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Paypal Reverses Payments Made To Indians
bhagwad writes "Beginning January 28, Paypal has been reversing the payments made to any Indian provider of services. In addition, Indian users have been unable to withdraw their money to their bank accounts. As a result, a large number of Indian Paypal accounts have negative balances running into the thousands of dollars. The worst part is that users weren't informed beforehand — the funds were just whisked away. Indian providers have gone ballistic, with over 2,000 posts on a thread on the reversal of payments and over 700 posts on this thread about the delay in transfers. Paypal hasn't given any explanation to this behavior other than they're looking into it. Although Paypal claims in the above blog post that payments made for 'Services' are not being reversed, this is not true. All payments not made for 'Goods' with a shipping address have been reversed — in fact, the Paypal e-mail tells the Indian sellers to encourage their clients to lie and claim that they're paying for goods with a shipping address instead."
Why anyone trusts PayPal with their money.
"Only do evil" Everything started out rosy in my time with paypal, but I ended up hundreds in actual money and thousands in potential sails. I mean paypalsucks.com is still going strong
....and the unfortunate reality is that there is no other option to really challenge their dominance. The sooner a new player comes along that can really give PayPal a run for their money, the better. When that challenger arrives, my PayPal account will be immediately closed!
Banking reform in the US should include subjecting PayPal to all the rules and regulations that apply to banks. I find it strange how they've managed to avoid being classed as a bank all these years in the first place. Current regulations leave a lot to be desired, but making PayPal adhere to them would be a good first step.
Who will be manning the call centers to handle the complaints?
This is due to some change in the regulations by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) regarding offshore money transfers. I read somewhere that RBI is demanding some documents form PayPal to make them eligible to transfer money to and from Indian Banks. Apparently PayPal hasn't been able to furnish those documents.
A few years back PayPal had closed my account without warning. It locked about $400 in it. It took about a week for them to finally tell me what was up, and they told me I'd have to wait up to 180 days to receive these funds. It took way longer, but I finally got my check. I'm never going to use PayPal again.
I am truely heartbroken!
Get a merchant account.
I don't respond to AC's.
I think PayPal is run by cowboys.
Currently hooked on AMP
Please do the needful!
Got Code?
Why PayPal needs to be regulated as a bank, and why I refuse to use it.
Bye.
Where would you hide a tree? In a forest of course. Every time there is a new technology is found, the terrorists and criminals use it first and the law enforcement is way behind and always plays catch up. The Mumbai attackers were using prepaid satellite phones and VOIP routed through New Jersy to get constant feed back while they were on their rampage inside the Taj hotel. Wait for a day or two, and you will see that angle will be mentioned. Whether sincerely or as a diversionary tactic by Paypal or by RBI I don't know. But it is a well known fact the terrorists use havala trading systems very effectively and Paypal would not be a big step for them.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
http://www.paypalsucks.com/
I got burned by these bozos once. Make sure you read the terms and conditions carefully. They refund only under very tight circumstances. If there was an alternative, i'd use them instead. ... I got bitten for several hundred dollars once...
I had no problems on about 50 transactions
Seriously, PayPal sucks...
Them too
Banks create money.
Paypal moves money.
Deleted
...if this were all down to poor programming done by Indian outsourcers?
Paypal are Indian givers? I had to check my clock to make sure it wasn't April 1.
In this case they're doing the right thing. Almost all of the Indians using PayPal are scammers.
Yeah, they only hold, transfer, convert, store, send, give cashback bonuses, interest, etc. They are nothing like a bank at all.
This is not what makes a bank a bank.
What makes a bank a bank and the reason they are more tightly regulated (though that's laughable) is that banks create and destroy money. Banks are a form of privatised money creation.
Paypal on the other hand simply move money from one person to another. They neither create nor destroy money. I would argue that no matter how bad their customer service, their costs or the problems they cause individuals, the paypal organisation is economically far more benign than your local bank.
Deleted
Wow, I read this and thought "American Indians" the whole time I was reading it. Only from within the comments did I realize my mistake...
