Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
True story.
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.
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.
"He does look a bit Oompa like, even if his Loompa is a bit off-kilter."
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.
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.
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.
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.
AccountKiller
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.
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.
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.
this sig deleted by another sig
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
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.
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.