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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.
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/ .
No good deed shall go unpunished. I really don't like Paypal, for this and many other reasons. What ever happened to e-Gold?
Now you have a PR nightmare on your hands.
ShortFormBlog: Writing a little. Saying a lot.
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.
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.
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
1) allow people to open accounts
2) collect donations for disaster relief
3) SIEZE MONEY
4) Profit!
Remember people, PayPal is not a bank!
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
sup RH krew
New Orleans more like who gives a fuck.
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."
/. editors. `Aweful', you could say.
Absolutely amazing. I hope Google uses this as an opportunity to launch GMoney or whatever they're calling it.
BTW, good spelling
My other car is first.
Afternoon nap survey.
Goon Justice.
The USA is Dying
.9 of a Euro. Coming on the heels of a recent Usenet survey which plainly states that The American Economy is in a recession, this news serves to
It is official -- The UN is now confirming: The USA is dying
One more crippling bombshell crushed the already beleaguered American economy
when x-rates.com confirmed that the American Dollar has dropped yet again,
now down to
reinforce what we've known all along. The USA is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict the USA's future. The hand writing is on the wall: The USA faces a bleak future. In fact there won't
be any future at all for the USA because it is dying. Things are looking very bad for America. As many of us are already aware, the US continues to lose relevence. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
The IT industry is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core
developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time IT jobs to india only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: The American IT Industry is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Microsoft Encarta states that there are 291,065,636 people in America. What is the US's national debt? Let's see. According to the The Debt clock the USA's National Debt is 6,465,271,811,559.14. Therefore each American
is $22,212.42. in debt. In fact, the USA's national debt has continued to
increase an average of $992 million per day since September 30, 2002. Indeed,
it can clearly be seen the the US is going broke faster then the Soviet Union did
Due to the troubles of American Meddling, An Capitalist Gorvernment and so on,
South Vietnam was attacked was taken over by North Vietnam who sell another
a more compassionate government. Now Iraq is also dead, its corpse turned over
to feed the US media.
All major surveys show that the USA has steadily declined in the world economy.
America is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If
the USA is to survive at all it will be among a broken collection of warring
factions. America continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save
it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, the United States of America is dead.
Fact: The USA is dying
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.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
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.
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.
Jesus saved me from my past. He can save you as well.
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 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!
Kyanka rips off SomethingAwful denizens as a matter of course; if you've ever tried ordering SA merchandise such as "City Name Sports Team" shirts or if you read the SA forum "SA-Mart", you'll probably notice that a lot of people don't get their merchandise. Of course, Richard is very quick to take people's cash out of their credit cards. But I guess occasionally he just gets overwhelmed, huh? I hate you Richard.
Lowtax can give the money to the red-cross in 180 days!
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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
I don't see any reason by Red Cross donations were being routed through someone's PayPal account. Well, sorry, I do see one: so that someone, instead of just posting a link to the Red Cross donation page, could instead garner all the credit for "organizing" a relief fund.
It's a foolish waste of money, of course, since Pay Pal charges for each transaction (7% or so?), so everyone is making additional donations to the Pay Pal overlords. And I assume that at the end the guy running this "Something Awful" self-promotion would just make a collected donation to the Red Cross on his own credit card, meaning credit charges are paid twice.
Not to mention further of course that people who donated through Pay Pal probably won't be able to claim it as an IRS deduction, but whoever ran the promotion in the first place might have a shot himself.
All foolish, self-promotional and highly irregular.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
I just finished writing submitting it myself, because GOON JUSTICE, man.
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.
Like here.
When a grassroots political operative needed a transplant and the opposition party got Paypal to shut down the donations.
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.
Shortlist of wankers probably responsible for complaints on this:
- The members of #buttes, which is mostly buttfaces who have been permabanned from Something Awful. The rest are buttfaces who haven't been banned yet.
- Ryan"TheMystic"Lord
- George"King Re0l"Fiffy
- That woman who makes memorial webpages for people who had miscarriages
- Euronymous
- Bitter furries, juggalos or prople who consider japanese pornographic comic books featuring children acceptable.
Wow, Slashdot following Genmay for once.
They'd love this story. Big company stealing from the poor hurricane victims. It's comedically evil, except it's real.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
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.
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.
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.
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!
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if most of the donated money went to pay for Richard's new car or music equipment.
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.
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.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
[01:57:28] http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161078&cid=134 749854 74950d =13474985d =13475014
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[01:57:56] o shi, beaten
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[01:58:05] UGS
[01:58:29] http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=161078&ci
[01:58:35] hey dudes, mod up
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.
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.
Is there cirumstances where none of what I said above is true? Definately.
Is what I said above the majority of what's going on? You better fucking believe it.
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
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.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
I hate PayPal even more. Geez, at least Lowtax is doing something respectable.
You forgot to call him "Blowtax".
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<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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The next awful link of the day will be paypal.com
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.
..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.
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.
...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.
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?
OMG Ponies!!! with Glitter!!!! I miss Pink
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.
Amirite?
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!
"RTFA" stands for "Read the Fucking Article"
People are usually told to RTFA because their question is answered within the article text (hint: their old payment system was hosted in New Orleans).
But hey, you're an idiot, you don't have to read no article!
See subject.
1. It is pretty suspicious to collect money "for the Red Cross" into your own PayPal account. Yes, I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt -- but PayPal isn't -- and I'm glad!
2. He claims to be doing this so that he can ship prizes out of his own pocket, yet doesn't show PayPal any evidence of this happening.
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?????
