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Paypal Won't Release Funds To Slain Soldier's Family
robustyoungsoul writes "Popular sports blog Deadspin established the Adam Knox Fund for the purpose of raising money in honor of the fallen soldier who was killed in Iraq. They took the donations through a PayPal account.
Turns out now, however, PayPal will not release the money due to the way the account was set up on their end."
SomethingAwful.com ran into a similar problem when they set up a paypal donation fund, to collect money for the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. They intended to give the money to the Red Cross.
After more than $20,000 had been donated in a day, PayPal froze the account. PayPal insisted that they would be unable to donate the money that had accumulted before the freeze to the Red Cross, tho bizarely said they could donate it to the United Way. After finding that the United Way had a reputation for inefficiency, SA finally just threw their hands up in disgust and told PayPall to refund the money to the donaters.
Wikipedia has a brief writeup of the issue in their SA article, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somethingawful
Your logic sounds like a lot of wishful thinking to me. Paypal is not a bank. Paypal has no rules or regulations to follow other than those they make up on fly, and there have been numerous instances of Paypal not paying or holding onto money for little or no reason. Go ahead and trust them. I have never used them. What's worse than a pay in advance credit card? Paypal!
Maybe Paypal should insert a transactional check. If account = Nonprofit and Approved = Not and Balance owed > $100 then flag a warning and have a rep check it out. Either that, or just have non profit accounts frozen *until* proof of non-profit-ness has been established.
One thing that confuses me here is the 180 days and April 13th...
180 days from today is July 9th.
180 days before April 13th is October 15th.
And (just for completeness) April 13th is 93 days from now.
Is someone's math wrong at paypal? Or is this being reported months after the fact? Or what?
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
Is the 5.03% per year their money market fund (Barclays International) pays "nice fat interest"?
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
In a situation like this the money probably doesn't belong to the account holder yet. It probably belongs to the one who sent the funds. But in either case, the money most definately does not belong to Paypal. Paypal releases the initial funds after 6 months in these cases (a rather extraordinary length of time) but Paypal is not entitled to the interest garnered on frozen funds no matter what the circumstances. Whether the charity is legit or not, I want the interest on my donation for the time period in which paypal held the frozen funds returned.
Whether you group those whose funds have been frozen by paypal, or you group those who donated the funds there is definately a class action to be made here. Paypal freezes accounts when they have accumlated large sums and then pockets the interest; they need to be stopped.
Those "Firefighter Union Charities" and "Police Brotherhood Funds" that call you are basically a scam. They give the police/firefighters a lump sum and then call in their name and keep everything they collect. The overhead can be on the order of 95% when all is said and done. If you are suckered into contributing to one of those you'd better be ready to listen to your phone ring, a lot. They will promptly use your name in the other similar charity-scams that they've set up. I used to have a picture of two pledge kits from two "different" organizations (I even asked them when they called back and they denied all knowledge of each other. The two organizations were: The Brotherhood of the Police Chiefs and the Police Chiefs Brotherhood. Their logos were similar, but not quite identical, and the information packets on the inside were nearly identical. Interestingly enough, the former had pledges in the $35-$55 range, while the latter had them in the $45-$75 range.
From what I can tell, if you "pledge" but then never send in the money, eventually they'll put your name on a deadbeats list and stop bothering you. At least the volume of calls I get from "unrelated" organizations diminished a fair bit after I sat on 5 different pledge kits for a few months.
I read the internet for the articles.
They took money out of my account they shouldn't have, due to a screw up entirely of their own making (it wasn't an error on my part, or another user trying to scam me and I certainly wasn't trying to scam anyone or up to anything remotely unusual or nefarious).
They wouldn't refund it and told me not to contact my credit card company (Mastercard) and sent me a cookie cutter response saying they would ban me from using Pay Pal if I reported the problem to Mastercard (as Mastercard policy explicitly said I should, given the nature of the transaction). Which is an 'interesting' way of doing business to say the least. As the only way to actually get a refund, I did tell Mastercard, I told them about everything Pay Pal had sent me, and told Pay Pal of this and instructed them to close my PP account.
Even after I had closed my account I kept getting junkmail from them (which I couldn't unsubscribe from, as I'd closed my account - which in turn prevented me from unsubscribing). Slick.
This has, to my surprise as much as anyone, been the sort of story (along with mysteriosly delayed releases of funds) that I've heard more of from people that success stories. I've met quite a few people who no longer use Pay Pal for their business because it's been such a hassle to deal with. It's ridiculous that they are not subject to stricter regulation.
Don't believe me? Here's the appropriate language from their terms of service:
Note the specific disclaimer of a fiduciary relationship with you. Upstream of that, note the separation of funds from their corporate cash flows. Specific enough?