Paypal (an eBay company) has been doing this for a long time. There have been a lawsuit in California which Paypal has settled (meaning all the money went to lawyers and now Paypal can do the same thing again as, once settled, you cannot sue the company for the same reason). Many people in the US have had accounts with $20,000 or more locked for no specific reasons, for months or years, while the company collects interests on that. This is the kind of behavior that needs to be outlawed in the U.S. (all other developed countries do not allow this). Paypal is NOT a bank and therefore are not subject to banking regulations (which in the U.S. are lax anyway).
supplied by Western Union called BidPay, but I think that's gone gone gone.
I'm not sure how paypal is even legal frankly, they screw over both consumer and vender alike, but their biggest problem is their poor consumer protections.
Credit cards however were sensibly designed to provide a safe avenue for consumer level electronic transactions, which means they must provide strong protections for the consumer. If you don't like payment avenues that have consumer protection, then you should use older payment systems like certified check and cash.
In general, credit card companies sort out contested charges fairly reasonably and efficiently, and the fee they charge the merchant is pretty typical for banking related fees. I've seen only really two main exceptions :
(1) Non-profit organizations occasionally get some moron making lots of donations using stolen credit cards, which ends up costing the non-profit. I think the easiest solution here would be for fraud scrubbing services to donate their services to tax exempt organizations.
(2) A small company using digital delivery often sees enormous numbers of charge backs because purchasers habitually forget what they purchased. If this happens, the small business has usually failed to clearly indicating their name in the credit card billing line, often because they have recycled the merchant account from another business.
Let me guess - you're an Indian software developer, right? Because this is just exactly the kind of ass-backwards thinking that I see whilst cleaning up outsourced code...
Why is anyone still using Paypal? I'd rather send money in an envelope. When they fucked Wikileaks should have been the final wakeup call.
No, I just have my posts written there in exchange for worthless karma.
LOL, please do the needful...f*ing great!
Somebody used "begging the question" correctly.
There must call-centers springing up around europe to deal with the crisis. Hello this is "Jangir" how may I help?
I'm a Cleveland Indian and I didn't get anything.
Paypal have been dodgy for years now, but if they have to go on a robbing spree I guess Indians are as good a target as anyone else.
Anyone that doesn't know about paypal's sleazy practices should treat this as a wake up call, close their account, and cancel any credit cards paypal know about.
The lower the price for the yuan (a.k.a the renminbi) in dollars, the more dollars China earns from exports, and the fewer dollars it spends on imports.
No, they also have to spend more on imports. But that doesn't matter much because of their trade surplus.
Reading the posts above this one, where everyone is making a distinction between a bank and paypal, in Europe the situation is different then in the US, PayPal IS a bank here (so no need to make a distinction between the two), from the website:
.
PayPal (Europe) S.à r.l. & Cie, S.C.A. (R.C.S. Luxembourg B 118 349) is duly licensed as a Luxembourg credit institution in the sense of Article 2 of the law of 5 April 1993 on the financial sector as amended (the “Law”) and is under the prudential supervision of the Luxembourg supervisory authority, the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier
link: https://cms.paypal.com/nl/cgi-bin/?&cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/ServiceDescription_full&locale.x=en_US
This is Slashdot. Anything that has anything to do with the NRA is automatically virtuous, honest, and freedom-loving. Guns are beautiful! And you are a freedom-hater if you think otherwise!
How will this affect the future of internet gambling. Aren't most of the casinos on reservations?
Title says it all !
As a result, a large number of Indian Paypal accounts have a negative balances running into the thousands of dollars.
Does anyone else see that as a good opportunity to cease their relationship with PayPay (for those stupid enough to have kept using them anytime in the past, oh, decade)?
Remember - Not a bank, by their own maneuverings. You can't actually owe PayPal money, because they don't sell anything or provide any (direct for-cost) services. Sure, you can owe their other customers money, but PayPal itself?
Negative balance? Yeah, time to close that account. Thanks, PayPal, but you can keep "my" negative money. Funny thing, about forced arbitration clauses - You can stack the system as much in your favor as you want, but to get government sponsored armed thugs to go shake down your clients, you need to step in to a real court of law and risk setting some seriously unfavorable precedents.
