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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!
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.
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!
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
Naah.. the whole 180 thing is a lie to get you to wait 'til they've managed to misappropriate your money somewhere.
Other people have waited the time and magically... no money. Not like that was a surprise.
I urge anyone with links to the media to let them know about this, submit it to your local paper, and even to the nationals. Let your local radio know, write an email to paypal threatening to close your paypal account and never use them again, the more bad press the quicker it will get resolved and they'll be under scrutiny for a while.
This is far from the first fundraiser SA has run. They raised another 20k or so for body armor for soldiers in Iraq, and recently a bunch of SA goons raised over 6k in a few weeks and bought toys for sick children, which they delivered in person.
I understand your suspicion but come on, this is is SA, home of one of the most populated forums on the internet. We goons care.
"He does look a bit Oompa like, even if his Loompa is a bit off-kilter."
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.
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.
You guys sound like good nerds, but I'm sorry, I still don't get it. Pay Pal fees are horrendous.
Look at it from the outside (my perspective.) The website is soliciting donations for the Red Cross. 7% of all those donations go down the drain -- all so that the webmaster can verify that the donation was actually made and give people "free merchendise"?
It's definitely not standard practice, and I'm sure not the way the Red Cross would want it done.
Again, imagine it from the outside: "WalMart Red Cross donation button! Donate to the Red Cross here! 93% of your donation will go DIRECTLY TO THE RED CROSS! Donations over $10 will recieve free Wal Mart goodies!"
I have nothing against people running their own clever, innovative charitable projects via Pay Pal, but this complicated and lossy system of passing the buck is foolish.
Protect your liberties. Donate to the ACLU
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.
Something Awful is Somewhere Awful After the plug was pulled on the popular somethingawful.com, Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka of SomeThingAwful.com, hoping to focus the community's efforts on raising money for the Red Cross, in exchange for SomethingAwful.com merchandise, found his fundraising drive cancelled, by PayPal.com, when they shut down his account and stole the $20,000 dollars the members had raised for Hurricane Katrina. Everybody needs to see the complete insensitivity that PayPal has. They have no shame. They have taken money that was going to the Red Cross, used their policies against a fine internet community, and has stolen Hurricane Katrina fund money. This cannot go unpunished.
I think it time we give PayPal's parent company an idea of what we think of their subsidiary. I'm willing to bet that if anybody with enough seniority gets ahold of this and recognizes it for the ticking PR time-bomb it is things could be set right.
EBay's toll free investor line:
1-866-696-3229
or
1-866-696-eBay
Have fun.
Yes, raising fund for forces stationed in Iraq and for sick children are horrible deeds indeed.
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!First, you can browse most of the forums before registering.
Second, the forums are the among the best, largest, and most literate, communities on the web. Hence, the registration cost is has two reasons
1) People tend to be less jackasses if they know it will cost them at least $10.
2) It actually costs money running forums with tens of thousands of users that require seven dedicated servers.
As for the extra features cost, once again, two reasons:
1) It still costs money to run the servers
2) With the sheer number of users on the forums (at least three thousand online at any given time), the servers just can't handle if everyone would search/browse archived posts all the time. Thus, either they limit it to those who find it worth extra money, or disable it for everyone
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
So? Over here in the UK, we *still* have Paypal alternatives, such as NOCHEX and PPPay. Are you seriously telling me there are no slightly smaller, less-evil alternatives to Paypal in the US?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
The owner of Something Awful is a longtime customer of PayPal. This isn't some fly-by-night operation that just popped up. Five minutes of investigation on PayPal's part would have revealed that it's quite legit.
And why would you be glad that PayPal is hording the money generously donated towards hurricane victims?
First, read the fucking article. Where did you get 7% from?
Next, realize that the percentage that goes down the drain is likely made up for by the people who wouldn't otherwise have donated but were convinced by the lure of free merchandise.
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!
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.
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.
1-866-648-5843
I was only offered this number when I made it clear I was closing my account.
Greyhound tickets work better if the buses are working -- both busses and planes pulled out of NO several days before the hurricane. This is a lot of why there were so many tourists stranded -- they simply didn't have any way to leave. (Many hotels then kicked them out in the streets for "liability reasons".)
Interestingly, not everyone knew how severe the hurricane was supposed to be. News travels slowly when you don't have a TV or net.
People stayed for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they had no choice/car. Interestingly, if you walk, the freeways (at least on one side, I'm not sure about the other) are one of the worst places to be, because they are flooded early and often.
Lea
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
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.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Suggestions for next steps:
This ongoing and repeated abuse must stop now!