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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.
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!
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."
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
* 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.