

Perhaps. But if they're going to assume responsiblity for such actions, they should also assume responsibility for their mistakes. And they should have some sort of customer services department. Actual people you can talk to on the phone who are empowered to sort out problems like this.

When they deliberately hide behind submission forms, people are apt to wonder if the scammers in this case are not paypal themselves.

Or is your Gripe "OMG! Paypal hasnt INSTANTLY fixed my problem, OVER THE WEEKEND?"

I think they problem is that it happened at all. And that it keeps on happpening for a lot of people.

Re:i hate paypal

[Anonymous Coward]

PayPal is wanting proof of SHIPMENT from the Seller to the Buyer (donators). I suppose receipts with the Seller's tax-id number, date, address and buyer's name and address and donation amount would do the trick. Of course, the tax-id number will need to be registered as a non-profit org with the IRS; otherwise, the money has to go back and be donated through some other organization.

Re:i hate paypal

[Flakeloaf]

How they have avoided serious investigation for so long eludes me. Any other individual who abused a trust and hend onto the property of another person with no reason and no explanation, regardless of the terms of their AUP (the likes of which grow more toothless with each passing year) would be incarcerated.

Even if they did release the funds, their initial action and the profit they gained from collecting for charity - yes, their computer may not know but the person reviewing the file sure as hell ought to - will be an absolute PR disaster that will drive us all to their largest credible competitor.

As soon as one materialises.

Re:i hate paypal

[Flakeloaf]

And the only assurance that paypal has, that they will, is cause, well, they say so?
Yeah, because 60,000 paying customers don't know who they've been dealing with for the last four years. Moron.

Re:i hate paypal

[arkanes]

Before you write any more stupid ass defenses of Paypal, you should spend a little time comparing what real banks and legitimate money processors do in the same circumstances, with what Paypal does, who has none of the same legal obligations and takes a great deal of advantage of that fact.

Re:i hate paypal

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude... forget "real banks." All money agents have to report suspicious activity. An account is opened and suddenly gets $22K? With no purchase orders or receipts like you expect for a merchant? That's a TEXTBOOK example of a smurfing account. Paypal is just following the anti-money-laundering laws.

Re:i hate paypal

[holloway]

It's not a new account, it's had heavy use in the past, the account owner is reputable, and if they'd checked the referrer they'd see the reason why it's getting so much cash. If they checked the history they'd see it's handled money for many charities in the past. Try reading the article next time, it's not a new account.

Re:i hate paypal

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

While I'm fairly certain this isn't a scam in any way, if it was, would having some guys money frozen really help? Paypals not refunding all of this money, they're just saying "hey, someones making too much money too quickly, they're probably doing something illegal so we can steal it and they wont go after us".
Itd be different if they decieded this was fradulent and refunded all funds, but as is they just keep it.

Re:i hate paypal

[Anonymous Coward]

Me too. 5 emails and I even tried calling them. Have you ever tried to find their number? It's all but impossible and you just get to talk to a machine.
Most of the alternatives are crap too. Online payments and banking is a sham, but Paypal suck the hardest.

Re:i hate paypal

[terry_dyne]

The existing SA account was suspended by paypal last year for violation of their adult content restrictions. That's why you have to use a credit card with another processor to subscribe or buy forum features.

So, this was either a new account or someone's personal account. Given that, such heavy activity in a short period of time is suspicious, even absent the complaints Paypal received. Suspending the account isn't really that unreasonable, although paypal's chaotic process of doing so and unresponsive customer service can be criticized.

THEY DID IT TO ME TOO!!!!!!

[yoduh]

they locked my personal account AND My relief account. Got $4,000 in two days to give to a few members on the site who had their houses flooded out. I've been working with Paypal. I took off notice about a percentage going to the redcross - and they want all my tax info. I'd post the site but I dont want to see the site get ./'ed

Re:THEY DID IT TO ME TOO!!!!!!

[Krach42]

I ran a donation for the PearPC legal fund against Maui X-Stream (it was on slashdot)

I collected about $1k in a few days, and PayPal calls me up while I'm trying to sleep, and they're like: "Did you know that you have had a large amount of money going into your account?" I'm like "Yeah, last I checked it was exactly this balance..." "Are you done asking me stupid questions now?"

Re:THEY DID IT TO ME TOO!!!!!!

[silverkniveshotmail.]

I ran a donation for the PearPC legal fund against Maui X-Stream

What happened to the money?

Re:THEY DID IT TO ME TOO!!!!!!

[skold]

Isn't it obvious? PayPal stole it and used it to throw an office party.

Re:THEY DID IT TO ME TOO!!!!!!

[Krach42]

I have the money sitting in a bank account earning interest while we (the main PearPC-devels) decide what will be done with the money.

The donation said that any amount not used for the purpose of suing MXS would be spent for the benefit of PearPC development.

Now, we're looking into possibly donating some to the SFLC (our lawyers, and a good lawyer for any GPL project that needs help). But many of our developers are lacking good money, and could use some money (not in just a "it'd be nice to have it..." but generally as in "you know what'd be good? food.")

So, we'll see what's going to happen. At least some of the money should be going to a charity though.

Re:THEY DID IT TO ME TOO!!!!!!

[silverkniveshotmail.]

Does pearpc even have much of a future in the long term with apple ditching ibm and going for intel?

??? revealed

[Zork the Almighty]

1) allow people to open accounts
2) collect donations for disaster relief
3) SIEZE MONEY
4) Profit!

Remember people, PayPal is not a bank!

Re:??? revealed

[FyreFiend]

That's what I don't understand. Why aren't they legally considered a bank? They handle money transfers like a bank, there are PayPal credit cards.
If they want to play at being a bank then they should have to follow the same rules as the rest.

Re:??? revealed

[loraksus]

5. Be dragged out of their offices by a mob and hanged from lamp posts.

Well... one can hope.

Re:??? revealed

[yfarren]

no, but they are federally regulated. And They arent "SEIZE[ing] MONEY". They have suspended an account for suspicious behavior. You are telling me, a new account, taking in $3500/hour, right after a natural disaster isnt a little, hmm, suspicious?

Re:??? revealed

[jez9999]

3) i's before e's except after seize.

Re:??? revealed

[Skye16]

I would say that's the one time it isn't suspicious - at least not compared to any other time.

The odds of someone setting up a new account, taking in $3500/hour, when absolutely nothing is going on in the world, and that account not being shady would seem, to me, to be incredibly low.

Whereas, during a national disaster, hundreds or thousands of people running hundreds or thousands of sites with "communities", running charity "events" (auctions, raffles, etc, etc) with all proceeds going to the Red Cross (remember, you need proof that person X actually donated Y dollars, and the best way to do that, considering the functionality of the Red Cross donation system, is to run it through yourself). I would say that, during a national disaster, this is the one time that a brand new account bringing in that much money would be less suspicious than any other time.

Re:??? revealed

[MrLint]

The feds decided that paypal wasnt a bank.

However this would probably be a good time to collect all the frozen donation account stories and press the congress to deal with this issue.

Re:??? revealed

[skeptictank]

Actually, it would be more accurate to say it's not a licensed bank.

What a surprise

[jrockway]

Just when I thought PayPal might be worth doing business with, this. They must have a world class PR department over there -- "Hey guys. Everyone thinks we're evil." "Oh, I know, let's freeze the donations for the Katrina victims. Everyone will think we're great after that."

Absolutely amazing. I hope Google uses this as an opportunity to launch GMoney or whatever they're calling it.

BTW, good spelling /. editors. `Aweful', you could say.

Afternoon nap survey.

[Anonymous Coward]

Afternoon nap survey.

Now

[Anonymous Coward]

Goon Justice.

I think I speak for many of us when I say..

[doormat]

Fuck You Paypal. If there is ever a reason never to use your service again, this is it. May Google open up an online payment system and wipe you off the face of the planet.

Re:I think I speak for many of us when I say..

[Anonymous Coward]

Kyanka was stupid enough to use PayPal instead of a legitimate service. Fuck him and his "community" of idiot mouthbreathers.

Re:I think I speak for many of us when I say..

[ValiantSoul]

I for one will welcome our new google money overlords!

Google can straight up murder Paypal's ass if they want - they have my vote!

Hmm..

[Anonymous Coward]

I sense a little anger here...

I loathe your wretched, vile, disgusting, bloated waste of a company with every last fibre of my body. You're a grotesque, swollen parasite whose existence hinges solely on the lack of competition.

Yes, definitely a little anger showing through.

Seriously, don't use PayPal for important stuff. I haven't read their terms lately (it's like, what, 30 pages long), but I wouldn't be surprised if they can shut him down because of his "offensive" web site, or because he used copyrighted screen shots on his page, or because he mocked and disparaged PayPal, or left the dash out of his zip+4 code, or pretty much anything else that they feel like.

Re:Hmm..

[Bob Finklestein]

This is not the first time PayPal screwed over Lowtax. You used to be able to register for the Awful Forums with PayPal (in case you don't know, the Awful Forums cost a one time $10 to join, unless you get banned and have to pay again), but they pulled out on him, claiming the forums were "inappropriate content" and left Lowtax owed a great deal of money.

I think that is how the story goes, goons or others, feel free to correct me.

Re:Hmm..

[Flakeloaf]

Not quite. There was a subform in which some users sometimes posted pornographic photographs. This was against Paypal's TOS, so they pulled the plug on his service before he could pull the plug on the photos. That forum no longer exists, but the "No Paypal" policy remains.

Regardless, his website currently hosts no offensive content, because it has NO content other than a "Hey guys, raise money and help people!" message.

Re:Hmm..

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time (every month or so) that I go to SA thinking "Hey, I'm bored at lunch and want to read something funny.", he manages to have gay porn on the front page and that causes the company webfilter to kick in and ban all of SA.

PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[ReformedExCon]

I wonder if this is related to the PayPal emails I've been receiving recently regarding suspicious activity on my account. From what I understand, Paypal does not have various safeguards that can help keep fraud to a minimum, unlike banks which are required by law to have these protections applied to all their transactions. Unfortunately, there really isn't an easier method of money transfers on the web than PayPal.

Someone enterprising enough could probably come up with a good online payment system that isn't fraught with fraud. I could possibly not have to re-enable my account every other day when PayPal's automated fraud detection system finds something amiss with my account. I'd switch in a heartbeat.

Hopefully those poor people in New Orleans can get the money and supplies they need to rebuild. It's a sick tragedy what's going on down there. I've been through hurricanes before, but I've never seen anything as bad as this in a non-Third World country.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[schatten]

Do you really believe those "suspicious activity" reports you are getting? They are phishing for your information.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[ReformedExCon]

PayPal has my information already. They need me to verify my information to make sure that my account activity is actually my activity and not someone else trying to hack my account (this is what I believe the case to be).

(Back on topic) I heard Americare is a very good charity to donate to in times of disaster.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[nekojin]

Indeed, the recent storm of 'suspicious activity' emails from Paypal are NOT really from Paypal, and if you followed any links from them and revealed personal information, well, you better go change it and/or cancel any accounts, cause you just got phished.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[nekojin]

No...dude, seriously. You got phished. I got those same exact emails. I hope nothing bad happens to your stuff but if I were you I'd change all my passwords and call the bank to make sure nothing unusual has been going on.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[ReformedExCon]

????!!!!

I've never heard of that term before (phished), so I looked it up on Google. I'm one unhappy camper...

Looks like I have a little bit of business to take care of. Why doesn't my virus scanner catch these things?

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[mr i want to go home]

You're not kidding? I think you've been had my friend. If I were you, I'd close that account like right now.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Rycross]

Because its not a virus, just some plain old-fashioned social engineering.

A good rule of thumb is never disclose personal information to a web page you follow through an email link. You always always navigate to the page manually (type in www.paypal.com), and if there aren't instructions on how to find the page manually, then its a phishing email.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[richie2000]

I wonder if this is related to the PayPal emails I've been receiving recently regarding suspicious activity on my account.

Hook, line, sinker and a lifetime subscription to Field and Stream. I was wondering what kind of gullible soul fell for those badly created phishing scams. Apparently, it's reformed ex-cons. Tell you what, roll back some of that reformation and take another look at those e-mail.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[E8086]

Didn't a bunch of fake donation sites pop up after the tsunami last year? Paypal may be attempting to verify the authenticity of the cause, we don't want the donations to end up in the pockets of scammers. For the technicality of nothing sold, they could sell shirts with the money going to the relief effort, but I don't know how that will effect its status as a charitable donation for tax purposes.
Or as you said, some scammers used the donate info to get his paypal account name and are going phishing for account access worth over $20,000. Either way I'd use Paypal's "Contact Us" link. One of the screen caps says contact appeals@paypal so it should be legit if he's seeing that while logged into paypal.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, type in "https://www.paypal.com".

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Creepy Crawler]

And I didnt there was anybody that naive to believe those scam mails.

Wow.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Narchie Troll]

"I wonder if this is related to the PayPal emails I've been receiving recently regarding suspicious activity on my account ..." " ... I could possibly not have to re-enable my account every other day when PayPal's automated fraud detection system finds something amiss with my account ..."

"Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well."

Apparently Jesus couldn't save you from an elementary phishing scam. Might want to call up the Big Guy and check on your coverage.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[IdntUnknwn]

You've almost definitely been had. Please visit these links for more information:

How can I tell the difference between a real PayPal email and a fake one?
What should I do if I receive a fake email?

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[dtfinch]

the PayPal emails I've been receiving recently regarding suspicious activity ... have to re-enable my account every other day when PayPal's automated fraud detection finds something amiss

Mod parent funny I guess. If it's not funny-joke, it's funny-oops.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Shano]

I've done quite well with the following policy:

1. If it says it's from Paypal, it's a scam.

Obviously, the receipts and so on from sending and receiving funds are legitimate, but don't tell me anything I don't know already. They also don't need me to take any action. Everything else is crap.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that your sig applies here. Anyone easily fooled to believe a fairy tale like "The Bible" is easily phished.

Nice work, champ. Some of your old friends, you know from the days before you made that nick, got you pretty good.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

If you're that stupud, what are you doing on slashdot? This is news for Nerds and you seem to be a Luser who doesn't know how to use his Compaq.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Sly Mongoose]

Hook, line, sinker...

I think that's exactly how you fell for Ex-con's brand of dead-pan humour. Hope you enjoy that sub. to Field'n'Stream...

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[richie2000]

I hope you're right. I'd hate for anyone to take those phishing messages seriously...

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Cpyder]

You *are* kidding, right?

Why doesn't my virus scanner catch these things?
--
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.

Most virus scanners nowadays have got a 'JesusSaver'-feature. This means that they pass the information they get in on to Him, and if He says it's OK they don't do further analysis on the sample they receive. After all, He is the one who can decide between good and bad, and why should they question His judgement, right?

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Anonymous Coward]

And I didn't think there was anyone that dull to not understand the irony.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[WWWWolf]

Why doesn't my virus scanner catch these things?

The anti-virus/anti-spam stuff tries to stop spam. They can't catch everything. Furthermore, the whole point of phishing e-mail is that it looks legit enough that careless people believe them. Automated spam traps can't catch stuff that looks really legitimate. "Oops, looks like this important security warning was miscategorised by my two-penny spam filter. Better tell it not to do that again."

Here's a hint: Never trust any instructions you get from email unless you are absolutely certain who you're dealing with - be they requests to reset passwords or check information (log on to the REAL site, don't follow the links in email!) or other kinds of instructions (send money, check out this attached security patch that surely seems to be scanned by some anti-virus proggie you don't even have, etc...)

Conmen ruined email as a communication medium, now they're slowly ruining Internet banking.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[m50d]

Do you really believe those "suspicious activity" reports you are getting?

If you have to ask if someone's joking you already know the answer.

This place gets dumber every time I visit

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Anonymous Coward]

0M6, ReformedExcon 607 cruc1f0wn3d!!!!1

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Cro Magnon]

I have a question about these PayPal emails. I've been getting them too, but I don't HAVE a PayPal account. How can I give them my account information so they can straighten things out, when I don't HAVE an account?

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[TCM]

This place gets dumber every time I visit

Do I see a pattern there?

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[LnxAddct]

Please tell me you're kidding! If you're not, those e-mails aren't legit, it is scam artists stealing your information.
Regards,
Steve

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Nethead]

Don't worry. Jesus will save him, again.

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Anonymous Coward]

Great comment...friend!

Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe

[Castar]

Well, in order to verify that you don't have an account, just send them your SSN, date of birth, full name, driver's license number, checking account number, and your mother's maiden name.

That should stop the emails.

Coral Cache link

[Deraj DeZine]

Here's a Coral Cache link: Something Awful Paypal fiasco

I think this might be a good idea since Something Awful was hosted in New Orleans and their main servers are obviously not online at the moment, so that temporary site is probably going to be blown away soon.

Re:Coral Cache link

[chrispyman]

Not likely since their temp servers are with Dreamhost, and they seem to weather /.'ings pretty well. In any case their main servers ARE back up and running.

Re:Coral Cache link

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, you're right. I wasn't expecting what I thought was a temporary server to handle it so well. I also couldn't post the link anonymously without waiting 18 minutes or whatever the limit on Slashdot is now (at which point I thought the server would be toast and we'd be robbing the site's bandwidth).

Paypal Strikes Again

[Entertainment Watch]

I totally agree about Paypal being a horrible provider of payment services. They are more then glad to take your 3% of each transaction as their fee, yet their service is horrible.

I had issues with them a few times now, from transactions on eBay and other transactions as well, one of which was never resolved and that money is gone forever. Thankfully the amount was insignificant, but it was more the point of the matter I guess, in that Paypal was useless in helping me resolve things, and basically DID NOT CARE and their "Buyer Protection" crap, is 100% useless.

I understand they want to work on preventing fraud, yet they need to be more careful about things, and take a better look at the situation, before just automatically locking a user's account such as this, and then having those funds useless.

You CAN call them up, and after being tossed around a few times, FINALLY get an agent that can assist you, but that usually is not until you act really pissed off (most of the time you don't have to act, you get pissed off at them hanging up on you, giving you the run-around, and such...) and then you finally get helped.

I wonder if all of us Slashdot citizens would unite and write hate mail to Paypal, if that would help in getting them to finally change their ways, and FIX the customer service NIGHTMARE that they run...

Good luck SomethingAwful! We are all behind you!

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[Blakey Rat]

I cancelled both my eBay and PayPal accounts, and put SomethingAwful in the comments field. I suggest other people do the same.

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[mp3phish]

"I think typing "I, for one" is redundant and annoying. Stop it."

BTW: when someone says "for one" after "I" he is typically implying that there are other people who he is referring to, and he is just one of them. So while it may be redundant in that it repeats the implicit singular noun, its implications run much deeper and the true meaning of the sentence would not be the same without the "for one" part.

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[jez9999]

I wonder if all of us Slashdot citizens would unite and write hate mail to Paypal

Right. Because the best way to improve a sector isn't to start a competing, better business - it's to whinge to the incumbent monopoly as loudly as possible.

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[4minus0]

Good job.
I cancelled my accounts with these scumbags as soon as I read about this ~12:30AM Eastern.
As a previous poster suggested, hopefully Google Wallet will turn out to be more than hype and bury these assholes.

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[Anonymous Coward]

How do I cancel PayPal... I don't see any way of doing that :(

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, never mind. I found it in "Profile".

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[Anonymous Coward]

I cancelled my Paypal account 3 or 4 years ago when they were caught stealing money from their users. I'm surprised anyone still uses Paypal. Even though they got bought out by Ebay, most of their management is still organized crime. I've never had problems with Ebay.

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[Anonymous Coward]

Done!

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[Frodo Crockett]

Cancelled my PayPal account. Swore at them in the comments field, but I also tried to make helpful suggestions for improving their service. Like unfreezing Lowtax's account and crediting him the transaction fees.

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[Frodo Crockett]

Right. Because the best way to improve a sector isn't to start a competing, better business - it's to whinge to the incumbent monopoly as loudly as possible.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. The best way to improve a sector is to convince Google to start a competing service. Hear that, guys? Get started on it in your 20% time!

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[deep square leg]

I've done it with my PayPal account over this issue, but I'll keep my ebay one until next time.

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[donnacha]

I think typing "I, for one" is redundant and annoying. Stop it.

I, for one, disagree.

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[doug141]

The (about) 3% they take for a mastercard (or visa, etc) payment to you they have to give to mastercard (or visa, etc). They aren't keeping it (with the single exception below). Paypal merely earns an interest on the float. If you get a *cash* transfer through paypal (instead of a credit card payment) they are *obligated* to keep 3% because credit card companies forbid anyone doing business with them from charging different prices for cash or credit. You may remember fifteen years ago the gasoline companies thinking they had enough clout to get around this... they didn't. Paypal has provided a loophole avoiding this 3% with their creation of "personal" accounts, which can't accept credit cards at all, therefore are outside the reach of the credit card companies' agreements.

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[ciroknight]

Oh the irony, my account's locked for contributing to SA's account. I think I'm going to give my lawyer a ring this afternoon...

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[hey]

I think that "redundant and annoying" adds extra info that's already there and bothers me.

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[Blakey Rat]

No, they're just pulling a psychological trick. The traditional valid use of it would be something like:

"All of you here on this jury believe the man is guilty. Well, I, for one, believe he is innocent, and here is why..."

What they're doing is setting up a hypothetical "they," a group that opposes them, then asserting that they came up with their conclusion individually from this group. They're the rebel, the revolutionary, the thinker outside the box, etc.

The problem is that people are using it to replace "I" in places where it makes no damn sense. "I, for one, wear a blue shirt." Is that supposed to imply that there's some big group out there opposed to wearing blue shirts and you're bucking the trend by wearing one?

And even worse, I'm starting to see it all over the Internet, like a meme. Not just on Slashdot, like it used to be.

