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PayPal Told Customer Her Death Breached Its Rules (bbc.com)
dryriver shares a report from the BBC: PayPal wrote to a woman who had died of cancer saying her death had breached its rules and that it might take legal action as a consequence. The firm has since acknowledged that the letter was "insensitive," apologized to her widower, and begun an inquiry into how it came to be sent.
Lindsay Durdle died on May 31 aged 37. She had been first diagnosed with breast cancer about a year-and-a-half earlier. The disease had later spread to her lungs and brain. PayPal was informed of Mrs Durdle's death three weeks ago by her husband Howard Durdle. He provided the online payments service with copies of her death certificate, her will and his ID, as requested. He has now received a letter addressed in her name, sent to his home in Bucklebury, West Berkshire. It was headlined: "Important: You should read this notice carefully." It said that Mrs Durdle owed the company about 3,200 pounds (~$4,200) and went on to say: "You are in breach of condition 15.4(c) of your agreement with PayPal Credit as we have received notice that you are deceased... this breach is not capable of remedy." According to a PayPal staff member, there were three possible explanations for how the letter was sent: a bug, a bad letter template, or human error. PayPal is continuing to work with Mr Durdle and has written off the debt in the meantime.
Lindsay Durdle died on May 31 aged 37. She had been first diagnosed with breast cancer about a year-and-a-half earlier. The disease had later spread to her lungs and brain. PayPal was informed of Mrs Durdle's death three weeks ago by her husband Howard Durdle. He provided the online payments service with copies of her death certificate, her will and his ID, as requested. He has now received a letter addressed in her name, sent to his home in Bucklebury, West Berkshire. It was headlined: "Important: You should read this notice carefully." It said that Mrs Durdle owed the company about 3,200 pounds (~$4,200) and went on to say: "You are in breach of condition 15.4(c) of your agreement with PayPal Credit as we have received notice that you are deceased... this breach is not capable of remedy." According to a PayPal staff member, there were three possible explanations for how the letter was sent: a bug, a bad letter template, or human error. PayPal is continuing to work with Mr Durdle and has written off the debt in the meantime.
This is a pretty major human error.
How does someone write: "we have received notice that you are deceased." and not realize something is wrong? Unless the person doesn't know what "deceased" means, which I suppose is possible, but even then you'd expect someone to notice something like this in code review.
Sending a letter to a dead person (that the company knows has died) is ridiculous on its own; the letter should be addressed to next of kin.
To be candid, repayment of outstanding debt is a legal matter. While I do believe this is in poor taste, it doesn't shock me in an official communication about the debt.
No, there's a much more plausible fourth explanation: Paypal is run by dicks.
Easy: there's a mail-merge template with the text "we have received notice that you are [reason_code]". At some point, some non-technical manager said that "deceased" should be one of the values, not thinking things all the way through.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
Yes, but, in this case it's inheriting _debt_ by default unless you explicitly opt out.
"a bug, a bad letter template, or human error. "
Or you just have crap policies where you fail to delineate other avenues of outcomes that occur but you do not consider legitimate. This leads to absurd conclusions any normal review or check would recognize as unacceptable.
PayPal is set up this way -deliberately-. They want you to give up. They don't want to be contacted. THey make many being pricks.
Get unsolicited email from PayPal, to an address you own and has never had anything to do with them? You have no easy recourse to get it removed. There is no unsubscribe since PayPal assumes they ahve the right address. They admit it's from an unmonitored email address you cannot rely to. They assume they are in the right or that you have an account or agreement with them. You cannot respond in kind in like medium (email) to get it resolved.
And if you call them, look out. They assume you are the phisher. Yeah, I'm spending 25mintues on hold telling you to contact the account holder they are using my email address, and in them eantime either temproarily blacklist the outgoing emails until thye at least verify the account. Yeah, that's a real good phish move, morons. Interesting how they won't email you to verify right then and there like a poor man's authentication sicn ethey maybe believe it's a MITM, but they'll authenticate with a plain email with an open link to verify an email account.
I'm almost tempted to try to see if I verify my address with the account that I didn't open to see if I can get a password reset. Then go in and turn off the email settings, assuming you can do that. Of course, if I did that, I'd probably be in trouble for hacking, while PP keeps sending me emails to sign up for their new credit card, or I've been preapproved for xyz.
PayPal. Oe wonly pretned to be a bank. WHat do you expect, real service?
Saying "computers don't make mistakes" is like saying "if we knew everything, we could predict the weather". It's true, but meaningless, because it's predicated on a condition that is impossible to fulfill.
Consider how many people are involved in running a simple computer program. Start with the team that wrote the program, the team(s) that tested it, the team that maintains it, the team that specced and accepted it, and the team that documented how to fit it into your workflow. The current operator, and the person who trained them, and the person who trained them. The team that specced, wrote, tested, documented, maintained and updated the operating system it runs on, and each of the various utilities and handlers that it depends on. Then the teams that did the same for the underlying silicon architecture, the surrounding network...
There is no-one alive who even knows who all these people are, let alone is competent to review all their work. Let's assume one of them made an error - maybe an error in programming or testing, but just as likely an error in training ("deceased" should be flagged for special handling), or speccing (there should be a flag that suspends auto-generated letters when some conditions are applied, and that flag must be clearly visible to the person who's maintaining the list of conditions). It may even be an error in integration (this program is tested on Windows 7, but is being run on Windows Server 2012 R2).
If you are serious, you are a fucking retard. I don't care how much you dislike Trump, to equate him with a philosophy that killed tens of millions of people is insulting to both groups.
Trump may be a giant asshole, but he's not rounding up Jews and gassing them.
I don't know which is worse.. The fact you imply Trump is as evil as Nazis or the fact that you make Nazis out to be less evil than they really were, by reducing them to the level of Trump.
First of all, Nazis did more than round up Jews and gas them, so there are plenty of ways to be like Nazis without actually murdering Jews.
Second, is your objection that he hasn't gotten around to persecuting Jews, or that he hasn't implemented mass murder yet? Because Hitler didn't campaign on a platform of death camps. His platform was about getting rid of illegal immigrants and making Germany great again. There were even Jewish organizations that supported Hitler because they also didn't want to be infested with illegal immigrants -- at least until such organizations became illegal.
Hitler took away Jews' citizenships so he could deport them without trial. Trump just set up a denaturalization task force to take away citizenships and wants to deport people without trial.
The problem with mass deportation is that it proved impossible, so eventually mass murder was chosen as the final solution. At this stage in Nazi history, though, Hitler was still a Zionist.
Even if Trump does not currently display the level of evil that Hitler did in 1944, you can clearly see from his disdain for the likes of Trudeau and Merkel and his admiration of dictators like Putin and Kim that he really wishes to be that evil.
The slogan "Make America Great Again" was even the name of a pro-Nazi organization that wanted America to not go to war with Germany!
After the rally in Charlottesville, where one side had people marching with Nazi flags and the other side had somebody murdered, Trump did nothing to denounce those marching with Nazi flags. Instead he said there were "good people on both sides". Meanwhile Mexicans are rapists and Muslims are terrorists.
Anyway, the reason for the comparison is that the book of Trump seems to be a copy of the book of Hitler. The settings are different, the characters have different names, and some details are changed (e.g. Hitler fought for his country in the war; Trump had "bone spurs") -- but by this chapter so far, the plot is basically the same. And since we know how the other book ends, we'd like the book we're reading now to diverge.
dom