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Didn't PayPal get a Class Action lawsuit on the basis of something similar recently?
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.
Donating to the hurricane effort is a commendable act, but it could have been accomplished through Red Cross link rather than Paypal. The reason why Lowtax had set up a paypal account was because he wanted to gather the money and write a check from SomethingAwful LLC, thus writing off that huge chunk of donations from his taxes. It had very little to do with "giving out free merchandize," as he claims so in the article.
Greed was the motive, and he's paying as a result. Way to piss away the goodwill of the SA community by looking for yet another way to profit off of people's good deeds. It's sickening to me how some people try to look at ways to profit even in the most desperate of situations.
As for Paypal, it has always sucked as a service, and Lowtax is no stranger to their dealings. It's not like he is using it for the first time. The entire forum registration system was tied to Paypal for years until he realized that he could make more money through direct credit card transactions.
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.
the real question is... can niggers swim?
SomethingAwful has been running a bittorrent tracker to pirate movies and the like. They opened up signups through some obscure link in their forums, demanding $10 for access to the tracker.
The address for their bittorrent site is wdma.biz. While it may look innocent, it is really a front for one of the WORST pirate sites on the net.
What is especially despicable about SA's pirate site is that they tried to make money off of piracy. If Hollywood is going to target sites like EliteTorrents, where the admins didn't make you PAY to sign up, then they sure as hell need to BRING DOWN WDMA.BIZ and SOMETHINGAWFUL. Those sites are worse than your casual bittorrent sites - they are moneymaking illegal operations trying to profit from THEFT.
SA may think they are being clever in throwing up that facade to hide their criminal actions, but it is time to let them know that they can not escape the law. Bring these "goons" to JUSTICE.
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?
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
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.
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.
I take it you haven't actually tried using that search button to find anything.
Let the goddamned Red Cross in to help those pitiful souls, you craven bastdard Feds!
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!
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.
Sig Under Construction
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.
...and replied. Yes, people. I, rolloffle, am Ryan Lord. Oh snap!
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.
ng to bed
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...
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
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.
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.
+++ATH0
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.
eTrade SUCKS
Please click:
http://www.paypal.com/
You can also go to Amazon and donate from there.
A Katrina relief effort by Little Green Football readers that had over $9000 in Paypal donations got frozen by Paypal:e s-our-account-as.html
o r-realizes-error.html
http://www.punditeria.com/2005/09/paypalcom-freez
Then unfrozen, thanks to efforts of someone higher up at Paypal:
http://www.punditeria.com/2005/09/paypal-supervis
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??
--- "End Of Line" - MCP
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!
or else!
Contact Us page at Paypal.
Send them an email and ask about this, with a link to this Slashdot page.
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!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Get your Unix fortune now!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Little Green Football???
/., but we have some standards.
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
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.
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.
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.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
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.
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.
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:
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.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
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!
1-866-648-5843
I was only offered this number when I made it clear I was closing my account.
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?
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
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.
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
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
...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.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
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...
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.
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've never had this problem. I've used it many times and left a tip.
this sig deleted by another sig
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.
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.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
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)
Hivemind harvest in progress..
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.
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.
RadioShack is taking donations for the Red Cross. See local store for details or just go here. http://www.radioshackcorporation.com/
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.
This is rediculous, maybe some bad press from CNN might shed some light on the Paypal rediculousness
Seen at the bottom of /. this morning:
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.)
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
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?
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
After 911, hundreds if not thousands of scams popped up claiming they were helping victims and their families.
Then as now, paypal did their best to make sure their service was not being used to funnel those funds. They were hammered by thousands of folks who ultimately wanted their donations reviewed and their money back when it turned out they were scammed.
When an account jumps 20k in one day and they find that a non-registered charity is accepting donations for disaster relief, they are doing due diligence. I would fully expect that Paypal will eithe re-open the account or forward the funds.
I was scammed on an ebay auction and they ultimately gave me my entire payment back pretty quickly when the seller couldn't prove he sent anything.
I still think they are scum and rarely use them. However I can't blame them for being cautious.
Karma means nothing to me, so suck it...
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?
There was a class action lawsuit against paypal because of these practices and PayPal settled. They haven't changed their practices though.
They collect fortunes but were unwilling to go in there. Can't you find a better referral?
It always warms my heart to see Something Awful goons suffer. Good job PayPal!
- JJCoolJ
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.
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.
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.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.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
New update on the paypal situation on somthingawful.com paypal still sucks though :)
whats going o
If it's any consolation, the guy is white.
... 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.
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
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
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
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
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
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
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.
Voted 5
Take it like a boyscout little man.
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.
"Proudly Posting Without Reading The Article"
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.
Putting 666 in their phone number must be part of their pact with Satan.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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.
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.
Suggestions for next steps:
This ongoing and repeated abuse must stop now!
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.
Any takers?
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.
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.
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
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 doesnt care about black people.
the byproduct of years of oppression by the white man
n/t
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.
They stole my money too.
I will make damn sure it costs them more than it cost me.
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.
0 .html
http://new.egg.com/visitor/0,,3_45806--View_771,0
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.
Sorry had to do it.
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.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The former minister of Defense in Cameroon needs my help to get his fortune out of the country. Can I used paypal for that?
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.
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.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
So what are good PayPal alternatives for buying and selling stuff?
Preferrably working across the 49th parallel
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?
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?
Thus spake the SysGoddess
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.
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".
If I really am talking out of my ass...explain it to me with respect so I'll at least pull my ears out to listen.
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)
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
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.
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"
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.
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.