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[zippthorne]

I tried to cancel recently after four years of trying to ignore the account which I thought i'd already cancelled. Apparantly I need to register a credit card with them in order to have my account re-activated up to the level that I can cancel it. There's no g'dang way I'm giving them that info (again I think, but the fewer places they have it written down, the better)

Paypal is a scam enabler if they're not a scam themselves. I wish someone would come up with a consignment version of Ebay.

Re:Paypal Strikes Again

[korba]

Actually PayPal takes 2.9% plus $0.30 plus 2.5% (if there is a currency exchange) out of each transaction, so it makes even 15-20% on small amounts.
I've learnt that PayPal sucks the hard way - I do a eBay-related service in Poland, so I'm doomed to PayPal if I want my service to be available for US users.

Aaaay relax, guy!

[autopr0n]

Lowtax can give the money to the red-cross in 180 days!

Re:Aaaay relax, guy!

[scrain]

Naah.. the whole 180 thing is a lie to get you to wait 'til they've managed to misappropriate your money somewhere.

Other people have waited the time and magically... no money. Not like that was a surprise.

Post-disaster scams...

[RyanFenton]

While I can understand some system in place to reactively deal with potential scams, ESPECIALLY given such a huge disaster as the whole gulf coast... I agree that the way PayPal has implimented their automatic system is rather, well, awful.

SomethingAwful has a lot of (crazy) enemies - it's not surprising that they would get a lot of gadflies out there submitting complaints, even at the cost of relief money going to flood victims. And I agree - if there was any sign of a scam going on, someone should have called to verify the events, or had a better way of cutting the account than leaving everyone's money in limbo.

In the meantime, SomethingAwful really should join another site's charity link, and work to resolve this in a way that gets those funds ultimately to that place.

One example: Amazon's Hurricane relief page off of Google

Ryan Fenton

Re:Post-disaster scams...

[Deraj DeZine]

The reason that Something Awful was using a Paypal link was so that Richard Kyanka could send free SA merchandise to people who donated a moderate amount as a bit of motivation. The normal payment system was offline because it was hosted in New Orleans (along with the rest of the site), so Kyanka turned to Paypal and the rest is probably some of the worst PR I've ever heard of.

Anyone with media contacts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I urge anyone with links to the media to let them know about this, submit it to your local paper, and even to the nationals. Let your local radio know, write an email to paypal threatening to close your paypal account and never use them again, the more bad press the quicker it will get resolved and they'll be under scrutiny for a while.

Re:Anyone with media contacts?

[PedanticSpellingTrol]

My aunt is news director of our local AM station, sometimes gets picked up by the AP wire, has an incredibly twisted sense of humor, and frequently uses eBay. I'm definitely showing her this over coffee in the morning.

Re:Anyone with media contacts?

[WillDraven]

I second this motion. I think i'll call up my local news affilates.

Re:Anyone with media contacts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think I'll submit this to slashdot

Crap like this happens all the time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Like here.

When a grassroots political operative needed a transplant and the opposition party got Paypal to shut down the donations.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Anonymous Coward]

Had you actually bothered to read the page that Lowtax wrote, you would have seen that he was using Paypal because with Something Awful down his usual credit card processing was unavailable, and also because he was collecting addresses so he could send some merchandise to anybody who donated above $10.

No contact number?

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that I love is that they gave him a bloody e-mail address to contact them at, not a 1-800 number, not even a regular number with an area code. Just an e-mail address for messages that they can handily route to dev/null.

If I'm not mistaken, this isn't the first time that PayPal's fucked Lowtax over. This makes me want to puke.

Genmay

[mnemonic_]

Wow, Slashdot following Genmay for once.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Reene]

It was routed through paypal because Lowtax wanted to give Something Awful merchandise to everyone that donated over 10 dollars.

This is far from the first fundraiser SA has run. They raised another 20k or so for body armor for soldiers in Iraq, and recently a bunch of SA goons raised over 6k in a few weeks and bought toys for sick children, which they delivered in person.

I understand your suspicion but come on, this is is SA, home of one of the most populated forums on the internet. We goons care.

Conventional media

[SleepyHappyDoc]

They'd love this story. Big company stealing from the poor hurricane victims. It's comedically evil, except it's real.

Re:The USA is Dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, loser, you can't even control a lame 3rd world country like Iraq. It takes you days to send help to one of your cities. So no, you can't kick my ass.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Blutarsky]

Lowtax was doing it thru paypal so he could send people some free swag out of his own pocket.

Re:The USA is Dying

[wormuniverse]

that is a very paypal-esque philosophy....

Great Racket

[Anonymous Coward]

You must admit, Paypal has a great racket going here. They aren't a bank so they don't have to abide by any legislation governing banks nor are they FDIC insured. Also, they get around a bunch of other responsibilities through their cleverly crafted TOS/Disclaimer. Lucky for Paypal, they can make a shitload of money on the fees and then seize your account at any time for any reason leaving you with almost no recourse. You can try calling their corporate HQ, if you can find the fucking phone number.

Obviously

[autopr0n]

It was done by computer. But what's weird is that with $22,000 at stake they couldn't even be bothered to double-check. I mean, I'd understand automated shutdowns of $50 accounts, but, they already made $520 off of these donations. Why not spend $10 of that to doublecheck before shutting it down!?

Re:Obviously

[jrockway]

> Why not spend $10 of that to doublecheck before shutting it down!?

Why spend $10 to not shut it down when shutting it down gives them $22,000?

"Remember, we're not a bank!"

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[sdedeo]

You guys sound like good nerds, but I'm sorry, I still don't get it. Pay Pal fees are horrendous.

Look at it from the outside (my perspective.) The website is soliciting donations for the Red Cross. 7% of all those donations go down the drain -- all so that the webmaster can verify that the donation was actually made and give people "free merchendise"?

It's definitely not standard practice, and I'm sure not the way the Red Cross would want it done.

Again, imagine it from the outside: "WalMart Red Cross donation button! Donate to the Red Cross here! 93% of your donation will go DIRECTLY TO THE RED CROSS! Donations over $10 will recieve free Wal Mart goodies!"

I have nothing against people running their own clever, innovative charitable projects via Pay Pal, but this complicated and lossy system of passing the buck is foolish.

GMoney

[Anonymous Coward]

For some reason, I remember gmoney as a term that this rapper wannabe/future drug dealer in my high school would always say (this would be in the mid-late nineties).

After a Google search, I found that there all ready is a GMoney, albeit in the UK.

Here's the link:

http://www.gmoney.co.uk/

Apparently, it represents the gay division of Sussex IFA group Global Financial Ltd.

And that's today's fun fact.

Re:GMoney

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm the same anon again...

After some more research, it looks like (according to the definitive turdwords.com) GMoney means:

Someone who rolls around with mega-cash.
A cool dude
An casual greeting of respect.

So it will be quite interesting if Google ever creates a GMoney product...

Re:GMoney

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, I'd have thought GMoney _was_ Google.

Seriously, Google should do what Paypal does, only better. I'd wager they get a fucking clue really fast.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[arkhan_jg]

The main reason he wanted to do it through paypal was to get shipping addresses, to send them free stuff for donating. Similiar principle to buying CD's via CDBaby, with the money going to the red cross.

The difference is, SA's servers are offline in NO, so he couldn't do it with his own credit card facilities, but had to use paypal. Who promptly stole all the money, not just the 3.25% processing fee.

I'm no fan of SA btw, or it's fans, but I can at least give props to the attempt to drum up donations with free stuff - and add this story to my list of why I will never use paypal.

2.4%

[autopr0n]

And, he needed to get people's shipping addresses to send them free stuff. I'm sure there was some desire for glory involved as well, but having 'the community' take credit is a motivation for members to assist. I think they would have raised more money this way, then by some other method.

from #cockes on irc.buttes.org:6667

[Anonymous Coward]

[01:57:28] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161078&cid=134 74985
[01:57:37] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161078&cid=134 74950
[01:57:51] http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161078&cid =13474985
[01:57:51] -!- madbeaner [carlos@jew-91881374.sd.sd.cox.net] has joined #cockes
[01:57:56] o shi, beaten
[01:57:56] -!- mode/#cockes [+o madbeaner] by Amish
[01:58:05] UGS
[01:58:29] http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161078&cid =13475014
[01:58:35] hey dudes, mod up

Re:from #cockes on irc.buttes.org:6667

[Anonymous Coward]

Chatlog, voted `1

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[snol]

Read the frickin article, you knee-jerk, cynical jackass.

If someone donated through SA rather than directly to the red cross (which it doesn't take a genius to do) it's because they decided they'd rather do it that way, and in some cases maybe they wouldn't have donated at all otherwise. They might not have rational reasons, but having another way to give money to a good cause doesn't hurt, and the amount that had gone in was a testament to that fact.

Are people still donating through SA's red cross link now? Probably. As many people as were donating through their paypal link before, so as to get free stuff and have their amount go towards SA's total? Probably not. Draw your own conclusions.

Oh, you angry goony goon goons!

[James A. Y. Joyce]

Being banned from an Internet forum obviously means that you're going to try and halt the transfer of :20000bux: to homeless people in New Orleans.

Well, actually, I would. Not 'cause I got banned, I just hate niggers.

Re:Oh, you angry goony goon goons!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll have you know that more than sixty percent of the fine netizens of buttes irc are African American and these claims of racism will not fly.

Re:Oh, you angry goony goon goons!

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd just like to point out that whilst these African Americans are actually in our channel, their numbers are high because they are employed as permenant slaves for the White Aryan population, we also have a couple of chinese servants.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Patrick Cable II]

In the past (for disasters) people have linked to directly organizations like the red cross. "Lowtax" (Richard Kyanka, the person who runs the site) wanted to send anyone who donated free merchandise as a thank you, which is why he chose to do it like this.

United States of Avarice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why are most of the people stranded "black" or "poor" yet those being "rescued" are predominately "white"? The American government arguably has a lot to be ashamed of lately but these six days of abandonment are beyond deplorable.

Re:United States of Avarice?

[Pax00]

well if you took a look at the location of new orleans and the area around it, you have to have a car to get out of the city... and well most of the low income in the area is black.. so going by statistics, there would be more black than white that are stranded.. it has nothing to do with people being perfered for evac... it just has to do with number crunching...

Re:United States of Avarice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Really? Why then is a black man "looting" food when a white guy 6' away was "getting" food.

clickety....

they may have used these but that would mean someone appropriate cared....

So is it because they're predominantly black that it has taken SIX days for help to arrive?

Appology not accepted.

Re:United States of Avarice?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a note on the looting/finding pictures that so many people have cited (keeping in mind these are a)only 2 pictures out of god knows how many b)not labeled by the government or some such) keep in mind that the captions are written by the photographers, and the two cited pictures were taken by two differnt photographers... so, there isn't really any evidence of racism there.

Re:United States of Avarice?

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean the Associated Press (AP). They are the ones that "labeled" a food carrying refugee as a looter, not the American governement.

Re:United States of Avarice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite the contrary, it is strong evidence that the racism is systemic. I swear I saw Rice blush when she extolled "I can't believe....". It's not limited to one photographer or outlet. Other inequalities include evacuee vs refugee. They are subtle and pervasive, up to and including your need to politely insist it dosn't exist even though it's blatently obvious it does.

Unfortunately the real problem is wider than racism. Contrast how the victims of the Asian tsunami acted after their disaster with the goings on in New Orleans. It's a whole lot uglier than the obvious stuff.

Re:United States of Avarice?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh I hear you brother! I mean Dubya was on a well earned vacation, but now he's on the job Katrinastan is toast!

secrecy through lazyness.

[autopr0n]

Seriously, it costs pay pal money to actually talk to people and read letters. Everything is automatic. They don't tell you anything because they simply don't care.

Re:secrecy through lazyness.

[no-body]

This are some of their major problems:

* Complexity of their buggy software and the inability to fix those bugs

* Automatic lockouts kicking in to prevent money laundering

Another one is that they seem to be real bone heads.
PayPal is owned by Ebay and therefore the preferred payment agent - except anything reated to sex.
One canot pay with PayPal on Ebay in that category!

Re:secrecy through lazyness.

[jelle]

Tsssk. Just image your bank doing something like that.

"I'm sorry, we can't authorize that payment, because we don't like it that people buy television sets".

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes because lowtax's business model is so indicative of his use of donated funds. Name me one other forum that people are actually willing to pay money to be part of.

SA raised thousands to buy badly armor for a platoon of troops in Iraq and a few grand for the Ronald McDonald house. Dont talk about things you know nothing about

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Anonymous Coward]

THREE PERCENT NOT SEVEN!

3 not 7!

Where the hell did you get that stupidly high number?

What an asshole to say that! It's not that much, and Kyanka didn't have his traditional credit card payment system so he had to use paypal. Why? because his server is in underwater New Orleans.

You see his method foolish? How the hell is he zupposed to do it? anybody can give money directly to the red cross, but what if they wanted to show solidarity to one of the affected sites, and a solidarity with their like minded peers? THIS WAS THE ONLY WAY.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFA

Something Awful normally does not use Paypal (due to fees and, well, stuff like this), but THEIR CREDIT CARD PROCESSING SOFTWARE WAS IN NEW ORLEANS so they couldn't use it in this case.

Of course, it's obvious now that using Paypal was a terrible idea.

I hate Lowtax, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I hate PayPal even more. Geez, at least Lowtax is doing something respectable.

Missed a spot

[zantolak]

You forgot to call him "Blowtax".

You dope, you fucked up the angle brackets

[James A. Y. Joyce]

<rolloffle> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161078&cid=134 74985
<rolloffle> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161078&cid=134 74950
<Mr_X> http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161078&cid =13474985
--> madbeaner (carlos@jew-91881374.sd.sd.cox.net) has joined #cockes
<Mr_X> o shi, beaten
<rolloffle> UGS

BTW, thanks Slashdot for putting spaces in the middle of the URLs. Learn how to code, Taco, you fucking Perl-using tool.

Re:You dope, you fucked up the angle brackets

[Anonymous Coward]

You guys are so good at giving technical advice to people who run successful websites. It's almost like you're the kind of people who wouldn't resort to a shitty AIM bot to phish for account info.

You guys must be really successful to be able to commit so much time to IRC every day.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Anonymous Coward]

t's a foolish waste of money, of course, since Pay Pal charges for each transaction (7% or so?)

Troll? How could you not be aware that PayPal charges 3%?

SomethingAwful does SomethingRight

[The Jays]

Something Awful is Somewhere Awful After the plug was pulled on the popular somethingawful.com, Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka of SomeThingAwful.com, hoping to focus the community's efforts on raising money for the Red Cross, in exchange for SomethingAwful.com merchandise, found his fundraising drive cancelled, by PayPal.com, when they shut down his account and stole the $20,000 dollars the members had raised for Hurricane Katrina. Everybody needs to see the complete insensitivity that PayPal has. They have no shame. They have taken money that was going to the Red Cross, used their policies against a fine internet community, and has stolen Hurricane Katrina fund money. This cannot go unpunished.

Re:Wow, what hypocrisy.

[Anonymous Coward]

And the previously mentioned insane enemies of SA step forward! Take a bow!

I heard that sometimes Taco Bell gets your order wrong. Pepsi is such an evil company.

Contact E-Mail paypal ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok contacting paypal is not for the faint of heart, its a rabbit warren of alice in wonderland proportions....blind alleys, mirrors etc

anyone have a real E-mail address for the important people at paypal, other than automated response.

Spread the word...

[UpLateDrinkingCoffee]

The only way is to get some attention outside the geek circles... as soon as the general public starts hearing about ebay (remember, paypal is owned by ebay now) wrapping up Katrina donations in red tape, SA will see some customer service.

Re:Spread the word...

[The Jays]

I've been trying to spread the word on my blog, and get the message out there. I've been livid about this whole Katrina cluster fuck to begin with, and now this??? http://thejays.completelyfreehosting.com/index.php /2005/09/03/paypal-shuts-down-red-cross-donation-a ccount/

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Anonymous Coward]

Why not have people donate DIRECTLY to the Red Cross? You know the method which doesn't make you lose 3% of the money donated? Of course they couldn't boast about how much was donated then...

Give Paypal some credit

[Anonymous Coward]

Paypal sees someone collect $20,000 in a couple hours. They have no way of knowing that he will actually use the money for charitable purposes. Paypal is just trying to protect their customers.

Re:Give Paypal some credit

[Blutarsky]

If they were responsible at all they would have contacted Lowtax first.

Re:Give Paypal some credit

[Anonymous Coward]

No, this is a known scam they perform. They freeze the account and start an investigation. After 6 months of being "investigated", the funds are seized by paypal permanently for being inactive. If they where trying to protect people the money would be refunded, not added to their corporate coffers.

Re:Give Paypal some credit

[Frodo Crockett]

The Senator is right. What I can't understand is why a buyer cannot get their money back immediately if a seller's account is frozen. It would be so simple.

As it is right now, PayPal can do whatever the fuck they want with all that money, and the people who wanted it to go to the Red Cross are left in the lurch.

I've closed my PayPal account, and I told them exactly why. I hope Google starts a payment service of their own, preferably one with support for easy micropayments. We could really use a micropayment system backed by a heavyweight like Google.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah and he wouldn't be able to offer incentive to donate then either, would he

ALOD

[Anonymous Coward]

The next awful link of the day will be paypal.com

EBay's Phone Number

[MrNonchalant]

I think it time we give PayPal's parent company an idea of what we think of their subsidiary. I'm willing to bet that if anybody with enough seniority gets ahold of this and recognizes it for the ticking PR time-bomb it is things could be set right.

EBay's toll free investor line:
1-866-696-3229
or
1-866-696-eBay

Have fun.

Re:EBay's Phone Number

[Anonymous Coward]

Paypals: 1-866-648-5843

Re:EBay's Phone Number

[USSJoin]

Turns out they don't like it when members call it to cancel their five-year-old accounts. I suggest we do it more. The customer service representative swore at me, then hung up.

All disasters draw fraud to some degree..

[machinegunhand]

..but to see this from PayPal is blatent highway robery. Granted, there is misuse of their system, constantly as far as I can tell. But without being held to accout on acts such as these, they're no better than the ones who commit fraud in the first place.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Anonymous Coward]

This wasn't a fundraiser for outsiders to participate in, nobody asked you to look at it at all until it turned into a huge shit storm. This was a fundraiser for the readers of Something Awful and we all accepted that this was the way it would get done and we trusted Lowtax. So if nobody that donated in this fundraiser (I donated $25) respects what you're saying, this is probably why.

Re:The USA is Dying

[Anonymous Coward]

*Feeding the Troll*

Well, we could "control" Iraq, but then we'd be accused of colonization, which is not what we are doing. We are trying to help those idiots in Iraq form a democracy. It's a long, painful process. We can't do it in 6 months and leave. It takes time.

Of course, idiots in Iraq like to blow others up who don't agree with them. Killing women and children seems to be a past time there. And they want to put religion in their system. Great.....

It took days to send stuff into the city for a number of reasons. Mainly, it did not flood until after the hurricane went through. It appeared that nothing had happened. Then the poorly constructed, category 3 rated, levys broke. Typical case of people not wanting to spend money on a project that is essential. And then the Governor sat on her ass and did not mobilize the Feds. The Feds don't act on their own, they need to be called in by a Governor, and coordinated by them. None of that happened. So, then the President got involved on Friday, and shit happened.

So troll, we could kick your ass. You'd get away for a day or two, but you'd get it kicked hard and swift on the third day.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Nehle]

Well, knowing Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka's past history, maybe PayPal has a perfectly valid reason to freeze his account. It wouldn't be a surprise if a large part, if not all of the money went into Richard's private account. Richard has a lot of experience misappropriating funds and pretty much just outright screwing his users.

Yes, raising fund for forces stationed in Iraq and for sick children are horrible deeds indeed.

Oh, and just for kicks, here's some basic information about the site: The forums, which contain nothing of interest, ask you to register before you can browse. Registration costs $10. To add search capabilities, which are standard on pretty much every single other forum, you have to pay extra. Want to browse old posts? Pay extra! Want to change your avatar or custom title? Pay extra!

First, you can browse most of the forums before registering.

Second, the forums are the among the best, largest, and most literate, communities on the web. Hence, the registration cost is has two reasons
1) People tend to be less jackasses if they know it will cost them at least $10.
2) It actually costs money running forums with tens of thousands of users that require seven dedicated servers.

As for the extra features cost, once again, two reasons:
1) It still costs money to run the servers
2) With the sheer number of users on the forums (at least three thousand online at any given time), the servers just can't handle if everyone would search/browse archived posts all the time. Thus, either they limit it to those who find it worth extra money, or disable it for everyone

It's their business plan

[dtfinch]

Whenever an account gets too big, they freeze it and pocket the money. They don't have to explain their reasons. They don't have to let you prove your innocence. They don't have to give anything back if you can prove it. And you agree not to sue them over it (probably not enforceable). It's all in their terms of service, and demonstrated in the thousands of horror stories you can find on the internet. I know people who have been hurt by them. I never have and never will trust PayPal with more money than I could afford to lose.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen SA from "behind the scenes" for about five-six years, so I'm pretty sure I can teach you a few things about Richard and his business practices.

Also, the fact that people are willing to pay money to post on an internet forum means only that people are stupid and are willing to buy into that whole "super secret internet clique" thing. Something Awful is a treehouse club for people lacking social skills and good hygiene.

Talk to Courtney Grayson

[Anonymous Coward]

...at Payapal. She's already got one blogger's account unfrozen, allowing that blogger to feed several families and buy much needed supplies for the Lakeview Regional Medical Center in LA.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to assume the "Proc" in your "Proc6" stands for "Proctologist" because there's no way someone could have their head as far up their ass as you obviously do and not have the help of a professional.

