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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.
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
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.
So it doesn't seem the company is trying to rip anybody off or laugh over the graves of the dead.
It seems like you've never used Paypal before.
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. -
Buddy, if your definition of evil is PayPal then you need some serious help.
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.
Is there any need to ask rhetorical questions?
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