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LulzSec Calls For PayPal Boycott, Spokesman Arrested
An anonymous reader writes "British police have arrested a 19-year-old man believed to be 'Topiary', the official spokesperson of the LulzSec hactivist group. The man was arrested at his home in the Shetland Islands earlier today (July 27), and is being transported to a central London police station." Also today, LulzSec has called for a boycott of PayPal saying “We encourage anyone using PayPal to immediately close their accounts and consider an alternative.”
How easy is it to say "and consider an alternative" without even giving one?
One of the problems with paypal is that it has no rival at all. Even if you do not take into account the fact that paypal is a de-facto standard payment method, there are very few alternatives.
I'm sure lots of people would ditch paypal for lots of reasons. I would. I use google checkout whenever I can, because I particularly have more trust in Google than in paypal, even if checkout is in some ways worse than paypal. But very few people offer checkout support.
I hope this guy knows that (almost) nobody will close their accounts because of his statements, but that this adds more weight on the "trend" that people are more and more dissatisfied with paypal and is seen as something "bad but necessary" and maybe "just good enough" in the eyes of many.
"We encourage anyone using PayPal to immediately close their accounts and consider an alternative."
Coming from these guys, this doesn't sound as much like a boycott as it sounds like they've found some laundry they're about to air.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
You are complaining that they are "stealing" your money even though you haven't given them proof of who you are.
If they want proof of ID, then they should ask for it up front - not when they have money and I have no option. Of course they won't return the money to the sender either.
Unlike PayPal, who you would also be sending your ID to, at a random address, Moneybookers is regulated.
Show me the regulation that says that they get to keep any money?
Your money is sitting in that account because you are a retard, not because they are thieves.
They are thieves. They won't give me my money and they won't give it to the person that sent it. And they demand that I send them a photocopy of a document that can be used to open bank accounts (real ones), apply to loans, and lot of other things. If you think I'm being a retard for not sending them that document, then will, go fuck yourself and send them yours.
What do you expect from British law enforcement? These are the guys who took bribes from News Corp. "Barely coherent, strongly infantile" and "ideological" is how they roll.
Rupert Murdoch gets to enjoy his billions but a 19 year-old hacker is public enemy number 1. The Prime Minister is playing footsie with a News Corp hatchet man, but it's "LulzSec" that's the big threat.
Yes, I would say that the British government, and the FBI, are being "barely coherent, strongly infantile and completely ideological"
You are welcome on my lawn.
Boycotting Paypal would be nice, but for a lot of people, it's impossible. Would you tell people to boycott the banks by closing their accounts and keeping all their money in cash under their mattress? That's basically what you're saying when you advise people to boycott Paypal, because like it or not, it's basically a monopoly in many online-payment venues. It's not that others haven't tried; Citibank tried something called C2it, but that was a flop and they shut it down. There's also Google Payments, which no one uses.
Unfortunately, if you use Ebay, or you have a small website selling stuff, Paypal is pretty much the only game in town for handling online payments. It's easy to set up, there's no monthly fees, and the per-transaction fees are the lowest out there for small quantities. Sure, if you have an online store selling $500,000 per month in merchandise, you can get a merchant account and pay lower fees than PP and the monthly fees won't really matter, but if you're selling only $1000/month (basically a hobby business) or selling your junk on Ebay, it's absolutely stupid to get a merchant account as the fees are so high.
Or what if you want to solicit donations for some cause, whether it's an open-source project or an animal rescue or whatever? With Paypal, it's easy and free: stick some "Donate" buttons on your website, and you only pay fees of 2.9% + $0.30 if someone donates, and if everyone thinks your cause sucks and never donates, you pay nothing. That's not so easy to do with merchant accounts.
That said, my biggest gripe about Paypal is their website: it's ridiculously slow, and you can't print reports. For instance, if you want to generate a PDF showing all the activity for the last 6 months or year, you can't. You just have to manually step through the transaction history, page by page, and print-screen for each page. There is a place on the website to go to generate reports in PDF, and if you go there and tell it to generate a PDF, it just hangs, because their site is soooooo slow, and eventually your web browser times out.
If you don't know how to make yourself untraceable, don't do things that will bring the cops to your door.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
You seem to misunderstand what a Ponzi scheme is.
Not all Ponzi schemes are up front about, basically, "pay us X dollars and we'll give you X * 110% from the next suckers." They often pretend to be legitimate investment or trading ventures. Among other things because most people get wise to up-front promises of infinitely sustainable giving guy A the money from B and C, after one or two collapse. You only get a very narrow window of opportunity to pull one off on new suckers, such as the ones that swept Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism, then people learned to avoid anything that up-front says it's a Ponzi scheme. You have to disguise it as a legitimate business investment or some legitimate service or whatever.
But, really, look at historical examples.
E.g., the Ivar Kreuger scheme didn't promise to be an up-front Ponzi Scheme at all. Kreuger owned a very profitable matches production and had a monopoly on it, owned banks, etc. By the time of his fall, he was at the head of more than 200 very profitable (or rather over-hyped as incredibly, fantastically profitable, although Kreuger was running deeper into debt) companies. On the surface lending some money to Kreuger was kinda like lending money to Microsoft. There was no way a multi-billion corporation would default on a few million they owed you with interest, right? The problem is that the whole debt added up to vastly more than actually those factories were worth, and in fact his reputation of paying back such debts and with good interest was really a Ponzi scheme where the money came from the next suckers lending him a few millions.
Other schemes gave certificates of value, shares, or a contract to get a house built for much less than the normal cost. (Which during the bubble used to be quite a lot.) Most of them are, at face value, things you can trade and which have a very visible value. E.g., you sure can trade value certificates or shares around, and there's nothing to keep you from selling a contract for a house to someone else. You can even check the current price for a house with that many rooms, and all.
Using a variable, market-driven value instead of promising some exorbitant return per week is also not that uncommon. See those house contracts for example. Sure, the lamest Ponzi schemes for idiots do promise fixed, too-good-to-be-true returns, but the more sophisticated ones avoid such blatant give-aways.
The real characteristic of a Ponzi scheme is basically that it's fiat currency without anyone actually guaranteeing its worth. Behind those Kreuger IOUs, or bonds, or value papers, or house contracts, or bit coins, there is no real tangible product or shares in some real company or anything of real value. You can get any money out of a Madoff investment only as long as someone else is willing to buy more investments, because Madoff didn't actually buy any shares or anything of actual value. The only return is basically robbing Peter to pay Paul. For a Paul to get some money out of Madoff, some Peter must be convinced to pay some money for whatever tokens or papers Madoff gives for those money.
And I honestly don't see why bit coins wouldn't qualify as such.
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