RED CROSS

[AgNO3]

Is this the same RED CROSS that wanted to not give all the money it collected for 9-11 to 9-11 causes? That had to be forced to do it?

Re:RED CROSS

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this the same RED CROSS that wanted to not give all the money it collected for 9-11 to 9-11 causes? That had to be forced to do it?

The Red Cross didn't give all the money it collected to 9-11 victims because there was so god damn much of it. The outpouring of support was so abundant that the organization ended up with way more money than it needed to help the 9-11 situation, so it reallocated some of that money to other disasters going on around the globe.

Given the scale of the NoLa situation, there seems to be very little chance of that happening this time.

Maybe you should know what you're talking about before dissing the one charity that gets its funds to disaster victims faster than all others, while having one of the lowest overhead percentages at the same time?

Re:Katrina can eat me

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to be the single most ignorant person I've ever come across.

Re:Wow, what hypocrisy.

[Anonymous Coward]

I also heard that he lives in a castle built on the grounds of a former concentration camp in Germany and drinks blood out of a chalice made from a baby's skull.

A fucking BABY SKULL for christ sake.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[sdedeo]

I'm getting 7% from what Pay Pal charges me for transactions with verified shipping to confirmed addresses for amounts between $10 and $20. Maybe he gets a better deal, I can't read the link.

In the end, it's of course everyone's right to waste money as they see fit. If people want to pay seven cents on the charity dollar to say "Something Awful Rules" then that's fine. It doesn't make it any less foolish in my mind, though.

I'll bow out of the flame war now.

Ah the mindless mob...

[Rakishi]

Of course no one seems to have thought about WHY paypal canceled the account. I mean, they're an "evil corporation" cause SA says so thus they must have done it for kicks.

If this was a real donation scam account and paypal left it open I'm sure half of the posters would be screaming at paypal for NOT closing down the account.

Maybe you should consider how many donation scams must have been setup by now. Also, you may wish to consider how unusual this method of donation is and that more likely than not it is used to scam people. Most websites simple have a giant link to Red Cross and tell people to donate, because it's easier and they don't lose 3% in fees. You know, the concept of all the money going to relief efforts and not corporate pockets. Of course it seems SA decided it needed credit or some such for the effort of its members. Also, Paypal really has no idea who SA is or how trustworthy they are so they can only look at the current actions which look mighty close to a scam site.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[zapf]

You're a braying fucking moron. The owner of Something Awful wasn't looking for "credit," recognition, or blowjobs. A separate method was set up so that those who donated could receive free merchandise.

Next time, read the fucking article.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. How is Paypal supposed to know what is going on here. This is certainly an unusual way to get donations since most sites link to Red Cross or something similar.

This way they are not only losing 3% to Paypal, but someone at SA is going to have to pay taxes on all that income even though they aren't keeping it. And what is to prove that they don't keep it anyway?

And for the donators, sending money to SA is not tax-deductable. That may not be a major concern for people donating, but it is just another reason this could look fishy to Paypal.

I have read a lot about problems with Paypal freezing acounts for no apparent reason and taking a long time to clear things up (if ever) so I hope Paypal doesn't hold up this money. They either need to refund all the "buyers" really fast so they can donate somewhere else or release the money to SA so it can be donated.

This is likley going to turn out to be really bad PR for Paypal, but they are doing the right thing here and obviously very few people see it.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[Vellmont]

Of course no one seems to have thought about WHY paypal canceled the account. I mean, they're an "evil corporation" cause SA says so thus they must have done it for kicks.


Check out some of the other posts. I've heard terrible stories about Paypal screwing people over for years. With the number of stories I've heard (and the consistency) I think Paypal is a very poor company that seems to shut down accounts on a whim and rarely explain why. I'm sure they have a lot of problems with money laundering, etc, but there's just too many stories of innocent people getting burned by Paypal for there not to be something wrong with paypal itself. This isn't just an "evil corporation" story, it's a company with a long long track record of unscrupulous behaviour.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[Anonymous Coward]

Devil's advocate: and how the hell should Paypal know he was offering FREE merchandise? He asked for money (donations) and was giving away stuff. This can easily be understood to be twisted words for selling stuff under the disguise of "donation".

Now back to reality. I read the article. Yes, Paypal is a big shit. I don't use them, and never will. I don't understand why people do. Why not use a real bank and a real account which gives you internet banking? Or donate directly to Red Cross. If you want to know how much people put in, just ask.

Paypal is a useless leech. Fuck'em.

In any case, this is a sad story altogether. The people most in need are hurt.

However what I do not get is the anarchy which had come up. Remember when there was the big tsunami? There was no rioting and looting, it was people helping each other in Thailand and other countries. Now it was a hurricane and some of those people are just shitting all over their own nest. Is it a cultural thing?

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[gabba_gabba_hey]

Going to stick with my standard reply to the clueless for this article: EAT A DICK! oh yeah, borrow a clue or two while you're at it.

xox

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[leprkan]

you must be joking. If you even went to www.somethingawful.com and read LowTax's thoughts on Katrina, you would not question this being a scam. And you obviously don't know SA's previous record of donating (raised over $22K to buy plated armor for soilders in Iraq, rasied over $6K to buy kids in need christmas presents. And that's just to name two). I really am disgusted at you considering this a possibility.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[Chanc_Gorkon]

You know, your 100 percent absoloutly correct. WHY SA decided they needed credit for donations is beyond me. I'd have just had a big giant link to the Red Cross. Your right, it IS easier and IS the place one should go. IN fact, if I was paypal, I would contact someone at the Red Cross and setup a account for this purpose. That way you can donate without a credit or debit card. Then, if others want to setup an account for it, paypal can automagically funnel the money to the red cross. That way SA could tell it's members how much they gave (if they wanted, or cared) and the money WOULD get to the red cross.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[batkiwi]

Lowtax was giving away SA merchandise randomly to people who donated. He has hundreds, if not thousands, of shirts/etc in his basement he's never sold, so he wanted addresses added to the donations so that he could ship, at his own cost, at least a bumper sticker or t-shirt to everyone donating.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[shish]

If you even went to www.somethingawful.com and read LowTax's thoughts on Katrina, you would not question this being a scam

So if I were to cut & paste his thoughts but replace the donate link to one of my own, you'd trust me too?

This is the internet; scammers have access to just as many words as real people -- judging something to be legitimate just because it claims itself to be is quite foolish...

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[moonbender]

So if I were to cut & paste his thoughts but replace the donate link to one of my own, you'd trust me too?

No, because you're not the webmaster and owner of a huge internet community website which has donated lots of money in the past. What's so difficult to understand about that?

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[shish]

There's nothing hard to understand about that, but that isn't what you said, and it isn't what I responded to.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[Anonymous Coward]

Paypal has a history of working with organized crime in foreign countries to steal money from users. SA was incredibly stupid for using Paypal to collect charity money. Anyone who is not new to the web and uses Paypal has only themselves to blame when their money is lost.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[moonbender]

Yeah, it certainly isn't what I said, because I'm not the original poster. And you responded to a part of a post you quoted out of context, great job.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[3spades]

Also, Paypal really has no idea who SA is or how trustworthy they are so they can only look at the current actions which look mighty close to a scam site. That would hold true except Paypal was the payment method for signing up at SA for a long time. I believe Lowtax himself said their signups were bringing in so much money they had their own dedicated person to talk to when things didnt work right. When paypal changed policy to stop associating itself with sites that have adult content or merchandice, that for some reason linking to adult pictures on the site violated this new policy, SA found another processor. I hope paypal gets what they deserve for pulling a stunt like this.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[Anonymous Coward]

IN fact, if I was paypal, I would contact someone at the Red Cross and setup a account for this purpose

you mean, like this one

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes but would it of taken more than five minutes to go to somethingawful.com, then do a google for somethingawful.com and maybe even ask a few people if they'd heard of somethingawful.com?

Its like saying "Hmm, this site called slashdot is accepting money, they could be a well known well established website, but rather than spend two minutes ivestigating, I'll just pocket the cash lol!"

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[Anonymous Coward]

You should really learn to differentiate between "your" and "you're." Also, "it's" is not a possessive.

Idiot.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[glesga_kiss]

You know, your 100 percent absoloutly correct. WHY SA decided they needed credit for donations is beyond me.

Because it encourages the online community to give more. If they are donating as a group, more people will be likely to donate as they feel a part of that group. Plus, they've done it before with other campaigns. This happens all the time in charities; here in the UK we have several annual drives for various causes and a large proportion of the donations are made through groups just like this. Sure, a lot of it is patting yourself on the back, but that's human nature.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[Sparr0]

Where do you live that they would have to pay taxes on money like this?

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[MoneyT]

1) So because someone writes something, it must be true?

2) How is pay pal supposed to know about SA's other donations? Were they all handled through pay pal? What makes you think anyone at pay pal gives a fuck who SA is or what they've done?

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[pineyapple]

2) How is pay pal supposed to know about SA's other donations? Were they all handled through pay pal?

Yes, actually. The credit card system is a fairly recent development after Paypal dropped SA, which had been using Paypal as their primary means of receiving payment for several years, under the "no adult content" clause. (There was, at one time, a porn forum under SA. It doesn't exist anymore.)

Paypal was used to collect funds to outfit Sgt. Greenmeat's platoon with Level 4 SAPI plates for their body armor vest things I can't remember the name of, we actually raised too much and the rest was spent on care packages for as many soldiers as possible. Paypal was used to collect funds for Kyle Kenyon's kidney transplant. I believe Paypal has been used for the last two years to collect funds for goons to buy toys and deliver them to the Ronald McDonald House in person. Paypal was used when some goons outfitted their local children's hospital with video game systems and games. Paypal and SA have a long history and it should have taken all of five minutes to verify the legitimacy of this drive.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever heard of a certain Rusty Foster? Owners and progenitors of huge internet community websites are not beyond taking donated money for their own nefarious purposes. With good enough explanations, you can even keep running your site as if nothing happened, since it's unlikely that any nerd who lost 50$ would bother to dig up enough hard facts to file a suit.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[moonbender]

Owners and progenitors of huge internet community websites are not beyond taking donated money for their own nefarious purposes.

Yeah, sure. But that kind of behaviour is not so widespread that I wouldn't give a guy like Lowtax or the Penny Arcade guys the benefit of the doubt. They certainly have a lot more to lose than some noname guy with a new website.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[Rakishi]

And going to SA finds a webpage which is devoid of much more than a request for donations... real useful. Accounts get hijacked often enough, and so can webpages. As I said, donations through PayPal seem to many people (read some of the other replies) as counter institutive since it takes 3% to 7% and the Red Cross takes direct donations already.

Who the heck should they ask? I doubt most people in the US have heard of SA, so asking any of them would result in the belief that SA is a scam site.

Also, SA probably has enough enemies that someone actually reported the donation drive as a scam.

Re:Ah the mindless mob...

[Yunzil]

And going to SA finds a webpage which is devoid of much more than a request for donations... real useful.

You do realize of course that the reason for the stripped-down page is that site is hosted in New Orleans. Now, can you think of any event recently that might have caused them to go offline?

More like BLOATTAKKK$$$

[James A. Y. Joyce]

Amirite?

Usually

[UndyingShadow]

I dont usually advocate this, but don't you think someone should SUE THE EVERLIVING SHIT out of paypal for pulling this crap.

Hundreds of people clicked "give money to hurrican e victims via lowtax" I dont care if I click "give money to potato farmers for space baby" paypal shouldn't have the ability of lock accounts. They have no right to touch that money.

Im sorry if I just blew a bunch of positive karma, this needed to be said, and with A VERY LOUD VOICE!

Re:Usually

[Tidal Flame]

How is this rated 4? No offense, but you didn't think it out much. I'm not saying SA did anything bad in this case, but just because somebody says they're creating a hurricane relief fund doesn't mean they actually are. If I put a hurricane relief web page and then run off with all the money, Paypal is liable for that. They have to make sure that "charitable" accounts are legit.

That said, they pull a lot of stupid crap, but this was actually reasonable.

Re:Usually

[UndyingShadow]

Its rated 4 because apparently some people agree with what I have to say. Who cares if they are or are not making a relief fund, that's not the issue. Paypall still takes their 3 percent. Paypal serves to help people move money around, as long as the paypal "buyers" click on the button that says "I'm giving money to whoever" then why should paypal have anything to say about it. If the "goons" trust Lowtax enough to give him money, why should paypal be able to decide to freeze the account and keep the money. I guess from now on, Somethingawful will just have to setup an account labeled "give me money for beer, hookers, and blow" and secretly give the money to whomever they want.

Re:Usually

[Anonymous Coward]

Im sorry if I just blew a bunch of positive karma

Listen, no one gives a rat's ass about your karma. Ok?

The rest of your post is good.

Re:Usually

[Anonymous Coward]

I just suggested to CNN that they cover this story, and encourage others to do the same:
http://www.cnn.com/feedback/forms/form11.html?1

If others encourage the same thing, we might be able to get this situation addressed by the powers that be. Apparently our govt. gets their news from CNN (judging by the hurricane response efforts), so let's make sure they're aware of this...

Re:Usually

[Puff Daddy]

Good thing we have people like you who have the courage to speak out in defense of victims of natural disasters. BTW, what are your views on puppies and sunshine? Keep it quiet though, things might get too controversial in here.

Re:Usually

[UndyingShadow]

Point Taken.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Blutarsky]

Then by all means post some verifiable facts and teach us all.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[Coxinhas]

...all to save humans that were too god damn stupid to not leave when the nation told them to.

You god-damned idiot. Most of the people who stayed behind didn't own a car, and were too poor to get out of town before Katrina hit. Check your facts before you shit out your mouth next time.

hi radium

[James A. Y. Joyce]

See subject.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[laughingcoyote]

I don't often mod negatively, but I wish I had some points now, along with a -1 "Racist, Clueless, and Uninformed" option. As I do not, I'm just going to point out that you are clearly wrong. I'm not sure if you are trolling or just utterly clueless, but either way, please consider putting a bit of thought behind what you decide to post next time. The crap you've posted is so trivially proved wrong with the most basic effort at fact checking. Try it sometime.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because you're of the IRC illuminati who cannot let go of something that occured years ago.

It's the Internet; let it go. Agree with what rules were put in place or butt out. It's obviously simple to comprehend, do you not agree?

I am permabanned too, but I don't hold a grudge anymore.

- AnimeFreak

Something Awful Flybynight newbie

[infonography]

Hmmm, so this site called Something Awful which is new suddenly gets a bunch of money. I think it works something like this;

1. Spend years developing a following for a humor site.

2. Wait like a spider for a national disaster (I think effects the actual SA servers)

3. Create a relief fund and your loyal patrons donate money.

4. ???????

5. Paypal profit.

Ok, so a sudden $20k boost in a account should really really send up flags. However SA is not a porn site created last week. Where is their brains?????

Re:Something Awful Flybynight newbie

[ciroknight]

PayPal's done this before to SA for other reasons as well.. it's fucking unacceptable.

And yes, the SA servers are in the same facility as the DirectNIC building, just a floor below. Yesterday they finally got the bandwidth to post a temporary homepage for those of us seeking refuge in Slashdot for the time being.

I hope the SA community stands with the rest of us who never use PayPal. This is fucking bullshit.

Re:Something Awful Flybynight newbie

[geodescent]

NEW site? Why don't you crawl out from under that rock you've been living under and accept the fact that just because YOU haven't seen a site mentioned on Slashdot doesn't mean it hasn't been there? I've been reading SA for YEARS and think they're awesome. That's opinion of course, so don't waste your breath refuting that; instead look at http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.somethinga wful.com. They go back to AT LEAST the year 2000. NOT new.

Re:Something Awful Flybynight newbie

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously missed #1.

Re:Something Awful Flybynight newbie

[Anonymous Coward]

You obviously missed #1.

No, somebody just forgot to change the batteries in their sarcasm detector.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Have Blue]

There was also the tiny matter of all the SA servers being located in New Orleans. He would have used his own payment system if it had been operational.

Deja Vu

[kilox]

Didn't PayPal get a Class Action lawsuit on the basis of something similar recently?

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, did I pay $10 to post this? No.

I'm pretty sure that Slashdot has more users and less banners/ads/posts by admins begging for money than the Something Awful forums. Oh, and see the search button at the bottom? Like, whoa!

And the servers can't handle the "sheer number of users" because radium can't code for shit and cobbled the software together from an old warezed version of vB and various examples from MySQL For Dummies.

Anyway, I'm sure that the fanatical following of Richard "Lowtax" Kayaka or whatever his name is will surely look me up and swiftly bring GOON JUSTICE by driving up to my house, dropping their disposable camera and driving away. Goon luck, guys!

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Martigan80]

Yes but you forget this is America we specialize ( i know) in profits. Humanity what the hell are you thinking humanity doesn't bring in the cash. Maybe if you would have gioven PayPal a cut you wouldn't be in this mess now.

Yes, we wanted credit. Is that so bad?

[zutroy]

I actually donated through Amazon's link before I noticed that Something Awful was taking donations. A few hours later, I checked my GMail account and saw that my donation had been denied. Turned out I used an old CC# by mistake. No big deal, and now I could donate through SA and get some free merchandise, too! But the SA page was showing that the account was closed. And now I'd like to donate, but I'd like to do it through SA. I want to do it this way because I'd like to inspire competition among net communities to see who can donate the most money. It's a great way to constructively use people's egotistical motivations, in my opinion. Wouldn't it be awesome if SA, Slashdot, Genmay, Fark, and all the other popular internet communities all tried to outdo each other in contributions? I guarantee this kind of competition would inspire tremendous giving.

PayPal errs on the side of caution

[adwb]

PayPal provides a service of transfering funds. PayPal is responsible for the money stored in their accounts. If someone starts accepting money for any purpose and PayPal deems it a suspicious activity it is in the interest of the account holders that PayPal investigate the situation. In this case an account growing at the rate of $3500 per hour is suspicious. If the owner of the account decides to run with the money PayPal is the only one left responsible. All the payers have every right to sue PayPal for not investigating unusual activity. Don't even get me started on PayPal charging fees for services rendered. They've already provided a fee-free method for donating to relief. Full disclosure: I have been a SomethingAwful fan for quite some time and believe that they were going to do the right thing. That still doesn't make PayPal a bad guy for being cautious.

Re:PayPal errs on the side of caution

[nachoboy]

Wrong. PayPal errs on the side of profit. Some bean counter ran the numbers and discovered that accounts that increase by x-hundred percent in y hours are more often fraudulent than not. It costs PayPal more money to deal with 1 fraudulent account than to collect their cut on that same account, so they've determined their financial risk threshold and freeze accounts accordingly.

Make no mistake about it, PayPal has no reason to be cautious with your money. In fact, part of their business model is based on the fact that it's easier (and more profitable) to screw over the "good guy" in a dishonest transaction than to devote resources to tracking down the "bad guy". It's this sort of behavior that makes people hate them, and it's why I refuse to pay for anything with PayPal.

Please don't purport that PayPal is just an innocent party trying to do the right thing. They're not. They're attempting to maximize profit even if it's at the expense of honest customers (or, in this case, needy victims of a natural disaster).

Re:PayPal errs on the side of caution

[Tidal Flame]

Yeah. At first, I was thinking "that's messed up," but when you think about it, it really is pretty suspicious. Why set up your own relief fund when there are so many other places you could direct people to donate to? I mean, PayPal itself has a relief fund, so why start a new one? I don't think SA was up to anything, but it does seem kind of odd.

Re:PayPal errs on the side of caution

[Anonymous Coward]

Bullshit. If they were being cautious and responsible, they would have done some actual investigation instead of simply freezing the account.

Re:PayPal errs on the side of caution

[applef00]

If this were an isolated incident, then I would absolutely agree with you. This, however, comes on the heels of many, many other incidents in which PayPal halts accounts on fiat and confiscates the funds. So I think your apology for them in this case is a little off.

Re:PayPal errs on the side of caution

[Anonymous Coward]

People are not mad that Paypal is being cautious. The problem is that Paypal has inadequite customer service, so when they decide to be cautious, they lock people's accounts for weeks and months. From the Something Awful site, he had to go to great lengths to get any response at all.

I had an ebay dispute that was the simplest dispute ever. The seller didn't contest it, so it should have been resolved in 10 days, according to their TOS. It took them 6 weeks. I firmly believe their policy is to hold funds for 30 days after a resolution so they can make money off the interest, which is complete bullshit.

Re:PayPal errs on the side of caution

[hurfy]

" If the owner of the account decides to run with the money PayPal is the only one left responsible"

HAHA

IF that happened and IF i found out it didnt get there (how i would prove that to Paypal is beyond me), does ANYONE think Paypal would actually be responsible for a penny?

Everyone that gets scammed like that gets there money back from paypal?!? ROFL it took a month to get back a double payment* that had the same auction number on both entries for full amount, takes about 2 secs to 'investigate' and 3-1/2 weeks to press the key on the computer to refund :/

* i think this is their little scam, ebay doesnt seem to update stuff when paid very well even when all done thru their systems. Wonder what they make in fees and interest from dups.

Re:RTFA

[jez9999]

So? Over here in the UK, we *still* have Paypal alternatives, such as NOCHEX and PPPay. Are you seriously telling me there are no slightly smaller, less-evil alternatives to Paypal in the US?

real question of might and courage

[Anonymous Coward]

the real question is... can niggers swim?

Re:real question of might and courage

[Anonymous Coward]

im black and i was offended by your comment.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

Just shut the hell up and get back to eating cheese puffs, fattie.

People without compassion should hang out in some other /. locale.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[FLAGGR]

Wait, you're making fun of the SA users hygiene and social skills, yet you're an Anonymous Coward on the slashdot message boards. I'm sorry, but you lose.

