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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.
No good deed shall go unpunished. I really don't like Paypal, for this and many other reasons. What ever happened to e-Gold?
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!
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.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
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!?
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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??
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
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.
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.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
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.
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.
When VCR's are outlawed, only outlaws will have VCR's.
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.
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.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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.
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.
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?
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.
* 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!
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.
I am unamerican, and proud of it!
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.
Putting 666 in their phone number must be part of their pact with Satan.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion