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“PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as customers’ files”

• rio517 10y ago
  Given that we've all read similar situations happening all over the web, I'm surprised organizations aren't including "paypal drops us for arbitrary reasons" or "paypal freezes our funds with them for arbitrary reasons" in their risk assessments when choosing vendors. In almost every case, that risk should probably push decision makers away from Paypal. It is also a little entertaining that their "brand risk" department is probably doing so much unintentional damage to the brand.
  • draugadrotten 10y ago
    > It is also a little entertaining that their "brand risk" department is probably doing so much unintentional damage to the brand. reply Their brand risk department obviosly tries to optimize the brand for someone big, someone nameless, and not for the customers. This itself leads to questions about paypals business model. Are they in business to provide payment services to users, or are their primary customers actually not end users, but someone buying something else?
    • ComodoHacker 10y ago
      Perhaps they want to become "financial Facebook", to profile and and sell users' spending habits.
      • CaptSpify 10y ago
        Or they are being coerced into doing that /conspiracy-theory
  • simonswords82 10y ago
    The reason PayPal continues to be provided with the opportunity to fuck people over is primarily due to their low financial/technical barriers to entry. A website can be configured to accept PayPal payments in less than half a day, and setting up a new PayPal account is a very straightforward process. Compare this with setting up a merchant account to take payments (here in the UK), which takes weeks, involves finding a payment gateway, all sorts of paperwork and hoop jumping. Fortunately companies like stripe.com have appeared here and will now eat in to PayPals user base. I can't wait for PayPal to go away.
    • oarsinsync 10y ago
      I deployed Nochex instead of PayPal back in 2005, and it took less than half a day, and came with guaranteed no chargebacks on UK payments and lower fees. Good PayPal competitors have existed in this space for a long time. PayPal still remains.
      • simonswords82 10y ago
        So is it the sheer dominance of the PayPal brand?
    • sovande 10y ago
      > Fortunately companies like stripe.com The sad truth is that Stripe is behaving exactly like PayPal. What's worse is that Stripe's fraud protection is non-existing. In other words, Stripe is actually worse than PayPal, as you risk the same account freeze, closing etc, but in addition, you will be swamped down with fraudulent purchases and chargebacks.
      • simonswords82 10y ago
        Ouch - that's a shame as I was hoping our next startup would use Stripe. I'd better do some more due diligence on them before we commit.
      • tarstarr 10y ago
        (Disclaimer: I work at Stripe) Stripe does have a fraud protection product, which is enabled by default for every user. It centers around a machine learning system, that uses static signals (e.g. card issuing country) and time-dependent, dynamic signals (e.g. "how many different devices have tried to use this card in the last N hours?") to analyze every charge that hits our systems. Transactions that are deemed almost certainly fraudulent are automatically declined (but can be reviewed in the dashboard or via the API.) We're constantly working on product & performance improvements, but feel free to get in touch with me directly (tara@stripe.com) to ask questions or share feedback on our models (and fraud product in general).
  • PeterisP 10y ago
    It's the same for all other payment processing methods - no matter how you handle your money, "our bank drops us for one reason or another", "our creditcard acquiring provider freezes our funds for arbitrary reasons", "our favorite cryptocurrency suddenly loses liquidity due to a major fraud event" and all kinds of other channel risks should absolutely be on your mind if you want to, like, base your whole business on receiving money through that channel. You should have alternate payment channels - even if you don't want to use them now, even if they're twice as expensive, if you need that money flowing then you want to have a solid alternate payment channel. Even if you don't want to advertise them to your customers due to e.g. costs, then you want to have all the legal agreements and technical integration in place so that you can turn it on right now if you needed to.
  • zyx321 10y ago
    For most of their existence, PayPal have been living the "shady questionably-legal startup" dream, operating in a heavily regulated industry while ignoring almost all of the regulations. They've been screwing over their customers, closing accounts on allegation of fraud and dragging out refunding the alleged victims for months and months, since before they were acquired by eBay. People still use their service. It's always been this way. People use PayPal because it's convenient, and because there's no real competitor with comparable market penetration. No, I'm not sure that PayPal's brand will suffer much from continuing to act the way they've always done.