The beauty is that you don't really have to trust PayPal. I usually transfer money out of my PayPal account within minutes of it arriving there, and I have made sure never to authorize PayPal to withdraw from any bank account I have.
Just make sure you have a backup plan so that if / when PayPal suspends your account for some stupid reason you have somewhere else for customers to go.
My sister sold some concert tickets on ebay paid for in full on PayPal. The guy came to her house & picked up the tickets and my sister withdrew the much needed money from PayPal.
About 4 weeks later my sister started receiving many e-mails from PayPal which, as she had no further business with PayPal, she assumed was spam and just ignored them. About 2 weeks ago she received a letter informing her PayPal has listed her with a credit reporting agency (yes, that means no credit cards, phone plans, mortgages for 5+ years) because she failed to pay them back $500 --- the guy had collected the tickets from my sister and saw the concert but then the bastard called PayPal to say he never received the tickets! PayPal simply put my sisters account into negative and started collections proceedings. When my sister finally figured out what had happened she explained the situation to PayPal & they just said too bad she didn't have proof that she gave him the tickets.
So yes, if you withdraw your money it makes it harder for PayPal to take it away from you, but that doesn't mean they can't screw you financially just for using their services
I wish I had modpoints today. Note that gunpal is the official payment processor of http://www.auctionarms.com/ It's not some little fly-by-night company.
Paypal needs to die.
"Liechtenstein is the world's largest producer of sausage casings, potassium storage units, and false teeth."
maybe that's why those Middle Eastern networks (can't recall the name. something like '---hasa')
You're thinking of hawala, as far as I can tell.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_giver
Indian giver is an English expression used in North America and Australia, used to describe a person who gives a gift (literal or figurative) and later wants it back, or something equivalent in return.
People there is Google Checkout. I have been selling through them since they started, because Pay Pal ripped me off for thousands of dollars with exactly one of these types of bs moves.
Living in Chile
I mean come on, does anything good EVER come out from India? sigh....
New Economic Perspectives
Note that gunpal is the official payment processor of http://www.auctionarms.com/ [auctionarms.com] It's not some little fly-by-night company.
As a person who has never heard of "auctionarms.com" until this very moment, I don't understand how this precludes them from being a "fly-by-night" company. And even if working with this somewhat obscure website (at least I have never heard of it) gives it a patina of legitimacy, that still means nothing. Ebay is a VERY large and popular company, meaning (by your logic) Paypal is not a fly-by-night company, but Paypal still sucks and operates in the most ethically dubious of manners.
Sorry for being a bit confrontational. I've always viewed Paypal, and any other company that operates in the same niche as highly dubious. And just having the endorsement of the NRA doesn't cut it. I have nothing against the NRA, but they do, often, attract the lunatic fringe. The association itself, doesn't lend too much credibility.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Posting anon not to undo moderation.
Paper checks are only slightly safer than cash. They are still subject to loss or theft, and there's all the additional hassle of signing and going to the bank to deposit. If stolen by someone familiar with your friend's signature (easy enough via dumpster diving), or if the entity cashing the check doesn't care or have any means of knowing the proper signature, the check is "endorsed" and cashed and away the thief goes.
I've lived in Japan, and there it's routine to send money via bank transfers. I paid my dues for a professional organization this way, and that was around US $100. I've repaid a friend via bank transfer too. It's very easy, can be done at any of your bank's ATMs or via your bank's website, and makes everything much simpler.
Banks do charge a nominal fee for this, I think ¥420 last I checked (think $4.20 for you USians reading this), so it only makes sense for amounts above a certain threshold, but even so, not having to mess around with a checkbook and wonder if / when someone is going to cash a check is an enormous boon. Your bank balance is always your bank balance, full stop; none of this garbage of having checks floating around uncashed, then hitting your account at unexpected times.
I'll wait for the proverbial flying blue monkeys coming from you-know-where before I'll expect to see US banks switch to something so consumer-friendly -- they love checks, precisely for all the inconveniences that (mostly) fall on the consumer's side. The discrepancy between the balance the bank lists and whatever checks are outstanding is brilliant from a profit-making (petty theft) motive -- it dramatically increases the chances that you might become overdrawn, at which point your bank gets to slam you with all kinds of fun fees. It's all very dodgy.
