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PayPal Brings Mobile Payments To U.S.
An anonymous reader writes "PayPal is bringing the eastern use of the cellphone as a payment method to the United States. The company's mobile service aims to use secure text messages as a payment method for direct-marketing initiatives and other 'on-the-spot' mercantile opportunities." From the article: "To the extent that digital money doesn't feel like real money, it may increase spontaneous purchasing ... " This story offers more details on a discussion we had last month.
TextPayMe already provides this exact same service. I wonder if they have a patent on it.
That's not really true, Paypal only charges fees on credit card transactions and the fees they charge are reasonably well in line with what other credit card gateways charge merchants when you purchase something from them with a credit card.
Whether the fees charged by credit card gateways are too much is another matter, and seems like it might be the case. I seem to recall class-action suits being brought against Mastercard by merchants because they felt the fees they charged were unjustified.
The fact of the matter though, is that although as a consumer you generally don't realize it, merchants always take a hit on credit sales and it's not always small. There are plenty of legitimate complaints about paypal and I don't see this as being one.
An automatic system makes a voice call to your phone after you have texted "send 14.99 to 2125551212" to 729725 ((PAYPAL)) and you touch-tone back a PIN which you set up when you activated the PayPal Mobile service. So the phone thief would need your PIN, not just your phone.
"The reason why PayPal (and most other financial institutions) don't support the eastern european countries is that those countries are notorious for the sheer number of fraudsters. So much so that it is not worth it to provide service there."
Thanks for standing behind an old stereotype that offers quick answers. However you may notice that "fraudsters" script kiddies can obtain US credit card numbers and then sign up without problems for PayPal.
It's guys like me who want to sign up with their own credit card that have the problem. The credit card operators in Bulgaria are the same as those well known internationally (MasterCard, Visa, Diners Club etc.).
And to bust another stereotype, it's not "most other financial institutions" that don't support Eastern Europe, from the big payment processing companies, the problem is specifically with PayPal.
I second this, I'm getting tired of all this "we don't support Eastern European clients" crap. I'm in Romania and have both debit and credit cards issued by Romanian banks. A Romanian client signing up with a Romanian credit card from a Romanian IP is definitely less likely to be a fraudster then someone signing up with a US credit card from an IP in Eastern Europe and asking for his goods to be shipped there.