    • dopamean 10y ago
      > For most of their existence, PayPal have been living the "shady questionably-legal startup" dream, operating in a heavily regulated industry while ignoring almost all of the regulations. I'm not saying you're wrong (because I actually don't know) but this seems to be way off base. What specific regulations are they ignoring? My understanding is that most of the things people gripe about with PayPal are borne out of PayPal's attempt to stay in line with regulations.
      • zyx321 10y ago
        I suppose it depends on whether you think of PayPal as a payment processing company that just so happens to prefer keeping your money on their internal accounts indefinitely rather than paying out ASAP like most competitors, or as a pseudo-bank in denial about their bankiness.
• josteink 10y ago
  > PayPal has demanded that we monitor data traffic as well as all our customers’ files for illegal content. They have also asked us to provide them with detailed statistics about the files types of our customers sync and share on https://app.seafile.de https://app.seafile.de That's a pretty big WTF right there. I know PayPal has a on overall pretty scummy reputation, but I still I cannot imagine PayPal doing this because they themselves think they'll benefit from this data. To me this seems like a demand which comes "upstream" from above PayPal, from its payment providers (VISA, MasterCard, American Express, etc). Would I be overly paranoid to imagine these demands and claims are the result of lobbing by entities like RIAA and MPAA? They do have a history for blocking payments to known pirate-friendly services after all. And as such, they clearly have too much power, and there needs to be some anti-discriminatory financial regulation to stop business-hostile practices like this from being lobbied and put in place. Because this is just madness.
  • nl 10y ago
    I think that there have been issues like this for porn sites in the past, because they have significant chargeback rates - to the point where man payment processes won't deal with them.
    • MichaelBurge 10y ago
      I've run into this issue in the past, but I also can't blame them. Has everyone forgotten the early 2000s when porn sites would use 0-days to embed dialers in your computer to rack up huge dial-up charges? Or offer you 'trial' memberships and make it very very difficult to cancel? Visa and MasterCard eventually stepped in and made the banks do extra legwork for the porn sites. That had to leave a bad impression on them. It's not even really the chargebacks: You'll still be considered high-risk even if you can demonstrate having very few chargebacks. It's more that you're lumped into a pool with some very bad actors in an industry that has a bad history.
      • nl 10y ago
        Oh, I agree entirely. I suspect the "File Sharing" sites may have the same issue. I wonder how many people charge-back the payment for "Download GoT S05E01.mp4 here"?
• howfun 10y ago
  Apparently the other filesharing companies spy on user data,that is why they are on Paypal.
  • RachelF 10y ago
    I wonder. It is a bit worrying that DropBox accepts PayPal.
    • draugadrotten 10y ago
      Dropbox has been known to search users' data for files matching md5 sums someone claims they own, such as movies or known illegal photos. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/179495-how-dropbox-knows-youre-a-dirty-pirate-and-why-you-shouldnt-use-cloud-storage-to-share-copyrighted-files http://www.extremetech.com/computing/179495-how-dropbox-know...
      • chipperyman573 10y ago
        Yeah, but checking a md5 on a "list of pirated movies" database is a lot different than sending data about file uploads to a random company with no promise of what they will do with it.
      • malinens 10y ago
        There should be a feature in torrent clients which add some random bytes to videos when downloading them without braking the video itself so md5 checks would be useless for illegal content downloads
        • mattmanser 10y ago
          That would making seeding it impossible though as you wouldn't be able to verify the chunk is what you claim it is and eventually lead to the whole video being corrupt.
          • RubyPinch 10y ago
• reitanqild 10y ago
  Improvement: PayPal at least asked first, IIRC that was not always the case. Still I advise people not to depend solely on PayPal because of their tendency to freeze funds over nothing.
