Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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).