Ah, well. More evidence the US strangling itself. <sigh.>
Cheers,
That's certainly a sobering story, but I'm really curious - did they manage to report her to a credit agency without knowing her SSN? Or did she give it to them?
My security with PayPal is that I have never given them any such info. The only fix they have on me is the bank account I transfer money out to, which is merely a holding account itself and can be tossed aside if necessary.
Indian givers.
I use a separate account at ING Direct. They let you set up as many bank accounts as you want under one umbrella, so you can just use a special account for PayPal with minimum funds in it. I call this my "sandbox" after the idea of sandboxing software in a chroot jail etc. to mitigate its damage potential. No matter what PayPal does, they cannot take more funds than you have in that account, as that is the authorized account. The only thing left they might do I suppose is thrash your credit. I'm not a big seller so I'm unlikely to run into the types of problems others have in this regard. I'm mainly concerned they will abscond with my cash.
Currently hooked on AMP
It sounds like a possible double-whammy, FCBA, and FCRA (failure to give required proper notice before negative information is reported) violation on PayPal's part looming.
An e-mail message is not a proper/valid notice of a debt, and fraudulently constructing and attempting to collect on a non-debt, would also be a violation of FDCPA (Reporting false information on a consumer's credit report or threatening to do so in the process of collection).
PayPal is not a court, and their independent decision to award a counterparty their money back is not binding on you, and doesn't create obligations on your part, unless you signed an agreement to that effect (and maybe not even then -- since a creditor cannot legally have any individual sign over FCRA/FCBA dispute rights, as long as you are a consumer, and not a business) .
The sister should then probably do something like going to each credit reporting agency and dispute PayPal's report to that credit reporting agency, state that the amount reported is not owed, and demand the erroneous information be validated / removed.
And make sure to send PayPal certified mail disputing the amount of the debt within 60 days of the 1st statement you received that was in error.
The CRA then has a period of time, to investigate the reporting. If PayPal then 'constructs' fraudulent information to 'validate' the debt, then there is a FCRA violation.
Send PayPal a demand they strike the erroneous debt, certified mail demand letter.
Then if they persist, sue Paypal in small claims court, for statutory damages on both counts.
PayPal can potentially be in the hole >$1,000 in statutory fees, plus reasonable attorney costs, if they have indeed violated one of those laws...
You really should find some sort of proof that you exchanged the tickets, however.
Or file suit against in small claims the person you sold the tickets to, for slander, and get a lawyer to subpoena someone (or some people) who were there to stand as witness that the person at least attended the concert.
And also, perform discovery, (assuming you can figure out ticket numbers), to determine if those tickets were actually used.
But then, maybe all the hassle in attempting this isn't worth the $500...
CRAs are smart, you don't have to report the SSN to them. If you don't know it, when filling out the form, you can just enter name and address. The CRA will figure out who to tie it to.
If they're wrong, and attach it to the wrong person [e.g. multiple people with similar names and address bit different SSN], it will be up to the person the debt is erroneously attached to -- to fix it, next time they get their annual free credit report, they will have an opportunity to dispute with the CRA using the online form or mail-in form (but probably will have to dispute individually with all 2 or 3 CRAs that got it wrong).
I wonder how many billions (trillions?) of pounds everyone would save if we all used a reliable, fast, non-profit bank which worked universally, and with a single universal currency to boot. It would be so efficient, that payment transfer would be economical even at a fraction of a penny.
In this electronic age, this should be easy. Oh I forgot - UWS. Otherwise known as: "Unnecessary Work Syndrome".
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
Reversing payments to the Cleveland Indians is similarly an outrage.
Also... calling them Indians is so last century. These days thay are called Native Americans or Indigenous people within the United States
And reversing payments made to them is one of the most intolerant, disrespectful actions a company like PayPal could undertake.
They clearly need a big long spanking for this.
The racial profiling of "scammers" or "frausters" has got to stop.