• joopxiv 10y ago
  I have quite some personal experience with PayPal, and their policies seem quite random. If one person gets it into his or her head that something is not allowed, no voice of reason will change the decision. I wouldn't shed too much tears over it though, there are many better and cheaper alternative forms of payment.
  • lovelearning 10y ago
    I'd appreciate if somebody lists some alternatives (better or otherwise). I've plans to launch a paid online service and would like to study all payment options.
  • Hondor 10y ago
    Can you give some examples? I know in America there are lots of startups doing it, but what about the rest of the world? I looked into Skrill a few years ago which seems to be just as international as Paypal, but also with just as horrible terms and conditions.
    • kennydude 10y ago
      Stripe seem pretty decent
      • Hondor 10y ago
        This is one of the not-very-international startups. Only available for merchants in 2 or 3 countries last I checked. I don't think small companies can do true international payment processing because of the labor needed to handle all the red tape in every country they go into. Edit: I see they're already grown a lot and are even starting to try unlikely countries like Brazil and New Zealand.
        • girvo 10y ago
          New Zealand is actually kind of interesting, and not as crazy as you'd think. It's often used as a test bed for consumer tech
• premasagar 10y ago
  Shenanigans like this will only hasten the onset of a bitcoin economy.
  • imron 10y ago
    Yes, because the bitcoin economy is totally free of shenanigans.. ;-)
    • vocatus_gate 10y ago
      "But our shenanigans are cheeky and fun!" "Yeah, and his shenanigans are cruel and tragic." "Which... makes them not really shenanigans at all."
  • ultramancool 10y ago
    It sounds like bullshit, but there's actually some truth to it: when providers of legal services with sketchy uses (I'm talking things like usenet searching, seedboxes, VPNs, scan4you, etc) lose access to PayPal they generally add Bitcoin as at least an option. It's harder to obtain currency in some of the sketchier webwallets (things like PerfectMoney, WebMoney, etc) and they've been largely replaced with Bitcoin. Likely because with Bitcoin you don't have to risk a government raid or an allout scam because the payment provider is sketchy (look into Liberty Reserve and Fethard Finance which used to be popular for this purpose).
• MichaelBurge 10y ago
  File sharing services are listed as requiring pre-approval, so Seafile should've sent them an email before accepting it as payment: https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full They're well within their rights to decline your business. If a bank told the government, "We have no absolutely no idea what our customers are doing with their money or who they're sending it to. Maybe they're sending it to terrorists or drug lords, maybe they're not; it's none of our business and we respect their privacy", they'd get shut down in a heartbeat. I can understand if Paypal doesn't want to appear on the front page of the news for funding an underground child porn ring that signed up as one of your "enterprise clients".
  • Cyph0n 10y ago
    Maybe their response in this specific case is warranted, but there are thousands of other smaller cases where PayPal simply does what it wants even if it's completely unfair and illogical. PayPal is a shitty company, with a borderline monopoly on online payments until very recently.
    • aminok 10y ago
      PayPal is made shitty by the laws relating to the financial system. If it doesn't act shitty, it stands to get fined for hundreds of millions, or even billions of dollars.
  • rmc 10y ago
    And if a EU company were to break the law and send personal data outside the EU, they'd be shut down in a heartbeat too.
    • chopin 10y ago
      Unfortunately not. Are there any examples for this? I din't see any.
      • lars_francke 10y ago
• tn13 10y ago
  I stopped using file-sharing software long back. I use s3 now.
• deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
• herghost 10y ago
  This is the reason I stopped using Paypal. The want to position themselves as a financial services provider equivalent to traditional banks, except that they reserve the right arbitrarily - and without recourse - remove their services. As a customer this means you can be cut out from your ability to use "currency". As a business this means you're beholden to arbitrary decisions that you can't really risk assess against - and if you've built your business on this service it could be devastating.
• jeena 10y ago
  So, suprise suprise, my 6 years old blogpost continues to be spot on https://jeena.net/paypal https://jeena.net/paypal that is when I deleted my PayPal account. But it was not all dance on roses after that, suprisingly many only offer PayPal as a way to pay them, so I always have to try to contact them and to try to explain and to ask for another way to pay. Most of the time they won't/can't help me.
