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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."
"Paypal Won't Release Funds To Slain Soldier's Family"
That isn't quite true, they are holding the funds until mid April, probably due to somebody screwing up. I'm not convinced that it was Paypal's mistake to begin with.
"Paypal Doesn't Want Slain Soldiers' Families To Receive Aid"
Come on now, yea, there may have been a mistake made, but it has nothing to do with the money going to a Slain Soldiers' Family.
Why the need for so much drama?
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
A more accurate summary should have indicated the money is frozen by policy for 180 days. So, paypal is not saying they won't release the money, they won't release it until April 13.
It probably sucks for the people who raised this money, but it also sucks for paypal that too many people set up these kinds of things with intent to defraud.
Hopefully with the noise raised and ruckus caused by sites such as slashdot, the resolution will become before April 13.
FTA:
Hopefully Adam's family and platoon isn't so depleted to not be able to function until April 13. Hopefully if this is so, paypal will figure out a way to disburse earlier.
Meantime, deepest regrets and best wishes to Adam's family for their loss.
I suspect that PayPal will release the funds within 24 hours of the /. report.
No one wants that kind of bad PR.
While I hate large corporations ripping people off as much as the next guy, I don't think this says anything that bad about PayPal. This is my guess at what happened:
So it doesn't seem the company is trying to rip anybody off or laugh over the graves of the dead. In this case.
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
The reason why Paypal does this is because creating a charity account without being able to provide documents proving your charity status is suspect. It's a red flag. Another red flag is having a new account suddenly receive a massive amount of funds from many individuals.
To make things clear, the types of accounts that is:
A) New accounts
B) Unable to provide documents
C) Receiving many funds from many separate individuals
If you can't guess already.... accounts created by phishing scams!
The fact that this person is not a phishing scam is a travesty on the part that they were suspended, but the FACT REMAINS that they have no possible means to prove their innocence.
Yes I said prove their innocence. This is a company, not a trial. Likewise, they haven't been found guilty either. The reason for the 180 suspension is obvious:
If the people who sent them money start to increasingly cancel their money payments, then, bingo, the account is a scam. If they don't after a given time, say... 180 days, then hey the account is legitimate.
Paypal sucks, but not in this particular case.
Lesson learned to all: if you're going to claim you're a nonprofit organization, BE A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION.
This site was not nonprofit, and was having the funds sent to their own, private account.
Yes it's sad, but ask yourself the following: could you trust a nonprofit paypal donation if you knew that they only had to casually mention that they were nonprofit? That they didn't have to prove it?
There's nothing stopping the people who run that website, other than personal honor, from pocketing the cash and giving the finger to everyone who donated. And THAT is why PayPal has those policies. I'm surprised that they'd even hand over the cash after 180 days in fact.
It's sad, yes: but in the future, they should know to make an actual nonprofit organization with its own account. Doing such a thing isn't that hard: you just have to apply, and make a seperate checking account. My club at High School did it, and the people in that club were a bunch of idiots, especially in High School (myself included).
-Vendal Thornheart
PayPal did the same thing when Dan Savage of the Savage Love sex column took up a collection for charity. PayPal refused to release the funds to him and would only donate them directly to United Way, a charity with a very questionable reputation. Don't take charity through PayPal, people. They're sketchy enough when you're buying and selling like they want you to.
Did you actually read the article? Oh wait, this is slashdot. Of course you didn't. Even the guy's personal blog admits that they will, indeed, get the money, and that they didn't set up their account correctly for this sort of online dontation gathering. I'm really not seeing how this is Paypal's fault. They have to have some safeguards in place to prevent fraud. And this has nothing to do with Paypal not 'wanting soldiers to get their money'; that implies someone actively made a decision to withhold the money on the basis of where the money was going. Sure, maybe they're being a bit inflexible, but that might get worked out in the coming weeks. That has nothing to do with Paypal actively withholding money from soldiers.
