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PayPal Withholding Indie Game Dev's €600,000 Account
epee1221 writes "Markus Persson, a.k.a. Notch, the developer of Minecraft, posted on his development blog today that PayPal limited his account with unspecified cause on August 25th. Since then, payments for the alpha version of Minecraft have continued accumulating while Notch has been unable to withdraw them, and the account now contains over €600,000. PayPal recently told him it may take up to two more weeks for things to get sorted out and that if they conclude that there is funny business involved, they will keep the money."
This unfortunate news followed an announcement a few days ago that he and a friend would be starting a studio of their own to continue development on Minecraft and start working on a new project.
They blocked my account for reasons that were not clear to me, but had to do with being an American living in Germany using a German bank. There was a way to get it unblocked, but it was complicated and not worth my time. I only ever used it for eBay, so I just stopped using eBay.
They are just stupid.
I worked for Western Union for over 6 years, they are subject to many, many banking regulations. Since PayPal is a money transfer service, it should fall under the same regulations.
It's too bad WU management is deathly afraid of the Internet (well, technology in general), otherwise they could have prevented PayPal from ever existing.
paypal is evil... don't do business with them.
Yes. In Canada you can do an Interac email money transfer from most banks for about $1. If the receiver is with one of the major banks they can have the money in their account within minutes of receiving the email from the sender and if they are with one of the institutions not participating in the scheme then they can use a middleman-service and still get the money within IIRC 3 days. There is also HyperWallet which seems favoured by the credit unions and a few of the banks and they provide a similar service... in fact the fastest way to get money into your PayPal account from a Canadian bank is to use HyperWallet.
I used to use Western Union wire transfers but they have become insanely expensive IMHO.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
That's because they don't exist. Even if the statistics back you up (and I'll bet every penny I've ever spent via Paypal they don't) we hear about the illegitimate business practices and not the few successes.
Last time I tried to use Paypal they took money off my credit card, then refused to route it through to the recipient. As they were acting as a merchant acquirer in the transaction, and I don't have a Paypal account, by holding onto those funds they were effectively stealing money from me.
So I threatened them with court action, asked my card company to reverse the transaction, and complained to the FSA and to Mastercard.
I got my money back eventually, and now refuse to do business with anybody that only accepts payment via Paypal. It's inconvenient at times, but not as inconvenient as giving money to a corrupt business and still not receiving the services/goods I've paid for.
Why someone would trust PayPal, who isn't a bank, with well over half a million dollars is beyond me.
I don't think they did, the summary makes it sound like they kept the balance low but have been locked out of their account for whatever reason and since they were locked out 600,000 Euros (actually more than 3/4 of a million dollars!) has come into the account. They've had no way to remove it, no way to prevent the money coming in short of shutting down their operation, and no way outside of PayPal's customer service to resolve the situation. Honestly, it's almost criminal (or maybe even is criminal, I don't know).