PayPal also needs to get sanctions and fines levied against them for their mistreatment of nigerian people, due their noted refusals to deal with transactions in that great nation.
is it just me or do you read the posts from apu's mouth?
(take no offense)
If you want to call it a house of cards, feel free. There is no money being "invented" but there is the practice of borrowing against money that isn't unencumbered.
Well, this is, in effect the same thing people are complaining about, just not as extreme or simple. The wiki article does explain this through its example of loan multiplication and the associated charts and graphs.
And I wouldn't call this a house of cards so much as a deliberate and effective system of social control. Though it certainly appears to be unstable from the perspective of the man in the street.
1. As per the wiki article, using 20% as the example, $100 of Central Bank money turns into $500. There is some attempt in the article to distinguish the difference between two types of money, but that's purely academic if not entirely nonsensical, since the moment borrowed funds enter use in the real world it quickly becomes nigh impossible to determine where it came from, especially if it spent any time traded as paper currency. Essentially, the banks DO create money from thin air, but there is an upper limit imposed by the required fraction required to be kept in the vaults.
2. The banks charge interest on that money. -This point appears from my cursory reading of the wiki article to be unaddressed, and it is perhaps the more alarming of the two items because unlike the mechanic observed with Loan Multiplication, it has no upper limit. But the real problem resides in the fact that since the money lent out by banks is all the money which exists in circulation, the question arises; "Where does the extra amount required to pay interest come from?" -Put another way. . . If all the banks at the same time demanded all their loans paid back in full, this would essentially account for all currency in existence. But because all of that money was lent out at interest, everybody would remain in debt because there is simply no money left over to cover the interest. Of course, we don't see this mechanic directly, because the economy is huge and all the loans are never called back in at once. But the net effect is that overall debt increases with time; it becomes more and more challenging for people, companies, cities and countries to scrape together enough of the available money supply to pay back the banks for the principal owed as well as the interest.
The net result is global debt slavery, -regardless of whether this result was deliberately intended or not. Of course, I think it is silly to assume that such a system could possibly be accidental, and indeed famous figures in banking and world politics have made statements over the last couple of centuries which make it quite clear that it was certainly not. This is the reason people are upset. And while I can understand why somebody might call such people, "Nutters", it is hardly a fair accusation, given the very real seriousness of the situation. A lack of insight is usually the culprit, and this is entirely forgivable given that the whole of society has been successfully kept in confusion regarding the true nature of banking for so long.
-FL
Any time you combine a political organization and money transfers, SOMETHING is bound to go wrong.
And even if doesn't, it is sure to come back and haunt you. Probably right in the middle of your bid for Governor.
they do, often, attract the lunatic fringe
and a highly armed lunatic fringe at that. Sounds like a dangerous customer base to screw around with.
Forgot fractional reserve...
You give the bank $100, they lend out $900. They charge the people 15% on that $900 making $135 on loans and give you (if you're lucky) $3. Then tack on charges of course.
Net profit north of $132.
Off your $100.
then if only 1/8th of the deposits are withdrawn, they collapse because they have to give out $12.50 but reduce their loans by $125. Early closures must result on the loans and they won't return the profit they were "meant" to.
After all, think about it from their point of view -- one could put an empty envelope in the thing while punching in a $500 deposit, and then claim that it was stolen or otherwise misplaced. So, there is no deposit until a bank employee says there is a deposit.
In the 1980s some banks would actually credit you half of that deposit immediately. So you could stuff an empty envelope in the machine, then withdraw half of it. When the bank figured out what had happened, they would be rather upset but if you deposited right away, would live with it. So, if you had gambled or drank away all of your getting travel money, it was a decent enough trick to get you home from college for the holidays. Of course, after the first bank meltdown in the 1990s, that all went away, I believe, and now, some bank machines are actually smart enough to actually count the money and scan the checks you deposit into them.
This is my sig.
Well we're in Australia so we dont have SSNs. But tbh I'm surprised anything more than name, dob & address is required, even in the USA.
I do the same with Natwest and their Step account. The account only allows direct debits. I swap money in and out online. Sandbox indeed.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
"Not in the US. And the banks like it that way, so it will never change."