Re:Dishonest company screws a dishonest webmaster

[Anonymous Coward]

Way to fag up the thread with half-truths and outright lies.

Re:Why PayPal froze the account:

[Anonymous Coward]

BECAUSE THEY RAISED $20k in 7 HOURS! HOW IS HE SUPPOSED TO SHIP OUT ANYTHING AND SHOW PROOF!

Not even counting was that he marked as donation, you fucking tool.

Not a goon, but still pissed.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said. I couldn't agree more. It just goes to show how stupid the people in gulf states are. No wonder they are always the lowest ranked in education in the nation.

This isn't going to stop

[NubKnacker]

I've heard so many stories, like most of us, about the things that people at Paypal do that it doesn't even surprise me anymore. But what can a community do to stop this ridiculous behaviour?

Pretty much nothing. And one big reason for that is ebay. I don't know the figures but I imagine most of Paypal's revenues come from ebay transactions. People use it, even when they don't want too, to pay for ebay products. So unless a competitor for ebay comes up(and they don't buy it out), I'm sure we'll read more of these stories in the future.

On a sidenote, why is this frozen account not mentioned on the SomethignAwful mainpage?

Re:This isn't going to stop

[NubKnacker]

http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=25915 Forgot to add this earlier.

Re:This isn't going to stop

[Infinityis]

Gbay, perhaps?

What are the alternatives?

[jedaustin]

I can't say I love paypal.. but with the low volume I do, I can't justify paying monthly fees to process credit card payments.

Besides paypal what other services out there will process payments without requiring a monthly fee?

JD

Re:What are the alternatives?

[MeWhOeLsE]

I use nochex. Ezpecially when I'm seeling Stuff... No monthly fees. No account required to send money, Its slightly cheaper than ebay and the money is back into your account earlier when you withdraw). I think its a UK based company. But I'm pretty sure its worldwide by now

Re:What are the alternatives?

[RailRide]

Last time I examined their website (from the US), Nochex appeared to be open only to UK residents. At very least it requires use of a credit card from a UK bank.

---PCJ

Re:Why PayPal froze the account:

[zapf]

The owner of Something Awful is a longtime customer of PayPal. This isn't some fly-by-night operation that just popped up. Five minutes of investigation on PayPal's part would have revealed that it's quite legit.

And why would you be glad that PayPal is hording the money generously donated towards hurricane victims?

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like somebody's a bit sore for getting banned.

Yeah, Slashdot is an order of magnitude bigger.

[James A. Y. Joyce]

Slashdot has about 912,400 users, and SA has - I believe - around 90,000 users. And, hell, a banner ad to a random website costs much more to run on the SA forums than on Slashdot.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[zapf]

First, read the fucking article. Where did you get 7% from?

Next, realize that the percentage that goes down the drain is likely made up for by the people who wouldn't otherwise have donated but were convinced by the lure of free merchandise.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[Proc6]

Since when did it cost money to walk?

"Ohh boo hoo, I'm too poor, I don't have a car, but I can afford a cell phone. I am "above" walking, I will not even try to go to the SuperDome or a shelter, I will just stay with my materialistic goods and drown or wait for someone to rescue me." give me a break. There is no excuse to be standing on the roof of your house right now waiting for a boat to pick you up unless you have no friends, no family and are paralyzed from the neck down.

Now which point specifically would you like to call untrue? The one about charities somehow misapropriating funds into peoples personal bank accounts? See 9/11 for some sweet examples of that. Idiot politicians grandstanding with comments like "This is our Tsunami!", yeah, good call dickhead. What like 210,000+ died in the Indonesian tsunami, how many have died to Katrina? And how many of those didn't have to? It's like saying "Yeah, sorry your family all died in a plane crash, but my Gameboy batteries stopped working, so that's "my plane crash".

Or did you want to tell me that there isn't mad looting going on? Or maybe all you disagree on is the celebrities. You're right, I am sure Britney Spears has genuine distress over the Katrina victims. In fact she's eating a third helping of Rocky Road while she wipes away her tears as we speak. No wait, you meant that there AREN'T capitalist pigs trying to make a fast buck off this... Ah yes, you mean like the $6 gallons of gas that aren't happening. If your heart keeps bleeding at its current rate, you'll need a transfusion before you're done reading this comment.

Corporate America screws it all up

[drakethegreat]

The reality is that people obviously care and want to donate. Now I doubt that corporate america believes in screwing over the victims but I think this shows how corporate stupidity can risk legitimate causes simply because when groups of people get to together they do stupid things like enact theft prevention that DOES NOT WORK. I'm sure this wasn't their intention but it goes to show what morons who run a crappy website can do. I hope that they release a public apology for this one but too bad it won't matter. The fact is that its possible people are going to starve because of their actions or they are at least going to be homeless a little longer because some dick couldn't do his job and monitor things correctly.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Nehle]

Hey, did I pay $10 to post this? No. I'm pretty sure that Slashdot has more users and less banners/ads/posts by admins begging for money than the Something Awful forums. Oh, and see the search button at the bottom? Like, whoa!

I'm pretty sure that if SomethingAwful was owned and ran by VA Software (which had a revenue of around $7.6 million in the third quarter of 2005), they wouldn't have an incentive to charge $10. However, as it turns out, it is owned and ran by one individual - Richard Kyanka, and he isn't quite as wealthy as a huge IT company. Like, whoa!

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[AnimeFreak]

If you have bothered to take a look at the forums, there is no piracy going on. MP3s were barred alongside torrents from the forums roughly a year ago, as it was just becomming a legal nightmare.

EARN SOME HISTORY, FAG

You're new here, aren't you

[Anonymous Coward]

I take it you haven't actually tried using that search button to find anything.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[realityfighter]

That's how public television gets it's donation money, at least around here. "Donate in the silver plan and get this handsome Black Adder tote bag!" We used to donate to get cool merch from british TV shows that only came to the US through public television. It's not an uncommon system for raising money.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Blutarsky]

Hmm that's what I thought. How don't I have compassion though, I'm confused by that one. I live in New hampshire, I don't personally know anyone affected by the hurricane, but I've already donated blood and money.

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Reene]

Are you the guy we've heard so much about? The one that posted a video of himself humping a chunk of flab with an orfice that vaguely resembled a vagina and got pissed when it got passed around?

Seriously, just let me know if I'm way off here...

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

WDMA had nothing to do with SA and was in no way related, paying 10bux to join SA wouldnt get you on WDMA, as WDMA WAS closed and never accepted any new members.

To read more about how WDMA IS GONE read http://www.wdma.biz/

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

Ladies and gentleman, I present you....

RYAN LORD! My parent reply here, may have been the actual person involved in the "complaints" action taken against this ligit donation.

For those of you who don't care, Ryan Lord is insane and has been electronically stalking Richard Kyanka for about a month now. Calling his parents, pretending to be him online. Even turning himself in to the FBI for trading illegal torrents on the internet.

Ryan Lord ladies and gents, Ryan Lord...

The best part is, he'll read this and have to reply. He just can't resist!

Re:The USA is Dying

[YeEntrancemperium]

Democracy doesn't work. Democracy has killed our Earth. Democracy is short term. Democracy is only as good as the people that run it and those people are stupid, unhealthy, and spiritually ignorant.

Paypal is Smart

[TiggertheMad]

Naah.. the whole 180 thing is a lie to get you to wait 'til they've managed to misappropriate your money somewhere.

They don't need to misappropriate the money to profit from the 180 day time period. Just by having a large sum of money for a given period of time allows you to make short term investments and such.

Imagine you are an e-bank. You have 100k in your vaults that people have given you as say escrow for ebay transactions. You have 5k incomming each day, and 5k outgoing each day. If you impose an additional 10 day waiting period on the transactions you are doing, you suddenly have 50k more liquid cash. While you are obligated to repay all of it, just by delaying things, you have generated more capital.

Re:Paypal is Smart

[theLOUDroom]

They don't need to misappropriate the money to profit from the 180 day time period. Just by having a large sum of money for a given period of time allows you to make short term investments and such.

Further more, that have it conveniently decided that they are NOT and bank, therefore they are exempt from federal reserve requirement.
This means that there's plenty of potential for a "bank run" on Paypal.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet Richard is wealthy enough to pay for a mail-order bride, a new house, and enough guns to arm a small third-world nation.

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL BUTTES

The only good

[gorkhal]

to come from this would be, if and when the androids at paypal finally admits their idiocy and unlocks the donation account, that Paypal dishes out some big $$bucks$$ towards the Katrina relief fund, to fix this PR mess.

And I mean big big bucks if those Paypal PR morons have any sense whatsoever.

It's apparent you don't know how taxes work

[ahecht]

All the payments he gets via paypal are taxable income. That income, minus paypal fees, is then donated.

Therefore, the amount donated is less than the amount of extra (taxable) income recieved, so he pays more taxes.

Re:It's apparent you don't know how taxes work

[Anonymous Coward]

The grandparent post is dead wrong because, as the parent post pointed out, the donations SA receives are taxable income. SA could conceivably claim the donations as deductions without claiming the income, but that way leads to audits and jail time, and to my reading the grandparent was complaining about a legal scam perpetrated on the donators, not an illegal scam prepetrated on the gub'ment.

The parent post is commendable, but the last postion is also wrong. It assumes that the 2.35+% cut that Paypal takes from each donation is ever considered to be SA's net income. Many business expenses are fully deductable, including (TA DA!!) payment processing fees. PayPal is the entity paying income taxes on those fees.

See, e.g., the final postings in this eBay thread. If you've never been a comptroller or a sole proprieter, then you cannot rationally discuss business income tax matters. They are nothing like personal income tax matters.

Read...

[James A. Y. Joyce]

...and replied. Yes, people. I, rolloffle, am Ryan Lord. Oh snap!

Then they have the nerve to...

[kakofb]

Have this on their website: http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/g eneral/PayPalKatrinaReliefEffort-outside By the way, the Red Cross was a poor choice of charity to give money to. They are just as bad as PayPal.

good night gewwns, this grandma is goi

[Anonymous Coward]

ng to bed

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

Post about it...

ON THE INTERNET!

Sup TheMystic? Get bent lately?

Paypal - uggh!

[Mathinker]

After trying to submit a comment on their privacy policy, I quickly became convinced that their customer service department was either reply-bots or incompetents.

It took at least 4 iterations until I finally got what could have been an immediate no-brainer "We forwarded your comment to our lawyers"...

Or maybe the CS staff has guidelines like "only people stubborn enough to reply 4 or more times to off-topic garbage can get forwarded to the legal department"...

After that it only took me a quick Google search for all the disgruntled customer sites to convince me to avoid them if at all possible...

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

Hello, Ryan Lord, also known as TheMystic. Your girlfriend is certainly large and in charge!

Totally agree

[SuperKendall]

PayPal sure gets slammed a lot around here, but they are a business really inbetween a rock and a hard place. PayPal has hordes of people trying to scam them with stolen CC numbers, and I am also glad they err on the side of caution even if from time to time what they do is inconvienient.

It doesn't help that when it comes to moeny, people get a lot more worked up at the drop of a hat.

Hopefully they sort out this issue soon and free up the money to go to where it's supposed to.

If you think PayPal is bad however, just try and look at the alternatives. Have you look at Western Union for sending money? Now THAT is a scam and a half.

Re:Totally agree

[cortana]

This is all absolutely true. However I'm sure people would be willing to cut Paypal a little slack if only their customer service wasn't so goddamn awful!

You're a fucking idiot.

[_KiTA_]

Your a fucking idiot. The people left behind didn't have money to rent a hotel, cars to drive themselves away, or the good health to just walk. Remember, New Orleans is one of the poorest towns in the poorest state in the United States of America. There are a LOT of fucking poor people, and there was NO evac plan, other than "drive yourselves out of the area." No busses, no choppers, nothing but "you're on your own."

Think it's so easy to evac on a tip of a hat? Ok. Put yourself in their shoes, the poor and elderly left behind -- first, get rid of your car keys and wallet. These people don't have cars to drive or spare cash to rent a motel, they're POOR. Second, twist your ankle. A good chunk of the people left behind were elderly and ill, so having a bum leg will be a pretty good stand in. Now, grab your entire family, as much of your property that you want to keep -- should be funny seeing you walking with a bum leg and your PC case strapped to your bag. Remember, it's a hurricane, anything you leave behind is gone. Now go walk for 48 hours straight, see how far you get.

Ok, done? Good. Now take a look around. Ask yourself "Did I just walk far enough to get the hell out of the way of a hurricane?" I'd wager you couldn't even make 50 miles. And remember, this was only a Category 1 hurricane until it hit the warm "global-warming doesn't exist!!!" gulf waters, where it balooned, rapidly.

As for the looting -- oh good, they stole a bunch of ruined TVs. You racist moron. You know why there's so many "black looters" down there? Because the media calls "white looting" "finding food". Oh, and the 60% black population might have something to do with it, too. Ya think?

They went 5 days without any federal relief, all so Bush could set up Photo Ops. Think it's easy to go 5 days without food or water? After day two you have to think to yourself "Ok, so the 7/11 has bottled water and bread, and it's already torn to shit because of the wind, fuck this, I'm going to grab some."

It's so fucking easy to sit back behind your computer monitor in some comfortable computer room on a cushy computer chair and blame the victims of this disaster and subsiquent leadership clusterfuck. But in reality these people were in desperate need of help from their city, state, and federal government and that help didn't arrive until it was 7 days too late.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[Zorilla]

Your a fucking idiot.

Wow, this time, it was the first word of the post. We have a new record.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

As for the looting -- oh good, they stole a bunch of ruined TVs. You racist moron. You know why there's so many "black looters" down there? Because the media calls "white looting" "finding food".

Most people wouldn't morally object to people taking food in a time of emergency such as this. I doubt you could say the same thing for people taking TVs.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

They went 5 days without any federal relief, all so Bush could set up Photo Ops.

Not that I like Bush personally, but...

They went 5 days without federal relief because luisianna has a state law that says they won't accept federal aid unless a disaster lasts at least that long. It's A crybaby law left from the civil-war bitterness. Pure beurracratic bullshit, and now millions are suffering for it.

Otherwise, I completely agree with you.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[Max Threshold]

Wow. Let's not let facts get in the way of passing judgement, huh?

First of all, while there were indeed a lot of sick and elderly trapped in New Orleans, the vast majority were perfectly healthy. These people had absolutely no excuse for being there. Their presence cost many of them their lives, and interfered with relief efforts.

And you can put away the race card. People were stealing a lot more than broken TVs. More to the point, nobody ever said, "hey, look at all the BLACK people stealing!" It's not the media's fault that most of the people who stayed behind are poor, and most of the poor are black. What are they supposed to do, photoshop some white people into the photos? Pretend the looting didn't happen? "There are reports of looting, but we can't show you the photos because the perpetrators are black." Right.

Oh, and the whole "white people find" thing is getting old. The photographer said he actually saw those people find the stuff floating in the water. So shut the fuck up already.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[marco13185]

This is semi-true. First of all, the people that stayed behind are MOSTLY the thugs that wanted to cause chaos after this shit. Think about it, if you were a thug, wanted to kill someone, rape someone, shoot upon firefighters and their families, wouldn't you stay behind? Actually, experts have proven (time and time again) that global warming does NOT cause more than a 10 increase in power. That would have increased the power maybe 8-9 mph (that's not even a whole category). It's just a fact that the gulf has great sunlight. It being surrounded by land, it conducts more heat. Also, cold currents don't flow as much as in the open sea. About looting. Looting for food is perfectly legal, as food is necessarry to live. Looting for non-necessities, such as TVs, is illegal and wrong. Also, it's not just TVs, it's fucking assault rifles you imbecile. And the 60% black population means nothing. The looters are like 99% black, not exactly proportional.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[zenneth]

Kanye?

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

I would like to ask, where's the army? looting should be blamed, but why somebody let this happened?

moveover, why there're children, babies? oh, they all born to go stealing those fucking broken TVs? if so that's really pretty suck.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[MoneyT]

The army can no legally be deployed without the request of the state government.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, Bush had all the power he needed. He could deploy Nat'l Guard units from other states to the hurricane zone. And he KNEW that. He used that very power after 911. Obviously Cheney and Rove forgot to tell him to do it this time.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[msdschris]

As for the looting -- oh good, they stole a bunch of ruined TVs. You racist moron. You know why there's so many "black looters" down there? Because the media calls "white looting" "finding food". Oh, and the 60% black population might have something to do with it, too. Ya think?
Taking food and other essentials in the midst of a disaster in order to preserve one's life or the life of one's family is nothing to be ashamed of. Walking through waist high water with that brand new plasma screen (or whatever it may be) only to take it... ummmm let's see home's gone, power's out, city is ruined and under water for who knows how long... gives new meaning to the phrase "intelligent life". "Yeah, I remember those two hours I had that 50" plasma..." They might not have had it long but they had it first.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

The hurricane's strength is immaterial. If you'll notice, the hurricane isn't what caused the damage to New Orleans, it was the piss poor job their flooding countermeasures didn't do.

That city is below sea level, which is a pretty stupid place for a city in a hurricane corridor in the first place, but nevermind that. The flooding after the hurricane passed through is what caused all the damage, the hurricane's strength just didn't matter. It was shoddy planning and lack of funding that flooded the city.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Reports from New Orleans state that people looting televisions and other electronic goods are doing so with the intentions of selling them in order to pay for passage out of New Orleans. This whole situation has arisen out of desperation, and everything else is a calloused attempt at blaming the victim.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[_KiTA_]

>>First of all, while there were indeed a lot of sick and elderly trapped in New Orleans, the vast majority were perfectly healthy. These people had absolutely no excuse for being there. Their presence cost many of them their lives, and interfered with relief efforts.

Except, while healthy, they had no way out of the city. You clamly ignored the point I rasied about, you know, poor people not being able to afford to just pack up and leave their entire lives on the drop of a hat.

The fact of the matter is there should have been an evacuation plan, and wasn't. There should have been leadership immediately after the floods started, there wasn't. And at least 10,000 people died because of it.

I can only hope that heads will roll for this, and that in the future, we'll be much more prepared.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[_KiTA_]

And they requested it repeatedly. The paperwork didn't go through for 2 days. And the National Guard Commander didn't want the army in there until they were satisfied that they couldn't handle it.

Like I said. A clusterfuck of leadership. Absolute disaster.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[MoneyT]

No, he can't. So glad you paid attention in school. Here's a hint for you, the National Guard is not under control of the president unless they are called into service of the Federal government. Once they are called into service for the Federal government, they become Federal troops. Federal troops can NOT be deployed to any state without the consent and request of that state's government.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, there was an evac plan, and the plan specifically said "use the buses". There was enough room for 10,000 people on those buses, but the mayor did not follow that part of the evac plan. That being said, there were fuck ups on every level of government.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[msdschris]

Bullshit... Victims my ass. Victims of their own stupidity perhaps. Who the hell were they going to sell them to? Tourists? Who were they going to pay for passage out? Keep making up excuses, next thing you'll be telling me they were just firing shots into the air to let the rescuers know that they were there and that it really wasn't rape going on in the stadium bathrooms because they were just delerious.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[dcigary]

First off, why isn't this modded down as "Off-Topic"? I don't see where this rant has anything to do with PayPal, which, from what I read last, this story was about.

Nevertheless, if a ranting, raving poster is going to be modded up, then the same should be applied to the the linked counter-rant.

Re:You're a fucking idiot.

[Max Threshold]

And you calmly ignored the fact that it doesn't cost a fucking cent to put one foot in front of the other. If not out of town and out of the storm's path, they could have at least found shelter on higher ground within the city.

Everything you just said is correct.

[StarKruzr]

But you know what?

NONE of it has ANYTHING to do with the 9/11 attacks or weapons of mass destruction, which were the reasons Bushco gave for the invasion.

F* You PayPal

[Jesus IS the Devil]

PayPal screwed me over big time too. These guys love taking your money, but as soon as there's heat, they clam up, take their cut, and pretend nothing has happened. Don't praise these clowns because you've not run into any problems. The true colors of any company comes when problems arise.

All PayPal does is give you the runaround via automated replies, and closing your support requests. You can re-open them either and they don't give a crap.

PayPal and eBay are like HEAVEN for crooks for run around and commit scams. And the few times PayPal tries to be proactive? They end up freezing up money of legimitate transactions.

Man... what a bunch of CLOWNS! Ebay and PayPal, Burn in hell.

Re:F* You PayPal

[seabreezemm]

what would a neocron that thinks Jesus is the devil know about heaven?...better study up on hell. I hear you will be staying a while.

Re:F* You PayPal

[gabba_gabba_hey]

bleh, eat a dick - oh did I say that out loud, best say it louder: EAT A DICK!!! ;) see ya in hell funnyboy...

Re:F* You PayPal

[Jesus IS the Devil]

Yeah the founders of PayPal, along with YOU, will be joining me in hell while I torture the $hit out of you all. You can call me Satan, or Jesus for short.

So this shows up in their HTTP referers...

[Anonymous Coward]

Please click:
http://www.paypal.com/

Re:RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

>chik-chik< BLAM. BLAM.

Another way to donate

[friday2k]

You can also go to Amazon and donate from there.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[galvanash]

Im tired of Katrina already. The entire event is one huge extortion opportunity, that's all it is.

Oh, I see. People who have lost _everything_ asking for help is extortion. What fucking species are you? Regardless, there is no gun pointed at your head. Dont help, no ones making you.

It's news networks trying to increase viewership with sensationalism.

Dude, they dont have to try. A major US city being pratically submerged into the fucking ocean is pretty sensational all by itself.

It's politicians trying to entrench their position by being the first to offer the biggest aid not out of passion but out of lust for power.

