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India Suspended From PayPal For "At Least a Few Months"
More details have come about about what was behind PayPal's decision to suspend personal payments to any user in India, as we discussed on Sunday. In a blog post today, PayPal revealed that payments to India will remain in suspension for at least a few months. Customers in India will be able to pull rupees out of the service into their bank accounts within a few days. The suspension came about when Indian government regulators raised questions about whether PayPal's service was enabling remittances (transfers of money by foreign workers) to Indian citizens. "The problems may have been triggered by a marketing push that promotes PayPal as a way to send money abroad, a source familiar with the matter said. The campaign — which reads 'As low as $1.50 to send $300 to countries like India' — may have caught the attention of Indian regulators, the source said."
My impression has been that PayPal is kind of like a reverse-lottery.
In a Lottery, everybody knows a bunch of people who have bought lottery tickets and lost. They may have heard of one or two people who 'won big' in the lottery.
With PayPal, just about everybody who has ever used PayPal has successfully used it to pay for something and had no problems whatsoever. But they've also heard about one or two 'losers' and their horror stories.
Most regular people don't place a lot of trust in PayPal, but use it successfully to engage in small transactions, i.e. to buy inexpensive collectables on eBay.
And there are a few very very bitter people who will NEVER stop hating PayPal because they screwed something up and PayPal proved rather unforgiving.
That's just the deal. When someone comes into a forum like this screaming bloody murder about what a horrible mess PayPal is, all the regular folks who've had no problem with it just end up thinking "are they nuts?" And then they move along. Because there are net-cranks everywhere online, and you just have to expect it.
Go ahead and rant about PayPal. It just lowers your credibility with the rest of us. And we ARE the majority at this time. We'll figure it out if PayPal ever really goes sour in enough time to get out.