  • celticninja 10y ago
    look into bitcoin.
    • tobltobs 10y ago
      Sending money in an envelope would be easier and more accepted.
      • celticninja 10y ago
        Not if you are in Germany, with bitcoin.de it is a very simple process.
• uncletammy 10y ago
  I don't think they need regulation. I think they need to carry on like they are for a few more years so I can watch them be eaten alive by crypto currencies and other fintech innovations.
  • weego 10y ago
    eaten alive by crypto currencies I worry about your perception of how the world outside of techy people works.
    • thwd 10y ago
      Agreed; with both of you. Maybe it won't be crypto-currencies, but Paypal Has To Go®. Let them screw up two or three more times. They're antiquated and operate like a typical barely-legal, gray-area, fee-riddled credit institution. I wonder why Douglas Crockford, a brilliant man, still works there (other than obviously well compensated time).
      • Sir_Substance 10y ago
        >Agreed; with both of you. Maybe it won't be crypto-currencies, but Paypal Has To Go®. Let them screw up two or three more times. They've already screwed up and screwed people over publicly dozens of times. Paypal does have to go, but I don't think paypal will die until someone offers an equivalent service.
        • wastedhours 10y ago
          Exactly - for a great deal many people, PayPal is preferable to paying directly to the seller. Until another branded payment provider has that level of mindshare across the general populace, and seen as being secure and trustworthy from twentysomethings to grandparents, then they wont be beaten.
          • Bartweiss 10y ago
            But will companies continue to run the risk of letting Paypal ban their accounts (and often, freeze their funds in the process)? I can't imagine a consumer revolt, but at a certain point "makes your users feel secure" is outweighed by "makes you terrified you'll lose your money". I suspect that something like Stripe or Square will eventually sell companies on a "we won't screw you over" narrative and start to compete directly.
• raverbashing 10y ago
  Paypal only exists because the current infrastructure of payments in the US is a joke Nobody needs paypal in Europe. Of course, they try to sell themselves as "the easiest way" (which is right to a point) but it's mostly unneeded
  • ladybro 10y ago
    What are the alternatives in Europe that make Paypal not needed? Genuinely curious, not saying you're wrong by any means.
    • nraynaud 10y ago
      any bank that accepts visa/mastercard ?
    • beobab 10y ago
      Barclays and Natwest in the UK will allow you to send money to anyone with an email address. Can't speak for other banks, though. But all banks will transfer money if you have a recipient account number and sort code.
      • rethab 10y ago
        See, the point is that you're saying 'in the UK'. We've been struggling to find a payment solution that works globally and sadly PayPal is the best we have found that covers a lot of countries.
      • dagw 10y ago
        Barclays and Natwest in the UK will allow you to send money to anyone with an email address. Anyone? Anyone in the UK? Or anyone in the UK with a Barclays or Natwest account? Paypal is still probably the quickest and easiest way to send money to 'anyone' in the world.
        • beobab 10y ago
          Barclays: Anyone in their 30 country list (PingIt is the app)
• sschueller 10y ago
  A little of topic but has anyone else noticed the paypal website being extremely slow?
  • the-dude 10y ago
    Paypal has been (extremely) slow for years, at least 6 years.
• mootothemax 10y ago
  Here's PayPal's page on what they require for file-sharing services: >Merchants offering file-sharing programs or access to newsgroup services must monitor for and prevent access to illegal content. https://www.paypal.com/selfhelp/article/FAQ1116/?country.x=JP&locale.x=en_US https://www.paypal.com/selfhelp/article/FAQ1116/?country.x=J...
  • raimue 10y ago
    "Article is currently unavailable" Searching for this entry with keywords like "file-sharing" did not turn up anything.