You are TRULY beyound clueless... This whole thing has been a royal cluster fuck from day one, and pretty much every politician involved, from the mayor to the governor all the way to the president has screwed up some aspect of their job to one degree or another. A power grab? Right... politicians are just standing in line to claim that they were involved in what is probably the worst excuse for a disaster plan ever concieve by man. Idiot.

It's minorities pushing their equal rights backwards 5 steps by being the hoodlums they say they aren't and looting like it's Christmas.

I didnt know that criminals represented a minority seeking equal rights... Or are you actually implying that honest people faced with desperation are inclined to steal TVs? No one is trying to help them, that is what the army was sent in for. But if you actually consider taking food and water in such a situation looting I hope one day you find yourself without either in the middle of nowhere... Just you and a black or latino guy who has lots of both. May he treat you as kindly as you would treat him.

It's aging celebrities lunging at a second chance in the limelight by crying on cue on Larry King.

Ok, that one Ill give you.

If you choose to live below sea level, along the coast and don't have insurance - deal with it. If the entire country is warning you that in 2-3 days all your shit will be submerged, and you opt to stay in your home and drown or put rescuer lives at risk to move you like you should have moved yourself three days prior - deal with it.

Ok, now Im gonna rant. Those that did not have flood insurance (the VAST majority) ARE dealing with it. They lost all their stuff and they're dealing with it. Many lost their jobs too. Some even lost family. They ARE dealing with it. Most are not even asking for help. The people of southern Louisiana (of which I am one) are very proud. For every 1 person you might see on TV crying for help there are at least 50,000 who are quietly trying to put their lives back together. But whether they are quiet about it or not, most could really use a bit of help. You dont want to help, fine, I couldn't care less. But to actually be so fucking self-absorbed that you are compeled to publically complain that the mere act of help being asked for and offered in your general vacinity sickens you is fucking repugnent.

You are the moral equivalent of the looters you complain about. So selfish that your own personal status blinds you to what is going on around you.

On a different note, like humans chimpazees are social creatures. They naturally gather in troops in order to defend and care for each other. Do you know what chimps do to members of the troop that dont behave socially? They usually beat them to death with large stones. Be glad you are not a chimp.

This happened to another effort but it got fixed

[qohen]

A Katrina relief effort by Little Green Football readers that had over $9000 in Paypal donations got frozen by Paypal:
http://www.punditeria.com/2005/09/paypalcom-freeze s-our-account-as.html

Then unfrozen, thanks to efforts of someone higher up at Paypal:
http://www.punditeria.com/2005/09/paypal-superviso r-realizes-error.html

Alternatives?

[Goosey]

This is enough to finally convince me to boycott paypal. My question is: What are the alternatives? There has got to be at least one??

Re:Alternatives?

[Anonymous Coward]

Send me your money.

Re:Alternatives?

[blank_vlad]

Moneybookers seems to be one such alternative. Wikipedia is accepting donations through them for their current fund drive.

those bastards!

[nilbog]

Protecting your business interests because of suspicious activity? You bastards!
Oh by the way, I'm killing babies and clubbing seals, but don't worry - it's in the name of hurricane relief which makes it okay!

Re:those bastards!

[gabba_gabba_hey]

You have to be fucking kidding me. They consider "suspicious activity" to be any account with enough funds in it to be worth seizing. There is plenty of precedent to back this up and a modicum of googling will show you tons of horror stories. Paypal is a fucking racket. Why they choose the barely legal path of just stealing money due to their TOS is beyond me as they must rake in zillions from ebay alone. They are unscrupulous fucking bastards and something more ethical needs to rise up in their place and burn them to the fucking ground.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[Anonymous Coward]

Chimps also like to throw shit at each other, but we have taboos against that. Instead we use the internet.

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow.
It takes a special blend of asshole to reach the spectacular level that you have somehow attained.

You are aware that any ability for people to trade television shows has been removed for a long time now, right? Without complaint from anyone outside the forums? Just because it was starting to tread on dangerous ground that no one was really willing to tread on? And because the site was not about having a place to download shows, but was actually a forum for conversation - and the owner did not want it to become some raped version of what his initial intentions were... right?

And you are aware that wdma, which closed due to the admins being sick of the internal drama, had no assosiation - in any way/shape/form to SA, correct? Different admins, no money shared, no anything... no real conversation even exchanged between the two parties.

I mean - to be an asshole is one thing. I pride myself on being an asshole... personally, it's my hobby; but, to be an uneducated asshole - not so much in the sense of inability to use correct words and grammar - but more in the sense of throwing out skewed and unfair arguements based on the fact that a home movie endevor did not go as planned, causing around 1/100th of the internet to wonder why someone would rub their genitals upon an uncooked Honey Baked Ham - is somewhat lame.

Jesus Christ. If you're going to attempt for any sort of halfway worthwhile blog, could you at least attempt to make the supporting arguements have some physical likeness of fact?

Because that'd be rad.

Hope your pelvis heals,
-afx

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

roffelmayonaise

Re:that web site sure is something awful!

[Anonymous Coward]

sh0ut0utz 2 tha raspberryheaven

ain't nobody out there givin' 2 shits bout New Orleans 'cuz it ain't worth my time

damn right bruthas

Re:Katrina can eat me

[galvanash]

Touché.

Re:that web site sure is something awful!

[Anonymous Coward]

Lowtax should have that Kane West go apeshit on paypal like he did with G W BUSH!

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh,
a) mail order bride? did you literally make that up because she's asian? Just wondering

b) Ok, so he's made enough money to buy a house... so have many people

c) 1) Those are airsoft
      2) That you are even familiar with that strongly implys you are a stupid banned user. That you are here and not there is a pretty strong argument for SA.

Contact paypal - all of /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Contact Us page at Paypal.

Send them an email and ask about this, with a link to this Slashdot page.

Re:Contact paypal - all of /.

[SenshiSteph]

Have already done this - and have been posting the following message on every forum and messageboard I am a member of: Subject: Paypal robs Red Cross of $20000 ______________ http://www.somethingawful.com/ Comedy site Something Awful recently organised a Paypal donation drive for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina (they could not use their normal credit-card processing as their servers are located in New Orleans). Because there were over 3000 dollars an hour flooding in, Paypal suspected fraud and have suspended the account, which then stood at over twenty thousand dollars. Paypal do not usually release funds on suspended accounts. They look set to keep the lot (on top of the 2.35% fees they charge anyway). Please contact Paypal at this link http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/websc...contact-gene ral to ask them to forward the funds to the Red Cross immediately, and reinstate the account so people can continue donating. Thanks for your help P.S. feel free to copy to other forums or forward by email

Re:Contact paypal - all of /.

[Anonymous Coward]

d00d!! s70p!! b4d!

seriously, you can't just start taking money into your paypal account to give to a third-party (no matter how needy). you either have to ship something in return for each payment received, or you have to declare that you are accepting the payments personally as the owner of the account. damned is that so freakin' hard for people to understand?

walk up and down the street and collect money in your boots and then donate it to the red cross if you like. if you decide to blow it on a cheeseburger, it is on you. but if you charge on people's cards and don't send the money to the red cross, then the company that ran those charges for you is going to get totally busted for allowing you on their network.

so stop with the screw-over ebay campaign. damn stupid people irritate me.

Re:Contact paypal - all of /.

[SharpFang]

Wrong.
You don't need anything extra to start gathering money for charity - be it a paypal account, your personal account, your pocket etc. And if, and only if you DON'T give the money to the charity, then they can sue your ass and punish you. Pre-emptive strike is NOT an allowed strategy. Assuming you won't donate the money you gathered and freezing them is just that: Robbing the victims, those who the money were designated for, from the donations. A thug taking the donation box from a kid, saying "It's not safe with you".

Re:Contact paypal - all of /.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, I went one better and cancelled my account. The comments are as follows.

I'd always heard bad stories about Paypal. I wasn't sure what to think. Now I know for sure. I don't mean to insult anyone who works at Paypal personally - individually you may be great people. As a company you are the fucking lowliest excuse for an organisation on the planet. For more information on what confirmed my stance please see http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/05/09/04/050220.shtml? tid=99&tid=17 and http://www.somethingawful.com.nyud.net:8090/.

I look forward to doing business with whatever company eventually overthrows you.

Re:Dishonest company screws a dishonest webmaster

[sockonafish]

How does one write off the expenses of an LLC on his personal income taxes?

[legal goons]

WTF?

[t_allardyce]

Why is this such a big deal? Just because there's a natural disaster does not mean everyone can drop the guards on their businesses and for example assume no-one will be abusing paypal (just look at the looters). Why does he even need to set-up a paypal donation account when there are countless charities already set-up and waiting to take your donation? Why did he not just link to the Red Cross in the first place, they would get money faster and more people would trust them rather than an unknown web-master. Oh boo fucking whoo paypal are being careful, lets boycott them!

Re:WTF?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've compiled this simple three-step method so you can avoid making an ass out of yourself on the internet in the future.

1) FOLLOW LINK
2) READ ARTICLE
3) ENJOY NOTORIETY AS A SENSIBLE POSTER

I hope this helps, and please read the fucking article before posting on this topic again.

Re:WTF?

[wootest]

I agree about PayPal having to watch their asses, because I'm sure that if they were more lenient, they'd either be bankrupt today or we'd get stories about how people were scammed out of their money and certainly lots of comments about PayPal being dupes, replacing today's stories of people being locked out of their accounts and comments about how PayPal are corporate fascists. It's a fine line to walk. (However, it's obviously not good that you have to jump through hoops to get to people you can talk to that can actually do something for you.)

People who collect their own funds typically do so for three reasons:
a) They want to thank the people who donate more than a specific amount, or at all. (SA is sending out swag, for example.)
b) They want to match donations.
c) Even if they want some of the money to get to the Red Cross, they want to get some of the money to someone's hands directly.

Most funds that are in operation right now do it for one (or some, or all) of the reasons above. None of them are possible by donating to the Red Cross directly. So if the major point is that these people are just doing a 'drive' out of spite with no main benefits, it's disproven by now. (Of course, some just want to "hand over a check" to the Red Cross with their web site name on it. I didn't say some people didn't do that. But it's wrong to accuse everyone of doing that.)

Re:WTF?

[HD Webdev]

Why did he not just link to the Red Cross in the first place, they would get money faster and more people would trust them rather than an unknown web-master. Oh boo fucking whoo paypal are being careful, lets boycott them!

From the somethingawful.com site:

"9/03/2005 - 2:05 PM - Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka

Some people are emailing me, asking if they can donate to SA to help with our server move and downtime and temporary hosting and stuff. Don't worry about us, we'll be fine. If you really want to make a difference, donate to the SA Red Cross Relief Fund link above. They need it more than we do."

He's not an unknown webmaster. He's just unknown to you. Lowtax has been a webmaster since he ran planetquake.com. People who would be donating wouldn't be stumbling upon a satire site to do so. It would be those who Lowtax encouraged that would be donating or other regulars of that site & forums.

Lowtax has had a HUGE following for the last ~7 years and couldn't cut and run without people recognizing him on the street and beating the crap out of him over and over again.

Those who don't aren't familiar with him would be stupid to donate there, I'll give you that. But, for the hundreds of thousands of people who regularly visit his site, giving AT HIS SITE is not only understandable but also shows how legitimate his community is.

It gives a community great pride to actually see how much is being contributed and how much a difference that particular community can make.

Re:WTF?

[SysGoddess]

Why did he not just link to the Red Cross in the first place, they would get money faster and more people would trust them rather than an unknown web-master

Because the RedCross won't let you solicit funds on their behalf or link to them in such a way as to appear to be soliciting funds on their behalf to minimize the potential for scamming.

Re:WTF?

[t_allardyce]

Ah, so you are saying that if you tried to click on this link: http://www.redcross.org/ there would be no way for you to make a donation? So how exactly does the red-cross get any donations if you pretty much can't link to them unless you say in the link 'do not donate to the read cross by clicking here'?

Re:WTF?

[SysGoddess]

so you are saying that if you tried to click on this link: http://www.redcross.org/ there would be no way for you to make a donation?

I've said no such thing. When the Red Cross has become aware of people linking to their site in such a way or requesting donations on their behalf they have acted swiftly with e-mail or even a cease and desist type letter.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[ultranova]

"Ohh boo hoo, I'm too poor, I don't have a car, but I can afford a cell phone. I am "above" walking, I will not even try to go to the SuperDome or a shelter, I will just stay with my materialistic goods and drown or wait for someone to rescue me." give me a break. There is no excuse to be standing on the roof of your house right now waiting for a boat to pick you up unless you have no friends, no family and are paralyzed from the neck down.

So tell me, how far can you walk in two days ? And if you're carrying food and water with you - after all, you're a smart person so you know that the infrastructure is likely to be overloaded with the amount of people fleeing the city, and so you can't be sure you can get food and water on the way ?

Can you walk far enough that you'll be safe from the hurricane ? You don't know, because you're no meteorologist. So what do you do ?

1. Start running into a random direction like a headless chicken and most likely be hit by the hurricane with no shelter in sight.
2. Go to a shelter where you most likely get trapped in tight conditions with thousands of people who're getting increasingly desperate and will therefore likely rape and/or kill you - assuming that the whole building won't collapse on you.
3. Stay at your home where you get at least some shelter from the storm, where you can get out quickly if it looks like it's going to collapse, where you likely have food stored, and where you can climb to rooftop if there's a flood, and don't have to worry about those thousands of other people killing you in a panicked frenzy.

Hint: option number three gives the best chances of survival.

More than one report of suspicious behavior?

[Masque Meqanique]

Mkay, it might just be me, but it sounds, from the screenshot on SA of the problem, like some wanker decided, "Hey, let's report the donation fund as being a scam, that'll be funny!" Of course, I'm sure that someone has pointed this out by now, and I haven't noticed it.

Re:Dishonest company screws a dishonest webmaster

[BlackMesaLabs]

Capital contributions.

PayPal & eBay sucks

[Alias00]

I stopped using PayPal over a year ago, when I was ripped off by an eBay seller for £50. Well, I went to the Dispute system, but I've still not got a reply.

Paypal is right

[Anonymous Coward]

Obviously they had to stop this, it's not really possible to accept donations until the security situation on the ground improves. That's the excuse for everything else.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Zorilla]

Hey, did I pay $10 to post this? No.

It's worth the $10 alone to avoid the Linux fanboyism and idiotic catchphrases that became tired in 1995.

Oh, and see the search button at the bottom? Like, whoa!

Have you ever tried using it? More than one search keyword and the system shits its pants.

And the servers can't handle the "sheer number of users" because radium can't code for shit and cobbled the software together from an old warezed version of vB and various examples from MySQL For Dummies.

Last time I checked, the Awful Forums rarely have performance issues. Previewing and Posting is almost instant. Compare that to Slashdot, where doing either results in a delay that is typically 10-20 seconds long. If you're going to compare code quality, try comparing to something else besides Slashcode (Nothing to see here, HURRRR).

What are your accusations of vBulletin being "warezed"? If Team Barry lacked any regard for the vB system on which the forums are based, the first thing they would do is get rid of the "Powered by vBulletin [really old version]" footer at the bottom of the page. It was actually one of the agreements between them and the vBulletin developers when they modified it.

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

haha what? wdma.biz? did you even check it when you when you smashed your head against the keyboard?

that's not a front... it's GONE. there is NOTHING there

YES i can do RANDOM CAPITALS too

Count me in as screwed by paypal

[Anonymous Coward]

I had a small account for a while, mostly for those who took paypal only...and then one day I had a friend transfer a bit over a thousand into my account, and I realized I needed that money sooner than I thought so I asked the parental units to write a check for me, and I paypal'd them the money. (My account was business, my parents, personal.)

They took a fee out as the money came to me.

They took a fee out as the money went to my parents.

Then, and only then, did they suspend my account, after years of use.

They wanted phone calls, faxes, emails, letters, and my blood type.

I just let them keep the dollar or so in the account and decided to use Amazon for any money collection in the future.

Re:The USA is Dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Gawd, are you naive and dumb.

Re:As a something awful member, this disappoints m

[ImaLamer]

The attorney general that should get involved is Gonzales. Bush already said he had no patience for fraud - Gonzales should just look at the situation and either charge eBay/PayPal or they should charge SA.

One is committing fraud, I think SomethingAweful is pretty safe I think.

Why does anyone still use PayPal for anything?

[Anonymous Coward]

They have been freezing accounts for no reason for years. Their idea of "resolving" these account freezes is to send a generic auto-response email. If you don't like it you can sue them. Oh wait! Filing a lawsuit takes months and costs tens of thousands of dollars, so if you don't like their policy, the only thing you can do about it is to complain about it!

I don't use them for anything. I refuse to set up an account with them, because I'm worried about them putting charges on my CC or my bank account (their terms of service probably allow them to do this). If an Ebay seller requires PayPal, I go somewhere else.

There are so many other options out there for credit card processing these days.

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Zorilla]

Just to be nitpicky, goon-run site Alluvion.org still hosts torrents for people who wish to provide them to fellow users. Thanks to it, we are able to share such things as that 500 MB video of Bill Hicks flipping out on stage. "Ah'm a drunk cunt!"

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Anonymous Coward]

"Again, imagine it from the outside: "WalMart Red Cross donation button! Donate to the Red Cross here! 93% of your donation will go DIRECTLY TO THE RED CROSS! Donations over $10 will recieve free Wal Mart goodies!" "

Hate to break it to you but that is how the US Charity system works. You rarely get 100% of your donation going directly to the charity in question. Even 93% would be unusual.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[bani]

jesus fucking christ. many of the people who weren't able to evacuate were the elderly, disabled, over 10,000 people in hospitals alone. i guess you're saying the patients should have just got up out of their hospital beds and walked away?

new orleans also has one of the lowest % of automobile ownership in the nation, and one of the highest poverty rates. it's not like everyone who chose to stay behind could afford to just get in a car/bus/etc and leave the area. many had no money, no family, no place to go.

you're a miserable asshole for blaming the victims.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

My god it's the opposition leader of NSW, Richard Brogden!

Re:Katrina can eat me

[Tim C]

I'm too poor, I don't have a car, but I can afford a cell phone.

Cost of my car: £300/month + tax, insurance and fuel.

Cost of my mobile phone: £25/month

Replying to an obvious troll: priceless^W a waste of time

Indeed

[DarkTempes]

the last thing you want to do on the internet is piss off the SomethingAwful crowd.

I mean, just look at the name. You don't even have to KNOW that they're goons to know it's bad when you piss them off.

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

The SomethingAwful crowd have been known to pick tantrum fights (a) with the wrong target, (b) in way over their heads.

Re:Indeed

[iMacGuy]

Actually none of us have attention spans, so it doesn't really mean anything.

PP has their Own

[kilox]

Maybe PayPal wanted to be the only one to use their own service to collent Hurricane Relief Funds. Check out the Katrina link on their home.

Being a charity isn't easy

[shoppa]

OK, I've got no sympathy for Paypal here.

But being a charity isn't easy

I automatically will question anyone serving as a middleman on the way of getting money to a real charity.

I even more will question the middleman who offers gifts/prizes to givers.

Maybe it's good old-fashioned midwesternism or something, but money should go directly as possible to those who need it. I barely trust organizations like Red Cross or United Way to do this. Any merchant between me and them, especially one offering prizes for giving, raises all sorts of red flags in my head.

Re:Being a charity isn't easy

[jdonnis]

I am glad to hear that the strong winds hasn't knocked off your tinfoil hat.

People need to relax, Seriously...

[Anonymous Coward]

What's happened here is that a charity account has been opened, and within a few hours has been swamped with many mnay (small?) donations totalling many thousands of dollars.

If PayPal DIDN'T flag this account as suspicous, I'd be mad.

Come the next business day, the money will be released and all will be well.

Of all the accounts that fit this profile, the vast majority are not legit. Paypal wouldn't be doing it's job if it didn't flag it. 99% of accounts that act like this are fraudulent.

Re:Dishonest company screws a dishonest webmaster

[Arivia]

Read SA's front page. The *only* reason Lowtax used PayPal was so that he could get donaters' shipping addresses to ship free merchandise to them as a thanks for their donations.

Re:This happened to another effort but it got fixe

[Anonymous Coward]

Little Green Football???

WTF? Aren't they all going around attacking muslims, still asking for Terri's feeding tube to be reinstated, and accusing everybody who isn't George Bush of being a terrorist?

Dear God, man! Don't bring references of that here.

This may be /., but we have some standards.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our new Linux fanboy overloards.

Paypal ARE a bank

[Ribbo.com]

Under UK law, they do actually count as a bank, and because of this have to follow all the same procedures as any other UK bank. They are also answerable to the British government should they try anything dodgy.

Re:Dishonest company screws a dishonest webmaster

[Anonymous Coward]

Its not income to begin with, and doesn't have to be reported as such. He's merely forwarding money, which isn't an income or an expenditure in the sense of tax liability.

Paypal does this a lot

[TorKlingberg]

Of the 4 sites I visit which have accepted PayPal donations in the past, all 4 have had their accounts frozen. And I really don't visit _that_ wierd sites.

Suspicious behaviour? YES!

[SharpFang]

In this case the "buyers" are the victims of the hurricane.
PayPal concluded they are moving en masse as if trying to escape from something (debts maybe?). They are under the army's supervision. They move in large organized groups (mobs?), they leave their workplaces and take as much property as they can (definitely, running with stolen goods), some of them died (gang wars?), drowned (certainly by Mafia), some lost all their property (possibly in gang wars again), some are now located in hospitals (certainly after brawls), not to mention cases of arson and robbery reported by the Police. Definitely suspicious behaviour, and certainly explaining it with bad weather won't help.

