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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
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.
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.