Banks are loosing a lot of goodwill recently because of some economic problems that are caused by banks risctaking. Changes in the rules might become possible because of this. In the EU transfers between EU countries there are rules about banking fees (transfer are essentially free) after banks failed to regulate it themself. See Wire Transfer
Speaking as someone who had no choice but to use paypal to transfer money out of India, thanks to the Indian govt's byzantine regulations, I'd say there are times when it's good to have a service that evades regulation. Trying to transfer money out via international bank transfers took 8 months struggling, with no results. Transferring money via paypal - despite the poor customer service and random account freezing - took only 2 months. The solution is for the Indians affected by this to pressure their government to cut the red tape and ease currency restrictions.
Paypal is the Indian giver.
I've been thinking of setting up that sort of sandbox; right now, my Paypal is tied directly to my one and only checking account. But does Paypal ever withdraw (or un-deposit) money from your bank account? I've seen dozens of horror stories where they freeze your Paypal account, or put transactions on 21-day hold, but a sandbox wouldn't help there. I don't recall seeing them actually pulling money from your bank account since their early days (pre-eBay).
Does it still happen?
Whether it does or not, "linking" it to your bank account is giving them more trust than necessary IMHO. I built the sandbox out of a sense of precaution. YMMV. Good luck.
Currently hooked on AMP
Bank of America only pretends to be one bank at the consumer level (partly due to stringent state banking laws), and only really manages to be one bank when it comes to the bottom line (great for execs, sucky for customers). Frankly, I think their unified national branding is false advertising.
Cheers,
I used my bank account from Grad school days as a sandbox for PayPal. Paypal on purpose deducted money from my bank account and not my credit card. And they freaking tried 3 times to withdraw the same amount. Anyway for a 25$ charge I ended up paying 150$'s in overdraft and other fees.
Careful.. the American banks might not like the idea and might try to thwart it. Compare when the Dutch ABN-AMRO bank tried to do the same thing in Italy (luring Italians away from their atherosclerotic banking system with the promise of normal service and normal fees): "Bancopoli" ensued.
There are new ATMs that scan the checks on the spot, inserted directly into the slot (no envelope) and tell you the amount the were able to read off them, allowing you to correct it.
The US does not allow for that. The banks don't link into other banking systems seamlessly.
Sure they do. Through the Automated Clearing House (ACH) network, also used for direct deposits, etc. Businesses can initiate Direct Debits on your account (with your permission). It's equivalent to a check - including the low level of transaction fees (which is why it is practical to be used for small payments).
A downside is that you have to be a big operation and do your transactions in a batch. So it's great for something like a utility company or large mailorder house. But for the little guy you have to get your bank to give you such access. Why should they do that, when they have an equivalent service where they charge you two-digit dollar amounts per transaction?
(Not sure whether this is available to businesses outside the US and with no US presence, though.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Also... calling them Indians is so last century. These days thay are called Native Americans or Indigenous people within the United States.
According to my wife (part American Indian and raised on a different tribe's reservation): The bulk of the American Indians (in her estimation) prefer "American Indian" to "Native American". (Exceptions being mostly a couple plains tribes and some individuals from all over who went to universities and got involved in political movements.) Two main reasons given:
1) It's a running gag on how the stupid Europeans still haven't figured out that Columbus was almost half a planet away from where he thought he was.
2) Anyone born in the USofA (commonly referred to by the rest of the world as "Americans") is a "Native American", regardless of percentage of tribal ancestry (including zero), culture, or state of tribal adoption. So using that term to refer to American Indians is not just politically-motivated claptrap but a misuse of the language.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Imagine my surprise to discover that cashing a check at the bank it was drawn on was subject to a $6 fee. I don't imagine this is done in civilized countries, and it seems to disagree with the contract written on the check.
The cost of that cleanup, of course, will be borne by taxpayers, not industry.
Hmm, I didn't think of overdraft fees! Dang. Well, it's a relatively cheap lesson, I'd say. I guess the solution is to have an account at PayPal that does not link in a bank account. Is that workable?
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