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[leprkan]

that site that shall not be named has gone down anyways.

If PayPal wanted to help...

[Anonymous Coward]

If PayPal really wanted to help, they could simply prohibit Kyanka from withdrawing the money from the account, and allow donations to continue to roll in while they contact some random donors. They could allow Kyanka to withdraw the money, but only in the form of a check to the American Red Cross. They could allow Kyanka to pipe the money directly into their own Red Cross donation fund. They could do any number of things, none of which involve freezing over $20,000 in donations, and stonewalling new ones from coming in.

Honesty is rare when the Internet or money is involved. PayPal is an Internet money transfer system. Go figure.

Angry? Do something about it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear a lot of complaining and bitching about Paypal. Your tear-soaked bed is one place to go. The media is another place to go. The more productive thing is to http://www.house.gov/writerep/ write to congress telling them of Paypal's constant victimization of their customers and ask for regulation, and notify FEMA (Phone: (800) 621-FEMA) of paypal defrauding flood victims of relief funds.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Placebo Messiah]

FOR THE LAST TIME I don't have stairs in my house quit fukkin asking me

Oh no, not the evil Paypal!!!

[verbatim]

So, some random internet website jockey sets up an account and begins to accept tens of thousands of dollars. Presumably, this money is going to be donated to the Red Cross on behalf of the users of a website and for the victims of a horrible disaster. However, some users begin filing charge-backs and... oh, maybe it's not completly legit...

Remember, Paypal doesn't have trained monkeys, sitting behind keyboards, waiting for the next sucker to come along and open an account. Like many other companies who deal with money, they have computer systems that scan transactions and hunt down fraud proactively.

Let's pretend we're the computer and imagine what we see:

1. an account is either opened or has been dormant for a long time (Lowtax gave up Paypal a long time ago)
2. there is a sudden surge of money from numerous accounts. Possibly a lot of these accounts are new, too -- possibly using stolen credit cards (remember, we don't know for a fact that everything is legit.)
3. chargebacks begin to appear (even if it's only a fraction of a percent of the donators involved)

Now, does the system just happily let the money go through? Possibly to Lowtax's bank account where, if the chargebacks are true, Paypal is out the money? And what is this hurricane thing? I doubt Paypal programmed in a check for natural disaster donation possibilities (although it might not be a bad idea, it is something that doesn't -- hopefully -- happen frequent enough to justify an entire process to analyze).

Also, Lowtax is running this donation thing from the same website that he runs his regular business. Hmmm.. Maybe the IRS will be interested in hearing of his handling over $20,000 in "donations"... especially since, I don't think, he doesn't run a not-for-profit. Oh well.

MAYBE, just maybe, it's all true. There's some evil exec at paypal who saw the transactions and lit up a big fat cigar with a $100 bill. Then he closed the account and withdrew the money to his petty cash drawer. Because, you know, they're evil like that.

But, in reality, the money is still there. Lowtax, and lowtax alone, needs to contact paypal via phone. Or maybe he can just continue to rant about it on the Internet and hope it all goes magically away.

Next time, folks, donate to a real charity. Something Awful, good intentions aside, isn't a charity. Something about the best laid plans of mice... men have got nothing to do with it... none at all.

Re:Oh no, not the evil Paypal!!!

[AndroidCat]

I'm sure that PayPal does have disaster donation checks designed to be paranoid, and for good reason. Lowtax has many good qualities, but slow, careful, unemotional, unlikely to P.O. mundanes in suits are not high on that list. :)

Re:Oh no, not the evil Paypal!!!

[skold]

What do you think you're doing, bringing logic and common sense into this? Nobody wants to hear that.

Re:Oh no, not the evil Paypal!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

What logic? What common sense?

PayPal is a business that pretends to be a bank but doesn't want to be one in legal standing.

A real bank can't pull this sorta shit on people. Their job is to call the cops if something suspicious is occuring. In this case, PayPal could have alerted the FBI and the FBI would have just verified that it IS legit and the hurricane victims would be able to get their much needed money without burecratic fuckups from PayPal.

Of course, if you want to be cynical, it is easy to look at this from a business perspective - if PayPal can lock up the money for a few weeks or months, they can make some cash by putting the frozen money on the money market.

If the excuse "but he could be a criminal!!!111one!" is going to be accepted, then why allow anyone to register accounts? Everyone might be trying to commit fraud! Obviously, PayPal is not really interested combatting fraud - it would be hypocritical to claim they are when they are stingy with issuing refunds to people who ACTUALLY WERE RIPPED OFF.

In short - PayPal is a crooked company and no one here wants to support someone trying to collect money for diasater relief. The only thing Lowtax did wrong was trust PayPal in the first place when there are so many horror stories of legit people losing their money with no recourse.

Sad.

Re:Oh no, not the evil Paypal!!!

[Bodhammer]

And don't forget that this whole thing is George Bush's fault. If he had just signed the Kyoto treaty, none of this would have happened, the hurricane would have become a giant cornucopia of flowers, puppies, and butter. Oh yea, don't forget the French, who else would build a city in bowl of seawater and fill it with poor people...

Yeah, don't piss of SA...

[Anonymous Coward]

They might link to your sight with a long winded rant piece under the guise of "humor", grab every email and any form of contact they can find, and ask their readers to tell the target "how they really feel."

I remember one time when they tried that tactic when SA's site owners didn't get their way, and boy did things not turn out well for them!

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, your that fuckwit who got caught fucking the buttertroll. I would be more worried about what your slipping your dick into than what someone else is allegedly doing.

Considering that you havent put a scrap of truth in your post..... Just go back worrying about your lack of taste in fuck buddies.

call them and tell them how you feel

[Loren_Burlingame]

1-866-648-5843

I was only offered this number when I made it clear I was closing my account.

This is it.

[EiZei]

I have seen lot of nasty shit from paypal but this is the last straw. Just closed my account, I urge anyone else to do the same.

O Google (or any other relatively non-scummy company) where art thou?

music for hurricane relief

[seven of five]

CDbaby is hosting thousands of indie musicians (including me) who are donating 100% of their sales to the Red Cross.

This is not going thru Paypal and it is 100% legit. We get no money from these sales, just the satisfaction of helping out:

http://www.cdbaby.com/mnmlm/n/m/l electronic music
http://www.cdbaby.com/redcrossAll Music

Re:Katrina can eat me

[Anonymous Coward]

Price of a bus ticket to Tennessee (via Greyhound): $127, or about £70. Includes luggage.

i think its a prank

[Anonymous Coward]

somethingawful, sorry, but they are just getting what they have been doing to others for a long time. maybe you made fun of chris the parade kid one too many times and he snapped. whatever.

Re:i think its a prank

[zantolak]

Yeah, SA keeps other organizations from donating thousands of dollars to charities all the time. Right? Think here. Please.

Another data point...

[mavenguy]

A aid effort centered at a hospital just outside of New Orleans set up by a couple of local and nearby members of a political blog site (no, I'm not going to risk /.ing them by posting a link) ran into this problem after setting up a PayPal link.

As people frequenting the blog started to make contributions, PayPal's automated anti-scam detector cut them off. After a number of frantic calls to the first level support operation they were basically told to piss off, and were finally referenced to a "Executive Escalations" department, but they couldn't get through to anyone with any authority. The members raised some hell on the blog and got other members to blast on PayPal. There were some suggestions that they would raise bloddy hell on the blogosphere if PayPal didn't correct the situation, and, finally, they got hold of somone in authority, who verified their "bone fides" and removed the block on the account, promising that a note had been added to it to prevent a repetition.

It's clear that PayPal is nowhere near being a useful mechanism for such acute, ad hoc situations, although the ability to quickly move funds to where it is needed is certainly attractive. I have idea what system combines the conflicting needs of authenticity and speedy flexibility

Want to REALLY get a response from PayPal? Call--

[Anonymous Coward]

Customer Service Center

PayPal Customer Service Agents are available to help you during the following times:

4:00 AM PDT to 10:00 PM PDT Monday through Friday
6:00 AM PDT to 8:00 PM PDT on Saturday and Sunday

Call us at: 402-935-2050 (a U.S. telephone number)

Call them.. A few hundred calls should REALLY get some attention.... And it's sick what they've done.. Also, I'm not really an Anonymous Coward, just really busy as I'm here in Louisiana too and don't have time to make an account right now. ;)

--T.J. Burns
Chameleon's Den

I use it...

[Chewbacon]

...rarely and when I do they have my money for as long as it takes me to read the email notice and transfer it to my checking account. Here's a problem with Paypal that anyone should recognize: do you see an FDIC notice on their site? They're not a bank. You pay a company to hold on to your money. And by their terms of agreement, if you read them, they can hold your money for any reason. They set no restriction for themselves - if they need to pay their electric bill, they can freeze your account and borrow/take the money.

Set the media on them...

[cherokee158]

I just submitted this little gem to both CNN and Wired news tip lines. That will undoubtably light a fire somewhere.

I suggest everyone else do likewise. Hanging out here and complaining about it won't accomplish anything...but when Paypal's offices get a call from CNN, watch how fast that account gets unfrozen...

Re:Set the media on them...

[verbatim]

Did you remember to tell them that the organization operating htis "relief fund" is a private indivudal operating from the website of his private business? And that he is offering rewards for donating to this private fund that he will recieve a nice big fat tax credit for? And that Paypal hasn't done anything wrong with respect to locking the accoint since it is entirely probable that people donating to the account have filed complaints (for a number of reasons, not limited to: being asshats, accidently paying twice and then "correcting" it by filing a complaint).

Gee. Maybe there's more to the story than just Paypal closing a suspicious account...

Re:Set the media on them...

[Anonymous Coward]

Um.. Individuals collecting donations is HARDLY A NEW CONCEPT.

If its "entirely probable" that this is a scam, why does PayPal allow individuals to operate in the firs place? After all, we're all crooks.

How can there be "more to the story" if Lowtax can't even get to the money? He couldn't have laundered money he hasn't gotten access too, bonehead.

Simply put: PayPal locked an account for no legimate reason other than them being excessively paranoid (read: preferring to "throw the baby out with the bathwater" when it comes to trying to "detect" and "prevent" fraud").

Banks don't play this shit on their customers. PayPal does and it sucks. (Lowtax should have known better, but its no excuse for criminal behavior on PayPal's part).

I would agree with technical difficulties...

[thomca]

Or suspicious behavior... If this wasn't the first time something like this happened. This kinda thing happened to Redvsblue.com, 4chan.org, and somethingawful.com on their first try. All involving large sums of cash. Not only that, to individuals -> www.paypalsucks.com Some even go as far as to say PayPal actually DEFRUADS people of their money! (Read the book Pay Pal Wars) Understanding that PayPal makes it's money on the "float" (aka, money that is temporarly stored), it's not to hard to believe they would defraud people. So, no, this should have been expected. No, Kyanka wasn't cheating you of money. No, 3 suspicious activity reports shouldn't have been enough. This is suspicious enough as it is. PayPal closes a $20,000 account without double checking? Something smells rotten here. And it would smell less rank if this wasn't PayPals first offense, or even didn't have a loooooooooooooooong line of lawsuits against them.

Re:I would agree with technical difficulties...

[iMacGuy]

The situation with 4chan is slightly different. We were of course violating their TOS with pornographic content, but they didn't give us the $2k+ after 180 days and they say they never will.

Re:I would agree with technical difficulties...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sue them. Even in small claims court (where it may be cheaper to litigate) where you are typically limited to $500-$1000 (varying depending on jurisdiction) in damages, you can at least get SOMETHING back and PayPal will likely just settle or not show up, in which case you get default judgement.

That is, of course, there is a provision in the PayPal TOS that you violated in the first place that says they can steal your money.

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

Geez I'm just a stupid '05, but even I knew that WDMA.biz was dead.
Ryan, I hadn't heard of you before now, but seriously if you had ANYTHING to do with the paypal account being frozen... well, good luck to you

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

So was she worth it, Ryan?

Well, damned if it isn't a trend.

[Anonymous Coward]

Although not Hurricane Katrina related (it was before), paypal shut down 4chan's own donation account just days before, which it uses to maintain its own BBS. Donation was purely optional.

I wonder if any other donation account got struck off the list. It seems they have found a cash cow worth milking.

ECommerce is dead. There is no way to completely protect the people using it. When Big Brother goes corrupt there is little the people can do.

I have a PayPal Visa

[PortWineBoy]

I've never had this problem. I've used it many times and left a tip.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[Anonymous Coward]

Finding a free seat on a bus leaving a city of 4 million just before a major national disaster: priceless.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[chialea]

Greyhound tickets work better if the buses are working -- both busses and planes pulled out of NO several days before the hurricane. This is a lot of why there were so many tourists stranded -- they simply didn't have any way to leave. (Many hotels then kicked them out in the streets for "liability reasons".)

Interestingly, not everyone knew how severe the hurricane was supposed to be. News travels slowly when you don't have a TV or net.

People stayed for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they had no choice/car. Interestingly, if you walk, the freeways (at least on one side, I'm not sure about the other) are one of the worst places to be, because they are flooded early and often.

Lea

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

Last I knew, illegal distribution was forbidden on Alluvion anyway.

Paypal ransacked us too

[salmonz]

Hi, I too have been a victim of Paypal 2 weeks ago with our 'business'. They limited the account which allowed us to receive payments for merchandise but we could not withdraw the money. They clearly committed fraud by allowing this to happen. I spoke with my Paypal dedicated account manager and go no where in the first few conversations. One morning from my home, I called them again and I ripped right into them for lieing to me saying that payments could not be accepted, blasted them for having unconfirmed buyers, advertising "gaurantees" on our products, how they were committing fraud for allowing payments to come in and not go out, and driving my business into bankruptcy. I finally ended the call, "expect a call from the police.". I called the police and filed a fraud report. By the time I got to my office 2-3 hours later, they unlocked the account with no restrictions. I suggest to get a Moneris merchant account. They're absolutely awesome.

PayPal isn't /completely/ evil, in this case

[AndroidCat]

Keep in mind that during the tsunami aftermath, scammers popped up claiming to be established organizations (MercyCorps) and tried to scam people into contributing money via PayPal accounts. The FBI busted a guy, who told agents "he thought it would be OK to keep the money to fix his car and pay bills, if he gave some of it to charity".

So bet your ass that this time around, they're watching accounts for aid money for anything slightly dodgy and freezing them. SA has vast supplies of slightly dodgy, and I'd take any report of what went down from them and run through a heavy duty reality distortion field compensator.

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Zorilla]

Well, thank you for equating torrents to illegal distribution since I was unclear about that part.

i would not trust a Gbanking solution

[Barryke]

Fuck You Paypal. If there is ever a reason never to use your service again, this is it. May Google open up an online payment system and wipe you off the face of the planet.

You dont want Google to be thát personal with you.
I like Google very much, but i would not trust a Gbanking solution since Google is just to good at finding unusual ways to make money from it.

When i ask people, many dont even know where 'that searchengine' Google makes their money from.
Thats their power.

Information is money, and a lot of people dont know its value.
I would never give give google an overview on what i buy where for a given price.

Can you give me information wich is worth more? (NOT counting information people never hand over, like pin-codes)

Re:i would not trust a Gbanking solution

[Anonymous Coward]

The Google one is apparently architecturally different -- Google aren't a bank, just an coordinate it. In doing so they don't hold the money, which would mean they're much less likely to have fuckups like Paypal here. But yeah, information wise, it'd be something to consider.

Umm, guys.

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of you are taking this a bit too seriously. Look at the math. $22000 in less than a day, nothing shipped. Seems kind of suspicious when you look at those numbers, doesn't it? So paypal locks the account. I'd do the same thing. Are they expected to know that SomethingAwful is trusted and that this isn't a scam? I think not. I'm sure that SomethingAwful will get their account unfrozen and probably a letter of apology too.

Re:Umm, guys.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats retarded. If there is illegal activity, the authorities should be notified. Banks don't pull this retarded boneheaded shit on people, they call the cops if they think something is amiss.

Lets put it another way - how much of that money do you think PayPal would refund to people if it WAS a scam? Likely none. Thats how crooked and hypocritical PayPal is.

Also, if nothing is shipped, then isn't it likely that the person accepting money ISNT SELLING ANYTHING? People do use PayPal to accept donations.

This isn't rocket science but PayPal's stupidity is ceaseless.

Re:Umm, guys.

[skold]

Right, because the various law enforcement agencies of the US work so fast that there's absolutely no chance that someone would be able to rake in a few hundred thousand dollars and run with it. Nope, no chance at all.

And then when someone bilks you out of a few hundred dollars, you'll blame PayPal for not checking them out before letting them take your money.

If it was determined to be a scam, you'd get as much of your money back as PayPal can provide you. If the account holder has managed to run off with any of it BEFORE they were shut down, you'll probably not get all of your money, but the paypal account will go negative, and be sent to collections, and if any money is retrieved, you'd get that too. PayPal isn't there to pay you back for your stupidity, so they're not going to pay for your mistakes out of their pockets.

As for 'not selling anything', When you make a payment to someone through PayPal, it asks you what the category of the purchase is. I'm willing to bet most people selected 'Goods - Other', which implies a tangible, shippable item. Generally if you're purchasing goods from someone, you'll want it shipped, right?

Re:Umm, guys.

[zantolak]

Lowtax said he selected "Donation" on Paypal's site. If this is a donation drive, what do you expect him to ship?

Just to be clear on "frozen"

[Anonymous Coward]

The term "account frozen" is taken from the banking world and is used to imply "the money is there, you just can't get at it".
Now, where is that money really? They don't refund it, they don't "freeze" it, they don't give it to charity, they just keep it.

I've had no problems with paypal, but there is enough evidence around that they are an immoral company and as such it is immoral to use them. There are alternatives.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Anonymous Coward]

you are supporting someone who runs a fake charity that rips off disaster victims? you are a total asshole. that money could have actually been put to use helping people rebuild their broken lives.

posted AC because someone had to say it.

RadioShack - Doing their part-

[leon.gandalf]

RadioShack is taking donations for the Red Cross. See local store for details or just go here. http://www.radioshackcorporation.com/

It happened to me too....

[AsshoPo]

I had a paypal account once.

I used it to transfer money from the buyer to myself for an eBay transaction. I sent the $300 item to the seller in perfect working condition. He received it and said it was broken and wanted to return it. Being as I sold the item because I was broke as fuck, I couldn't do that because I had already used the money in an emergency, so instead, I filed a FedEx claim. In the middle of this, PayPal and eBay were notified of the FedEx claim and the guy decided to charge back his credit card. PayPal ignored the fact that I was in the middle of a claim and decided to not fight the chargeback.

So, in the end, the guy got his money, the item and I got left with a $300 paypal account that is still frozen to this day.

forwarded to CNN

[Anonymous Coward]

This is rediculous, maybe some bad press from CNN might shed some light on the Paypal rediculousness

Re:forwarded to CNN

[Loltastic]

red red red red red red red red red red red red red ridiculous.

Very bad taste

[martinultima]

Seen at the bottom of /. this morning:

Poverty must have its satisfactions, else there would not be so many poor people. -- Don Herold

Randomly spit out or no, that really isn't very appropriate considering the tragedy that's hit New Orleans lately. Do we really need to go over the reasons why?

(Not that I'd really like it any other time either, I'll admit that I'm pretty well-off but I think that there are some things that nobody should put up for.)

Re:Very bad taste

[Mccavity91k]

I wouldn't think I'd have to say this, but you DO know that that quote is what some people label "sarcasm".

Obviously, nobody in their right mind is going to really state it in those words if they really believed it, but many people say pretty much the same thing, just in prettier words. Of course, it's not a valid argument, because of the logical failure that being poor is a choice. Saying it that way brings that logical fallicy to contrast, exposing the argument that poor people "like the way they are" by crassly stating the basic point of such an argument.

It seems satire is lost on some people.

PayPal has been there before

[AndroidCat]

During the tsunami. Freezing the account until someone can check out that it's okay, is better than some other bastard walking away with money scammed from blood before they can catch him.

Some people might complain that this is delaying aid money, but if immediate aid was the issue, WTF aren't they giving directly to the Red Cross or other agencies rather than collecting freebee points on SA?

Re:PayPal has been there before

[ndvaughan]

I agree with you completely. It does seem a little selfish for Something Awful to "claim" these donations. Why not just post a link to the Red Cross on their web site, and tell people to give directly? I mean, it's going to go to them (or a similar agency) anyway, right? The only point of Something Awful being the middle man (IMO) is to be able to say, "our members gave X dollars to hurricane relief". Am I wrong?

Re:PayPal has been there before

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe if you fucking read anything to be somewhat informed before forming an opinion in that infantile brain of yours, you would quickly learn that the REASON that Rich Kyanka set up a paypal account for donations through his website is because he needed a way to keep track of addresses of people that donated so that he could GIVE THEM FREE STUFF.

You know, as INCENTIVES FOR DONATING.

You would think after being ignorant about everything ever, some people might learn to look for sources of information that would make them not be morons for a few seconds. You didn't even have to LOOK for it this time, the link was in the article summary!

Re:PayPal has been there before

[AndroidCat]

Having a rally among SA members for aid money isn't a bad thing by any means! Keeping track of who gave what to encourage peer-pressure and competition, and to toss in perks for contributors is an excllent idea. Just poor execution. ("Hey, I have an old Paypal account...")

Because of past scams taking avantage of charitable feelings, especially in times of disaster when a lot of people need help in a hurry, the money path always needs to be closely controlled and audited. Here's an idea (if it hasn't already been done): Have a tracking number for donations to the Red Cross through PayPal (or whomever) that can entered on a web site and the status displayed. That way people can give the money directly to the aid agency and tell SA the tracking number. Then SA can check and update their own stats/scores and do what they want with it. That gets the money in the aid agency's hands ASAP and lets them buy supplies and pay upfront costs.

