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

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.

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: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.

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.

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: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.