The deadspin folks claim that paypal wrongly flagged the account as a charity account, and that they (deadspin) did not ask for the acount to be flagged as a charity account. If that is true, paypal has no right to be witholding the money, and they are also obliged to correct their classification error.
No matter what the "factual" details are, if you're on the same side of a dispute as a dead soldier's family, there's no possible way you can be wrong.
& I wish I knew the password to your heart . . . &
If PayPal wants to continue pretending to be a bank, they should be regulated like one.
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
Read the article, and it will be obvious that the person who set everything up is not only and idiot, but they are rude and foul-mouthed as well.
PayPal is doing what they have to, giving themselves time to investigate to make sure it isn't a scam. Scams like this are rampant, both with soldier funds and hurricane relief funds.
Considering the guy did NOT set this up as a non-profit, he is going to be in for a rude shock come tax time. Once PayPal releases $20,000 to his PERSONAL BANK ACCOUNT the bank will file a "suspicious transaction report" with the gov't. I wouldn't be surprised it HIS BANK didn't then freeze the funds for 30-90 days.
Assuming it is then released, the IRS is going to count that $20K as INCOME and will want 20-33% tax from this person. All his protestations of "but I gave it to the widow's family as a gift!" won't amount for shit.
Sure, he meant well, but he is going to be a living example of "The Road to Hell is Paved With Good Intentions" because PayPal is only the beginning of his descent.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Notice the use of the word "Had." I'm sorry, but responding to a problem like that with that sort of language is somewhat ridiculous. Paypal is supposedly following their own policy. You can respond to it by acting professionally, writing it up for the public, and then returning to PayPal and trying to get access to someone higher up the command chain, or you can do what they've done, and mouth off about it. Considering the way they reacted in text, I have a hard time believing that they acted professionally enough on the phone to make the PayPal representitive honestly feel they were there in good faith. As well, their request that people assault PayPal with phonecalls and other contacts is somewhat petty. Honestly, I'm not a fan of PayPal in the slightest, but this isn't the way to react to such things.
Buddy, if your definition of evil is PayPal then you need some serious help.
Indeed. We all know that Ray Romano is the true definition of evil.
... and then they built the supercollider.
Umm, are there stories that show Paypal in a good light? I haven't heard / read any...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
PAYING with PayPal is rarely the problem. It's GETTING YOUR MONEY BACK from PayPal where all the issues come up. All their policies are designed to do one thing: keep the cash in their accounts, earning interest for them, for as long as possible. As a payer, I've never had any issues.
Dude, I think I can see my house from here.
There's absolutely NOTHING new in Paypal doing this. They aren't regulated, so they can do what the hell they want to in effect. and you can notice this.
On top of that, atleast in one point, even fscking janitors could get to see your account info there!
It does get better tho... Rather than working honestly, in one case i had, i got a fraudulent order, found out about that myself
a day later, e-mailed them about the transaction needs to be reversed. This got to happen due to the fact, that they do not require any authentication at all to deposit more into paypal, as long as you have username & password.
I explained what has happened in detail etc. meanwhile, calming the victim down (who's account was stolen, victim of a phishing attack). I wasn't going to just send the funds to her, then the insane transfer fees would be lost etc. Total amount was approximately 150.
Almost 2 months later, i finally got a word from there... Nope, they hadn't read my e-mails, it seems it was automated message, saying the funds had been refunded etc. but the thing is, who's money it was, never got it. She noticed my Myspace profile 6months later, and she hadn't got STILL got it, while paypal had taken the funds from me.
In effect: Paypal decided to take the funds, without refunding them.
Nevermind the insanely high fraud amounts with them! I dropped them, after using them years and years, guess they calculated the
one time cash was worth to them more than continuing transfer fees.
People, don't use paypal, there is honest companies out there to replace them... That being moneybookers!
Pulsed Media Seedboxes
Not to Yoda.