Re:PayPal has been there before

[Anonymous Coward]

The internet makes you stupid. :v:

PayPal isn't the police

[Anonymous Coward]

Banks don't pull this shit on you.

This is a job left up to the authorities, not PayPal.

PayPal's policy is "screw you" now and ask questions later.

Its even stupider becuase PayPal only provides protection against eBay transactions for buyers. Anything else and they shurg their shoulders at you - so why are they all of the sudden trying to play rookie detective now?

Already been done

[__aailob1448]

There was a class action lawsuit against paypal because of these practices and PayPal settled. They haven't changed their practices though.

The Red Cross blows

[Anonymous Coward]

They collect fortunes but were unwilling to go in there. Can't you find a better referral?

Good

[Anonymous Coward]

It always warms my heart to see Something Awful goons suffer. Good job PayPal!

- JJCoolJ

Re:Good

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think anything warms you heart at this point other than having sex with animals.

For someone that hates SomethingAwful you sure have provided them with a lot of money for all the times you've reregistered after being permabanned.

Do you miss Something Awful as much as you missed ArsTechnia IRC?

"im going through hell and am suffering serious withdrawl

ive gone to that channel and read it ALL THE TIME im going fucking crazy without it its my lifeling"

Maybe you can go assault another one of your co-workers because he refused to give you a high five and get fired, because that seems to be the only thing you're good at, you disgusting furry nutbag.

-LLCoolJ

Re:Good

[zantolak]

Maybe you should get back to work on Jason's Weekend II: Yiff Orgy.

Re:RTFA

[laffer1]

There are a few smaller ones but no one will take them on ebay. Try to pay with an alternative! Occasionally i see western union epayment options.

I've had problems with paypal because my wife and i have seperate paypal and ebay accounts. My account can't be "verified" because we have one bank account. You can't have two accounts tied to one bank account with paypal. Then assholes on ebay require verfied paypal accounts which means i can't buy from them. Trying to convince my wife to buy a sun sparc box isn't going to happen :)

The issue is that people want one system for convenience sake. I suspect thats why debit mastercards and the like are popular instead of real credit cards now. Many people think its odd i have a real credit card especially in my age group. I'm a college student. (26)

Do not trust PayPal

[Anonymous Coward]

I know of a number of people who had alot of problems with PayPal lately. Two of my friends claim steadfast and independently of each other that PayPal itself has tried taking money out of their accounts through third parties they had sold their account information. Both of my friends are currently suing and say there are most likely many more people affected.

I don't know if ebay has full knowledge of it or not but PayPal has evolved into a sketchy and mob-like company and I wouldn't trust them a bit if you value your money.

Re:Do not trust PayPal

[Anonymous Coward]

PayPal is an eBay company.

Check this out

[Emperor Cezar]

Here is a story about how paypal got to the way it is today. Basicly it's about the founders of paypal dealing with the .gov and lawyers so much and being put down by them that they finally just gave up.

Update

[Nehle]

http://forums.somethingawful.com/
Paypal / Donation / Server Update 9/04/2005 - 10:07 AM - Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka

I finally got ahold of a Paypal customer support person this morning (when I called last night, their automated "screw off" system told me they were closed for the night). I explained everything to her and she asked me to fax in a bunch of junk like my driver's license, statement from my bank account, statement from my credit card account, and various other things. I guess I should be lucky they didn't ask for DNA and sperm samples as well.

I told them the only reason, and I repeat ONLY REASON I was using their service was to raise relief funds, and the representative made a comment along the lines of "well you can see how it's counter-productive to get this resolved when you're writing 'Paypal sucks' on your website." Gee lady, maybe the whole issue could've been resolved beforehand if your company actually gave a crap about their customers and made even the tiniest bit of effort to resolve things without immediately hitting the "off" switch like that one jerk from "Ghostbusters?" The representative herself was nice, and I don't have a problem with the people working there; I do, however, have a problem with their automated systems making arbitrary decisions without providing customers ANY time to rectify the situation without risking downtime / account closure. You don't run a business treating all your customers like criminals and making them prove they aren't.

I'll be faxing in that information right now, so the money you donated to the Paypal fund WILL get to the Red Cross, but it all depends on the speed of the world-famous Paypal Complaint Appeals Department or whatever the hell they're called.

On 9/4/05, Rokas Kirvelis norgin@gmail.com wrote:

Instead of writing a fucking essay about PayPal how about you FUCKING CONTACT CUSTOMER SUPPORT like it told you to do? I wouldn't be fucking surprised if you photoshopped those pics (because text is so hard to photoshop) and took the money. You're not even doing anything to get the money back.

Yeah, okay. Thanks again for the support, Internet.

Still no ETA on when the servers and SA will be up again. No idea when we'll be able to get the servers and move them to another hosting facility either. Running a small business is awesome because, not only are you in charge of making sure a bunch of people get service and employees get paid, but you're constantly responsible for everything and you can't stop worrying about what will happen. At least your standard 9-to-5 job lets you leave work at your office when your shift is over; a small business is a boulder you carry around on your shoulders every hour of every day. Some days the boulder crushes you, and this past week has been a series of those days.

My apologies to everybody.

oh jeez. you weren't joking.

[mbius]

Check the status bar (or view the source code of your HTML-formatted mail) to see where those links are gonna take you.

You've been had by identity thieves. You should contact Paypal's customer service department immediately.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[MoneyT]

Hmm, when the busses and the planes leave, and you're living below sea level, and a hurricane is bearing down on you, I don't know about you, but I'm getting the hell out of dodge any way I can.

somethingawful.com paypal issue updated

[msaint]

New update on the paypal situation on somthingawful.com paypal still sucks though :)

Re:somethingawful.com paypal issue updated

[msaint]

looks like at the funds will at least eventually get to where they were destined to go. Paypal still sucks :) Oh hah sorry for the typo in my post above http://www.somethingawful.com/

Hay guys

[Anonymous Coward]

whats going o

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

Can i get a link to this please?

Re:Katrina can eat me

[tacodealer]

I don't know, I'm inclined to agree with the OP. Maybe this is just evolution at work....natural selection at its finest. Either that, or we were all wrong and there really is a god....and he's pissed. I think the bible spoke of a great flood that washed all god's mistakes away and those that were left were in good hands with Allstate.

Look closer at the"whites" photo, female is black.

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's any consolation, the guy is white.

An now, some commentary from someone without pc blinders on:

Leighton Levy, Jamaica Star, Sept. 2

Let me start by saying that if I had my life to live over a thousand times, the one thing I would not change would be my race. I am proud to be a black man. There are times however, when I wish that certain people and I did not share that trait.

For the past few days, the whole world ... well, at least those who have access to satellite and cable television, have been seeing pictures of the virtually total devastation of the cities of the U.S. Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina. An estimated 90 per cent of homes in New Orleans have been destroyed by flood waters and more than 100 people have been confirmed dead.

We see people standing on the roofs of their submerged homes desperate to be rescued, others being airlifted to safety, and we have heard tear-jerking stories of families losing their loved ones. But in all of this, we have also seen the really dark side of black people.

The day after the hurricane passed, there were reports of looting but network reporters had been saying that people were looting out of desperation, in search of food and water. A lot they knew.

The pictures I have been seeing are of people--black people--stealing shoes, diapers, and television sets. Not food and definitely not water. Not unless the armfuls of clothing, shoes, and appliances I see people wading through the streets with count as food and water.

Now, if all the looters were looting out of desperation, how desperate were the guy and girls I saw toting several boxes of size 13 Nikes? How desperate was the fellow with the stack of diapers? What, is it that he has several babies at home suffering from loose bowels? What am I talking about, what home? Everything is under water and what isn't, has been totally destroyed.

Plasma TV?

And just what are those guys stealing the plasma television sets going to be watching when there is no power in the entire city?

Desperation? Yeah, right. I am beginning to believe that black people, no matter where in the world they are, are cursed with a genetic predisposition to steal, murder, and create mayhem.

The entire firearm department at a Wal-Mart department store, for example, was cleaned out and the looters used the stolen weapons to rob people. How low is that? Everybody is suffering and the black people would seek to rob people who are suffering just like themselves.

No white looters?

And it has nothing to do with poverty. Where are the white people in all this? I am sure there are poor white people living in New Orleans, Biloxi and the other towns affected by what has been going on. Is it that the media are not showing pictures of them looting and robbing? Or is it that they are too busy trying to stay alive, waiting to be rescued, and hiding from the blacks.

And you know what? Even if the poor whites were looting and robbing, wouldn't it be nice if the blacks could have made them the only ones doing it

Just once, I would like for us blacks to take the high road in situations like this, where instead of showing our darkest side, we put our best foot forward. But I guess that would be too much to ask, too much of a case of wishful thinking.

(Posted on September 2, 2005)

Ryan Parry, Mirror (London), Sept. 2

British students told yesterday how they stepped out of the horror of Hurricane Katrina into the hell of their Superdome "shelter".

A place of refuge became a terrifying trap, where knives and guns, crack cocaine use, threats of violence and racial abuse were rife.

Jamie Trout, 22, who kept a record of his four days there, said: "It was like something out of Lord of the Flies--one minute everything is calm and civil, the next it descends into chaos."

In one diary entry, he said: "A man has been arrested for raping a seven-year-old in the toilet, this place is hell, I feel sick. The smell i

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[MoneyT]

You mean to tell me Red Cross doesn't send verification/confirmation emails to the people that donate online? He couldn't ask for those?

pre-auth; check your bill; merchant suffers

[PhYrE2k2]

Yes- you do a pre-auth, then fill in the top and sign. They put it in. You check your receipts at the end of the month.

Now when you challenge it, they request the signed Visa slip from the merchant and from you and compare them. It's the merchant's responsibility to correctly enter the amount and charge it properly. If it just so happens that the merchant entered something other than the actual amount on the slip, the money gets revoked and returned to you.

The only person they hurt is themselves when they do a slip request. And if a waiter/waitress does it, they risk their jobs (the merchant wastes a lot of time on these)

-M

'Donation'

[PhYrE2k2]

Simple- So PayPal closes this 'suspicious' account. PayPal then confiscates the money saying it was invalid. But people would get annoyed if this happens... very annoyed. So PayPal (in all it's light-shining glory) makes a convinient donation of $20,000... no wait- $20,000+5% to the victims.

Now the donation is credited to PayPal- looks good in the paper, etc etc.

See- yay PR!

-M

Can't really disagree with them...

[GoRK]

While I do know that in many cases (and probably this one too) Paypal likes to be quite draconian, in this case I have to wonder if they didn't actually have a legitimate case against this particular account. After all, a friend of mine is also running a PayPal drive and has accepted far MORE money (Over $35,000) into it than the SA account and has had no problems whatsoever with paypal. Of course not only does he publish the records of the donation money going to charity at the maximum rate that he can extract the money from the paypal account ($3,000/day), he has also filed large amounts of paperwork with both the charities and with paypal to stay above board with all of this. The last time that he did a donation drive, paypal even reimbursed 100% of the transaction and CC fees to him.

Unfortunately, paypal makes this kind of a payment avenue and "tip jar" type donation system so easy for people to set up that most forget that there are a lot of complicated requirements when you start accepting and spending large amounts of money like this for the purposes of charitable donation. There are tax implications surrounding the money and requirements surrounding the donations for the donor, for the intermediary, for paypal, and for the charity. If you don't abide by them properly you're going to get shut down.

I'm sure they are sincere, but the way SA operates kind of makes you think that they could easily have brought this on themselves -- going nuts about the Paypal freeze probably isn't the best thing to do to get it resolved either, but it's typical SA style. I hope for the sake of all the donors and the charities involved that at least for once the SA people act maturely in this dispute or else all that money will be sitting there for weeks while the SA forums go crazy with the typical threats of retaliation and the normal fare while nothing happens.

Re:Can't really disagree with them...

[GoRK]

Follow up commentary:

Looks like I was right. Lowtax completely went on a tyraid about it and as a result PayPal didn't want to work with him. The CSR even asked him why he would put up a whole article about how paypal sucks on the front page of his site and then expect them to help him. Paypal does suck in a lot of cases; Lowtax is correct in this case; Paypal ought to held to the same standards as banks and other financial institutions, etc. but as of right now they aren't a bank and when they have $30K of your money, you don't kick them in the balls and expect them to do everything you say.

What's worse is that the first reason the account was shut down is because of his own idiotic users. He had the users submit payments for merchandise in order to get a shipping address to send them free stuff. While this is a good idea for a fundraiser, his users started sending demands for proof of shipping via paypal (probably thinking how funny it would be to do that sort of thing) and hosed the whole damn thing.

You know these same SA users even went around to other forums who were running donation drives and insulted their efforts claiming that the "SomethingAwful donation drive is going to [crush your drive]" and the like. Great fucking job, guys.

What is EVEN worse is that people gave money to SA to be donated to the Red Cross, then when it seemed that PayPal was willing to send the money into their United Way fund, Lowtax immediately jumped at the chance to misappropriate $30,000 of other peoples' money. Another fucking brilliant move.

Now I am applauding PayPal for their decision and their willingness to refund the money. I can only hope that the donors will immediately spin it back out to a charity or relief organization through a proper avenue, but honestly I suspect that many will not.

Re:Can't really disagree with them...

[swordofstars]

Yeah! Fuck those people for donating to help Katrina! What could possibly be worse than having a rivalry with other sites as to how much they could help hurricane victims! How dare they.

And you're totally right. There's no way he should have said anything about why his drive wasn't working, just 'paypal decided to take this under advisement, those poor people will still be there in 3-6 buisness days when paypal decides to make a decision.' After all, it's not like there's some reason the red cross could use the immediate help. And then he makes up some claim about how 'paypal' sucks for effectively stealing money being donated to victims in louisiana. (Yeah, money has a time value, so taking it, even with the intention to give it back is stealing)

And you were insightful enough to point out Lowtax's obvious failings. He got upset at being shut down automatically, when he should have known that it would be a horrible idea to offer to give out shirts to people. And then he had the the audacity to not ship them immediately.

Clearly, by taking the high road and refusing to simply donate the money to such a shady organization as the international red cross, paypal brings themselves into the right.

Fucking troll.

Re:Can't really disagree with them...

[GoRK]

Yeah! Fuck those people for donating to help Katrina! What could possibly be worse than having a rivalry with other sites as to how much they could help hurricane victims! How dare they.

I think your sarcasm is very misplaced. Nowhere did I belittle anyone for trying to help. I did critisize SA's users for berating and belittling other fundraising efforts -- which they DID do. Nobody was having any kind of competition to see whose site could raise more money!

I also critisized SA users for sabotoging their own fund by filing complaints through paypal since they think that sort of thing is funny. This is par for the course for SA's userbase. They remind me a lot of roadies who follow ICP around. I am sorry that they ruined it and I'm sorry that so many people's sincerity was hurt by them. I only hope that after Paypal refunds everyone's money, those people send it right back to charity some way, but again, I suspect that many will not bother, and it's even more unfortunate that much of this money will not make it to a charity.

And you were insightful enough to point out Lowtax's obvious failings. He got upset at being shut down automatically, when he should have known that it would be a horrible idea to offer to give out shirts to people. And then he had the the audacity to not ship them immediately.

Well, according to the complaints sent to paypal by his users, yes, this is exactly what was wrong; he did not ship their free stuff immediately. I did not say Lowtax was doing anything wrong; his users did -- to paypal. After Paypal received enough complaints, they automatically shut the account down. Lowtax attacked paypal instead of saying "WTF are you idiots doing?" to his userbase and explaining things to paypal. A side note here is that in order to make this kind of complaint, you must have sent the fund at least $10 as a paypal payment for "Merchandise - Non Auction" and provided a shipping address, then returned to paypal and opened a complaint against the seller and a request for the money to be retuned. At this point the seller must provide paypal a proof that he shipped the item you ordered -- which in this case was really nothing but a promise to try to send out "some free merchandise when possible". So, it's not a particularly easy process to do, but many of the people who gave to the fund nonetheless did do all of this!

Clearly, by taking the high road and refusing to simply donate the money to such a shady organization as the international red cross, paypal brings themselves into the right.

As I clearly said, the problem was that Lowtax accepted $30,000 for relief that was to be donated to the Red Cross and then decided that it would be OK to give it to the United Way instad. That is not only unacceptable, it's reprehensable. If I send money to be donated to the Red Cross and suddenly my donation went somewhere else -- yeah I'd be upset about it. It wasn't right for him to have made that decision. When I posted the previous comment, giving the money to the UW was his operating plan. Fortunately, Lowtax has backpedeled on it due to users complaining.

Fucking troll.

You, sir, are a complete idiot. Welcome to my killfile.

Re:Can't really disagree with them...

[swordofstars]

Wow, your closing line zinged me. You started with you sir, simultaneously pointing out the dignity inherent in your upbringing in upper class victorian England, while acting as a foil for my sheer currishness of using bad words for emphasis, twice. I've got to know where you got that idea! It's so origional, so fresh! I've never seen anything like that on slashdot. Do you write your own material?

First you say Lowtax immediately jumped at the chance to misappropriate $30,000 of other peoples' money. Misappropriate means to embezzle, to take from one purpose, and to use as one's own. So, you were accusing Lowtax of stealing money from charity victims to take for his own. In reality, he did attempt to get the money to hurricane victims as soon as possible, even if it had to be through another organization. (As opposed to sitting on it for a few weeks which was the other option available at the time). Yes, that Lowtax surely is a felon for attempting to get money earmarked for hurricane victims to hurricane victims through whatever means possible.

In your later post, you continue on your theme of bashing people who've donated to help hurricane victims, This is par for the course for SA's userbase. I am sorry that they ruined it and I'm sorry that so many people's sincerity was hurt by them Yeah, those assholes who give money to cheritable causes! How dare the members of the something awful community donate through their own site! It was the SA users that were donating in the first place and SA has a great history of giving to cheritable causes. The only factor that differentiates this is payapal deciding to slam them.

You know these same SA users even went around to other forums who were running donation drives and insulted their efforts claiming that the "SomethingAwful donation drive is going to [crush your drive]" and the like. Great fucking job, guys. I can see how this is a huge problem. After all, the members of those other sites are gonna immediately realize that they're beaten and begin to weep at the helplessness of their cause. The tears streaming down their eyes will short out their keyboards and prevent them from logging in to donate to paypal! Or, it could spawn a friendly rivelry with a site like fark, and become a competition as to which community could raise more money to help hurricane victims. But fark and SA never compete, ever! And such a battle would surely raze the internetes into a barren wasteland of desloation.

-Warmest regards!

P.S. A threat to killfile me is a hell of a lot more impressive, if it isn't delivered in a reply timestamped about 5 hours after you added me to your foes list. Is your kill file like the ultra-foe list that exists only for you people in moonland where communities donating money to charities are on par with ICP fans?

GBTGBS

[Triggersite]

Voted 5

Re:RTFA

[ceejayoz]

Ironically, PayPal is the only system trusted by the vast majority of buyers on eBay and similar sites, so competitors haven't really taken off here.

Ha Ha what a dork

[Anonymous Coward]

Take it like a boyscout little man.

TEXT OF UPDATE (Lest we kill the backup servers.)

[Gleng]

Here's the text of the update, they're on reserve servers at the moment, and I don't think they'll survive a Slashdotting as well as several thousand Goons trying to find out what's going on.

9/04/2005 - 10:07 AM - Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka

I finally got ahold of a Paypal customer support person this morning (when I called last night, their automated "screw off" system told me they were closed for the night). I explained everything to her and she asked me to fax in a bunch of junk like my driver's license, statement from my bank account, statement from my credit card account, and various other things. I guess I should be lucky they didn't ask for DNA and sperm samples as well.

I told them the only reason, and I repeat ONLY REASON I was using their service was to raise relief funds, and the representative made a comment along the lines of "well you can see how it's counter-productive to get this resolved when you're writing 'Paypal sucks' on your website." Gee lady, maybe the whole issue could've been resolved beforehand if your company actually gave a crap about their customers and made even the tiniest bit of effort to resolve things without immediately hitting the "off" switch like that one jerk from "Ghostbusters?" The representative herself was nice, and I don't have a problem with the people working there; I do, however, have a problem with their automated systems making arbitrary decisions without providing customers ANY time to rectify the situation without risking downtime / account closure. You don't run a business treating all your customers like criminals and making them prove they aren't.

I'll be faxing in that information right now, so the money you donated to the Paypal fund WILL get to the Red Cross, but it all depends on the speed of the world-famous Paypal Complaint Appeals Department or whatever the hell they're called.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

haahahahhahahaah :high5:

You can submit donation via your cellphone too

[klops]

For most US tier 1 Cell network (Cingular Blue/Orange, Tmobile, Verizon, Sprint, Nextel/Boost), you can text in "2HELP" (24357) with "Help" or "Give". Follow the text prompt and you can donate 5 dollars each time. All of the proceeds will go directly to redcross, and the donation amount will show up on your phone bill.

Does anyone else notice the 66-6 in that number?

[the_raptor]

Putting 666 in their phone number must be part of their pact with Satan.

Welcome to the real world

[skold]

Here's how it looks to the automated system that limited Lowtax's account: New or hardly used PayPal account starts receiving $3500 an hour. PayPal limits the account automatically so the money can't go anywhere, but allows it to continue receiving funds. The account holder is asked to provide some information to identify themselves and release the funds. Someone pays twice, or overpays. While they're doing this, they list the category of the purchase as 'Goods - other', which implies a tangible, shippable item, rather than 'Service'. Being the idiots they are, they file a chargeback or buyer complaint, rather than ask Lowtax to refund part or all of their payment. Now theres unresolved buyer complaints or chargebacks on an account that's already set off alarms for receiving an unusually large amount of money in a short time. Now it's restricted, and can't send or receive money. What PayPal wants from Lowtax is information to prove that he's legit, including statements from any credit cards or bank accounts he's used on his PayPal account, showing that he has access to that information and didn't just type in stolen account numbers, and a drivers license, showing that he's the account holder listed on the account. Once this is provided, everythings great, and the money can start moving freely again. Here's a (not so) hypothetical situation for you: Someone opens a PayPal account, and advertises it as a relief fund. It receives tons of money, but, PayPal doesn't limit it, check out the account holder, or do anything to stop the flow of that money, because that's a 'PR nightmare' and 'will just piss people off'. Next, this person takes all of this money and runs off with it. Now you've got a bunch of people who are whining and bitching at PayPal because they let someone steal all their money. 'PayPal should check people out before letting them accept that kind of money!' They go and file chargebacks, which leaves PayPal out that money. There's no way to tell the bad guys from the good guys until checks like these are done. Instead of being a bunch of sensationlist whiners about it, try cooperating with the company that you're entrusting $20,000 to. In short, grab a clue, please.

SomethingAwful, LOWTAX IS A RACIST!

[Anonymous Coward]

Its just a front site if you go to the forums and sign up ($10 WTF RIPOFF) down the bottom there is a link that takes you to lowtaxs secret race hate site.

Re:??? revealed AKA embezzlement

[Anonymous Coward]

It's pretty clear that PayPal is practicing embezzlement and racketeering. This is rising to a criminal level of behavior as victims of Katrina are dying with every hour lost who could have been saved if money donations only arrived in a timely fashion. civil suits already exist against PayPal because of bad acts committed by PayPal. Many of these acts border on criminal acts so this is hardly surprising this around.

Suggestions for next steps:

1. Contact the California Dept Financial Institutions and tell them one of their licensees is committing financial embezzlement and racketeering under the guise of operating under their granted license
2. Contact the Santa Clara Country District Attorney's office and tell them a Santa Clara Country corporation is committing embezzlement and racketeering with charitable donations for Katrina victims.
3. Contact SF Bay Area news media (SJ Mercury News, SF Chronicle/Examiner, KRON 4 TV, KTVU 2 TV, KPIX 5 TV, KGO 7 TV) and tell them a Santa Clara Country corporation is committing embezzlement and racketeering with charitable donations for Katrina victims. Send E-mail and call them - hearing the story from multiple channels adds credibility.
4. Collect documentation of previous malfeasance (e.g. PalPay Sucks!) and broadcast it as widely as possible. That especially includes personal networks: make it a point to tell 5 friends and 5 strangers about PayPal's unacceptable behavior in the next 24 hours. Ask those you tell to investigate the truth themselves and tell 10 people they know also. Lather. Rinse. Repeat as necessary.

This ongoing and repeated abuse must stop now!

waiters do get their tips...

[cleved]

That's bullshit. I used to be a waiter, and all of our electronic tips were tallied and given to us in cash at the end of the night. True, wages are only 2.15 minimum per hour, but I never made less than 8/hour, and usually 10/hour or more. Moreover, I was the only waiter in the place to my knowledge who actually declared more than a fraction of his earnings. Most waiters not only get tips, but a self-declared tax break as well.

Re:waiters do get their tips...

[Edgester]

I used to know a waiter. He told me that there was something called "tipping out". I don't know the percentage, but portions of the tip had to be given to the hostess, cooks, and bartender -- even if nothing from the bar was served. It probably varies by restaurant.

Re:waiters do get their tips...

[cleved]

At some places you have to do that with the bartender, but where I've been you didn't have to. I've not heard of doing it with the hostess, though--they're usually paid a straight wage, which is reasonable considering that their job is substantially easier. I've also never heard of giving anything to the cooks. They're already making twice what the average waiter makes (and often what the best waiter makes, or even more). It definitely varies by restaurant, though.

Re:waiters do get their tips...

[gbulmash]

The only hard and fast rule I can say about tipping is that you should always tip the dealer after you get blackjack.

"Tipping out" is to make sure that the people who serve you as a waiter or waitress are encouraged to do so with the same kind of speed and care you give to your customers.

If you want to make sure your drinks get made quick and right, you share tips with the bartender. If you want to make sure that plates are cleared quickly, that your customers get their water refilled, that the little things are taken care of, you share tips with the busboy. Don't tip the hosts and hostesses and watch how quickly your section becomes the screaming babies and crotchety senior citizens section.

I bet this guy posts from AOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Any takers?

PayPal doesn't care about black people!

[WiZZLa]

That, and they also have terrible business practices (PayPal that is.) You'd think PayPal would have learned from previous suits but the bad publicity this situation will bring is far worse than a $9.25 million settlement.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

Second, the forums are the among the best, largest, and most literate, communities on the web. Hence, the registration cost is has two reasons

Keep diluting yourself. Make yourself believe that $10 was well spent. I visited SomethingAwful a few times. The name is truely descriptive.

re: tipping

[King_TJ]

Yes, yes, yes! I'd mod your post up further if I could.
The concept of a "tip" isn't a bad thing at all, but it should have been kept completely informal. A "tip" should simply be a small gift from the customer to the employee - *not* anything even remotely tied into the financial structure of the establishment.

IMHO, if a restaurant can't afford to pay their workers at least the same "minimum wage" every other business has to pay, *regardless of tipping*, then they should probably raise prices on their food to make it possible. If they can't compete after doing that, too bad for them. Going out to eat is much about the "atmosphere" and the "service" as it is the food itself. It makes little sense to me to pay as little as possible to your workers, when their attitude and happiness being at the place directly reflects your ability to project your establishment as "superior" to the rest and worthy of return patronage.

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

Since we are going to druge up unrelated drama, I'd like to explain briefly what that site was in relation to SA.
Aside from sharing a relitive few select members of the community, that site had no relation. It had a seperate database, and ran off of donations. It also stopped accepting members as of January, and finally shut down nearly 6 weeks ago (has it been so long? :( ), and even then, it did not endorse software piracy as you imply.
One of the problems with the site that contributed to the shutdown was that a few morons, such as yourself, assumed that SA/Lowtax/whoever controlled that fragment of the community. Another theory was someone posting a movie of themselves banging some hambeast.
In any case, your outdated sensationalizing is a worthless digression from the topic at best. Please go back to being jaded in your corner of the internet, where no one can continue to like you.

My apologies to the /. community if this rebuttle is a bit scattered. I'm just tired :)

Please help me!

[sheldon]

I have $20 million locked up in a bank in New Orleans. The only way I can get this out is to provide a security deposit to the bank to validate that I have sufficient funds.

If you give me $20,000... I shall give you 10% of the money I get from my bank deposit box.

Please send the money to my paypal account...

rekcusaru@gmail.com

Re:ATTENTION **AAs: SomethingAwful = PIRATE Haven

[Anonymous Coward]

The mp3 forum is still up at http://forums.nmp3s.net/

RTFA

[Anonymous Coward]

As he pointed out, he's sending free SomethingAwful merchandise to everyone who donates $10 or more, and he needs to know who they are.

Paypal

[Angry Black Man]

Paypal doesnt care about black people.

iawtc

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

SomethingAwful is not an official charity

[samj]

So what, it's ok to encourage people to donate money to anyone now? You've got to be kidding. If they can redirect people to Red Cross for now, why didn't they just do that from thestart - there is absolutely no need to handle the money themselves. Have people already forgotten about the SPAMs soliciting donations for the Asian Tsunami disaster? IMO PayPal aredoing the right thing, and there should be more done to prevent this type of 'helpfulness'.

PS this is not to detract from SomethingAwful's efforts, nor suggest that they had anything but the best intentions, but the benefactors of charity really need to be better protected from those lacking morals.

Re:SomethingAwful is not an official charity

[rusty0101]

Actually, Yes. Anyone can ask for cash from anyone else, with no promise of any return, or even any claim that the person doing the asking is a charity. There is nothing illegal in that.

If the person being asked to give, decides for themselves that what is being asked is reasonable for them to give, and they choose to give some ammount in response, that's perfectly legal as well.

Granted using extortion/strong arm tactics in the asking would make that act illegal, but that does not appear to have happened here.

My own bank has set up accounts that any customer may deposit money to, and all funds that are deposited to those accounts will be delivered to the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army, (I seem to recall.) One of the reasons that they are willing to do that is that it makes handling the donations at the various charities significantly easier. Rather than having 5,000 $30, and 2,000 $250 checks that they have to account for, they get one check for the total $5,150,000 (*which the bank has to explain to the feds to preclude concerns over money laundering) and a printout of those people who wish to be acknoledged for their donations.

PayPal can be considered to be doing the 'right thing' only in that they have frozen the account of a customer that has had some suspicious activity. That freeze should have been lifted by now as the investigation would have shown that that 'suspicious activity' is reasonable for the situation.

-Rusty

Re:SomethingAwful is not an official charity

[Anonymous Coward]

Read the article dude, firstly SomethingAwful is reputable, and has done charity via PayPal in the past. They went via paypal rather than directly to RedCross so they could offer incentives to people who donated (tshirts, etc.). In summary, read the article.

PAYPAL ARE THIEVING CUNTS

[Anonymous Coward]

They stole my money too.
I will make damn sure it costs them more than it cost me.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Anonymous Coward]

Business accounts get a much better deal, especially if they're turning $30k at a time.

There's always eggpay

[Enviro]

I'm not certain of how eggpay differs from paypal but I'm under the impression an eggpay account is just like a normal bank account but with the slight difference that payment is accetped from an email address. That information + contact details are all that's exchanged.

http://new.egg.com/visitor/0,,3_45806--View_771,00 .html

Re:There's always eggpay

[Enviro]

sorry I meant the difference is that there are no transaction fees.

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

"Keep diluting yourself. Make yourself believe that $10 was well spent. I visited SomethingAwful a few times. The name is truely descriptive."

Last I heard, "diluting" wasn't the spelling you were looking for. Of course, you're too -delusional- from your hatred of Something Awful that you're unable to see the difference.

Re:Dishonest company screws a dishonest webmaster

[AlexMax2742]

Read SA's front page. The *only* reason Lowtax used PayPal was so that he could get donaters' shipping addresses to ship free merchandise to them as a thanks for their donations.

I don't see the connection here. How is this a bad thing?

Re:You're a fucking idiot, KiTA

[Anonymous Coward]

You do realize it hasn't even been 7 days since the storm hit as of your posting, don't you?

Hell, it was only eight days ago that Bush talked these lame-asses into making the evacuation mandatory, since it had been voluntary the previous day.

But you're not one to let facts get in the way of a good rant, I guess.

Re:RTFA

[zorander]

All the alternatives in the world won't get the $30k out of the account and into the hands of the people who need it.

Regardless of alternatives, paypal shouldn't fuck around with this and they did. Unfortunately, there's no real consequences for them.

Re:Katrina can eat me

[itcomesinwaves]

If you want to turn off your TV and computer, close your eyes, plug your ears, and hum the national anthem that's fine. I would understand. But instead you decided to play devils advocate to the outpouring of concern for the biggest national disaster in American history. I'd like to point out, like everyone else here, that you are a waste of flesh. If you won't kill yourself please consider cutting off your balls. please.

In addition to these people having no means to leave town, also consider that many of them live on government checks, which are mailed out on the first of the month. So at the time of the hurricane most of them have literally no money. There was no evacuation plan to get these people out of the city before the hurricane.

People were told to go to the superdome and convention center on the radio. When they got there nothing was set up for them. No food, no water, plumbing knocked out, and no evacuation. When your government tells you that they have a shelter set up for you, and you don't have anywhere else to go, why wouldn't you believe them? Stupid? No. Uneducated. Yeah. Maybe they'll learn not to trust authority, the ones that already have are those in the streets.

Your comment about politicians trying to gain from this disaster is laughable. The government attempt at aid was the biggest clusterfuck ever. If anything many of them should be very worried about losing their jobs and earning the distane of the people.

PayPal hates black people

[LBt1st]

Sorry had to do it.

Exactly

[autopr0n]

Fuck the cooks! Also, remember that the government taxes waiters based on "assumed" tips, so if you don't get your tips, you still have to pay taxes on them. It's really kind of fucked up.

If you paid with a charge card, do a chargeback

[autopr0n]

Contact paypal, and tell them to either refund your money, or send it to lowtax. If they don't respond, have your CC company do a chargeback.

Re:If you paid with a charge card, do a chargeback

[Lehk228]

how about mailing paypal a spring loaded box of dog shit?

Re:Past history of SomethingAwful

[Anonymous Coward]

THANKS TEAM BARRY (DOT ORG)

Re:PayPal in Cameroon?

[skeptictank]

The former minister of Defense in Cameroon needs my help to get his fortune out of the country. Can I used paypal for that?

Re:Wow, what hypocrisy.

[Anonymous Coward]

Fine, just as long as it not an anime-style drawing of a fucking baby skull.

..Just another PayPal story

[Archon-X]

Don't think you can negotiate with these guys.
Let me recount an experience-

A while ago, I came across the wrong side of some people in the online world - seemed when I blogged about the Paris Hilton incident, the people who released the content weren't happy.

My servers were DDoS'd, my paypal account started getting attempts to be broken into, that type of thing.

I took the time and rang paypal, and got a real person. I told them, to please note on my account, that people were attempting to access my account, and other nefarious things.

I was assured that the hackers (as such) couldn't do anything, and I need not worry.

Two days later, my Paypal account was frozen.
From what I can piece together, my online adversaries put a donate link, to my account, on some random smut-site, and then reported me.

I rang PayPal, expecting them to politely unfreeze it, as I had advised them of the situations that were going on..

I was flatly, and blankly, told my aacount was closed for TOS violations. They wouldnt not tell me what the violations were, and would not enter into discussion.

$300+US into their piggy bank.

Interestingly, they keep emailing me and telling me if I don't resolve the issues on my account, they'll have to close it. Pity I can't login.

Paypal == assholes.

Google.bucks?

[abb3w]

I hope Google uses this as an opportunity to launch GMoney or whatever they're calling it.

It might be Google.bucks, or it might be an unnamed earlier part in the public Master Plan a step or two before Google.Gov. A pity they can't roll THAT out at this point; they at least have some understanding of infrastructute....

I, for one, would welcome just about any new overlords, given the quality level of the current one. Frogs to Jove: King Stork has not been an improvement over King Log.

Alternatives?

[alexo]

So what are good PayPal alternatives for buying and selling stuff?
Preferrably working across the 49th parallel

Am I the only person

[Anonymous Coward]

who thinks that lowtax would have done well to contact paypal when he set the account up to explain what he was doing and ask them to shunt the money straight to the Red Cross?

Send your money to the Salvation Army instead

[SysGoddess]

The Red Cross has an abysmal record of return in terms of percentage of each dollar spent towards actual relief efforts. This has been widely reported in the mainstream press for a number of years and is a matter of public record.

Here in Houston, before the first buses began arriving, the Red Cross knew it didn't have enough supplies on hand to accomodate the number of people who would be arriving yet when large companies turned out to offer assistance in the form of manpower, bottled water & drinks and even food they were turned away. We saw this repeated many many times on our local news even once the tired, hungry people began arriving yet the Red Cross people kept smiling and saying "Send Money."

The people who were able to get out who are staying in hotels here are running out of money but nobody thought of what to do about that. In my immediate community local churches are helping with vouchers and offering the occasional hot meals. I went to a major chain hotel near my home 2 days ago to see if anyone there needed anything and was told by the manager that many of the guests had rooms because the churches were helping to pay for them but had run out of money so had no food. I brought several sacks of non-perishable groceries and when I came back 6 hours later with a major food drop, they were all gone save for 3 bananas and a couple of cookies.

Many individuals like myself are working with the owners of local restaurants who are donating their leftovers each night to some of the hotels. And the Salvation Army has stepped up to the plate with clothing and other donations since many of these people left with very few clothes and personal items of necessity. Where's the Red Cross?

The Red Cross doesn't endorse members of the community taking in or hosting refugees since they cannot "check out the households" they would be going to. Bloody hell, these people barely have the clothes on their back, many have no money and no food and the Red Cross is turning away every potential source of help available to them except themselves. Most people here are showing compassion and saying bugger the Red Cross and taking families into their homes since it could be weeks or months before they're allowed to return home and the Red Cross doesn't seem to have any grip on reality in terms of where these people will live or what they will eat in the interim, nor have they apparently planned for such a contingency.

If you're going to send money, send it to http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/USNSAHome.htm. Sure, the Red Cross is 'there' but at what cost and what miniscule amount of your dollar is actually going to any relief effort rather than to feed that top-heavy organization?

Closed My Account

[aer0]

And I suggest everyone else does as well. Just leave them a link to let them know why. I imaging the /. effect on paypal would be noticeable.

Re:Closed My Account

[(1 -sqrt(5))*(2**-1)]

Just leave them a link to let them know why.

They say PaySwiss is the new PayPal.

What really happens when a tip is charged...

[Math, The Ancient]

This doesn't apply to "every" vendor that accepts major credit cards and I'm not versed in PayPal's protection practices; But what "normally" happens is the cancel/new charge scenario...by example:

I take my wife out to dinner and use my Visa card (PayPal or other banking institution) that has a $200 limit or remaining balance (funds available at PayPal, funds available via your bank's credit/debit checking account, your credit balance perhaps, etc).

Dinner costs $100 (i haven't been out in awhile, i don't know if this is a realistic number). This charge is put against the account, so they can bring your receipt to be signed. If no tip is applied, the deal is done. No more transactions are applied.

However, if a tip IS applied, the first transaction is then actually cancelled so that the new amount with the tip can be charged instead. Yet, because the first charge hasn't had a chance to be processed by the Visa-issuing bank within the business day, it's still out there showing as a "pending" transaction.

The cancellation also becomes a pending transaction, but is NEVER reflected against the available balance as the new charge ($115 with a tip of 15%) now brings the account over the available limit resulting in a denial.

Another common practice is for vendors (or their processing center that handles credit card transactions for them) to charge the same transaction TWICE and put a "hold" on the second transaction pending the first clears (AT&T Wireless does this for example). This still reflects activity against the account as a pending transaction which is automatically dropped once the first charge clears. As explained to me by a bank employee, this allows the vendor to have a pending charge against your account should the first transaction fail and first in line if a deposit/payment is made to the account in the immediate future.

For the debit/credit Visa cardholder in the above dinner example against a checking account this would result in a negative "available balance" (albeit temporary and not your "actual balance") and your bank will often invoke an NSF charge for going over balance (Key Bank does this)! Normal credit cardholders can experience a denied transaction if any of these transactions brought them over their available balance and they tried to use it afterwards, but before the next business day can happen to "clear".

A lot of places do higher preauthorizations

[arete]

A lot of restaurants and many hotels preauthorize the maximum likely amount instead of the current total.

For instance, the excellent and incredible Safehouse Milwaukee authorizes 20% over your dinner bill. Then they actually charge whatever you pay for tip. Since the bill for dinner and drinks for a dozen people was substantial but we had paid the tip in cash, we noticed the increased amount of the preauthorization.

I've heard for a long time that servers prefer cash - which I think is true for tax and management purposes. But I've heard the reverse from some servers - due to theft from other servers and bussing staff. At least with a card they always get SOME of the tip.

I try to tip with cash and make sure to hand the payment + tip directly to the server.

Personally I think credit receipts with tip ought to print the maximum preauthorized amount (bill + 20-25%), the payment processors should refuse tip amounts higher than the preauth and to leave a higher tip you should either ask for a receipt with tip included or one with a higher preauth amount - and you should have to do it before they swipe your card. (or have them reswipe your card)

Sounds Like Save Toby

[Toaster Assassin]

This sounds like Save Toby. Where a man threatened to kill Toby, the cute little bunny rabbit, unless he recieved $50,000. Pay Pal thought it was horrible and thus froze it. If this is another repeat I commend Pay Pal.

Couldn't paypal have....

[00Dan]

Would have been easy for PayPal to fix- Just send an email saying "Suspicious activity has been detected on this account, please call your account representative Bill Smith at 555-555-5555. Deposits into your account will still be accepted, but no funds can be withdrawn until this matter is resolved. If no action is taken, funds will be returned to the sender." Instead, PayPal's response was - "Your account has been closed, good luck trying to contact someone"

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[Irish_Samurai]

No he couldn't have. People would have begun cutting and pasting false emails to collect free stuff. It sounds shitty, but it would happen. Sometimes a person trying to help out can't afford to go out of pocket to facilitate it. But if they utilize their social pull, they can garner a greater amount of support than they could have provided as an individual.

do you even KNOW who Lowtax is?!

[Anonymous Coward]

do you even *know* who Richard "lowtax" Kyanaka is or how many times the SA guys have donated money to big charities, douchebag?

this man (and his SA followers) are genuinely good people. they've donated a ton of money before... just shut the fuck up cuz you obviously don't know what the hell you're talking about.

This is nothing new.

[121merchantaccount.c]

Paypal has been freezing accounts for years. Sometimes people get their money back, sometimes they don't. If you are a real business and process more than $1K a month, you should just set up a real merchant account anyway. It cost less and you have more control. On the note of donations, unless you can verify a companies identity and intentions, you shouldn't donate online or off. - Compare merchant account providers and save.

Re:foolish and self-promotional

[a24061]

In the UK the Charities Aid Foundation promotes "efficient giving".

If you are a UK taxpayer, you can set up a CAF account, and when you put money into it (lump sums or monthly) CAF reclaims the relevant income tax from the government to add about 27%. You can then give money on-line to any registered charity in the UK.

(Slightly simplified explanation: Charitable donations here are considered to come out of gross income and the charities get the extra money you would have paid in tax on the amount given.)