    • mootothemax 10y ago
      >Searching for this entry with keywords like "file-sharing" did not turn up anything. Well that's really helpful of them. I've updated the link, can you read it now? Edit: FWIW, this was on the first page of Google for me - in Poland - when searching "paypal file-sharing"
      • deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      • raimue 10y ago
        Thanks, the link works now for me. Apparently this depends on the country. Your link includes JP for Japan and the contact mail address for Japan (which ironically is spelled wrong). I really cannot reach it from Germany without this ?country.x=JP.
• mk89 10y ago
  Another great example of the so called "democratization".
  • mk89 10y ago
    Whoever down-voted the comment above doesn't probably know that "democratization of management and movements of money" is really one goal of this company. ( http://fortune.com/2015/05/21/paypal-ceo-dan-schulman/ http://fortune.com/2015/05/21/paypal-ceo-dan-schulman/ ) Now it's seafile.de, a couple of months ago they started to block accounts used to pay VPN services. What's next? I am not judging the company, because I am sure that they would like to have users to pay everything possible via their services. That's fine. I just find it incoherent to claim that they are democratizing the way to manage/move money around.
• adrianmsmith 10y ago
  Presumably with TTIP harmonizing laws between the US and EU, violating the privacy of users will stop being illegal in the EU at some point.
  • Qantourisc 10y ago
    Hopefully the other way around in the US.
• nakodari 10y ago
  Another victim of Paypal here. I run Jumpshare, a file sharing and collaboration service for creative professionals. This is what Paypal sent us: "May 8, 2016: When you signed up for your PayPal account, you agreed to our User Agreement and Acceptable Use Policy. Because some of your recent transactions violated this policy, we've had to permanently limit your account. Please remove any references to PayPal from your website." They never mentioned which transactions violated the policy, we have never had any complains from our customers. There was no prior warning. We called them and they asked us to email them. We sent multiple emails and nobody bothered to respond back. We lost 30% of our recurring monthly revenue right away! We now use Stripe as our sole payment service provider. After this experience, we will probably never accept Paypal again.
  • benevol 10y ago
    Having read during the last few years about the endless horror stories businesses have endured with PayPal, I honestly don't understand why anyone would still use PayPal when there clearly are alternatives (be that US companies like Stripe or EU companies like Paymill).
    • WA 10y ago
      Because they're still anecdotal and for most people, PayPal works just fine. I find the stories horrifying, but I ran about 40,000 transactions through PayPal in the last 5-6 years and never had any problems. I guess this is how it is for most people, at least, I can use PayPal as a buyer on most online businesses I deal with.
      • alyandon 10y ago
        Sure, using PayPal as a buyer is great as long as you never get into a dispute with a seller. It took about 4 months for me to get PayPal to refund my money when a seller on eBay ripped me off. PayPal support was so inept they claimed that I had not returned the merchandise despite giving them the DHL tracking number and shipping receipt multiple times and eventually they closed my case in favor of the merchant. I had to keep calling and harassing them and finally threatening to have the charges reversed by my credit card company when they suddenly reversed their decision. I will never use PayPal for anything if I can avoid it.
• Matt3o12_ 10y ago
  I wonder if legal action can be taken against PayPal for demanding this kind of information. PayPal blackmailed them into breaking a law (they didn't break it but they suffered financial loss from not doing it). If I told a customer who absolutely depends on my business to harass/attack somebody, I would certainly hold liable as well.
  • mrgoldenbrown 10y ago
    Or can PayPal take legal action against them for violating ToS? Did they properly disclose they were a file sharing site (as required by PayPal) before signing up to take payments? If they can't meet PayPal's ToS, they shouldn't have signed up. [Paypal sucks, but this doesn't seem like a cause for legal remedy]
    • tremon 10y ago
      ToS do not trump the law in Europe, so no. If a company is offering services in Europe with terms that contradict local law, the terms are void.
• Draiken 10y ago
  I'm once again astonished with how much control of our businesses is simply out of our hands. When looking at practices these financial institutions use it makes me wonder what can't they do? Everyone cites "regulations", but as far as I understand, they make the regulations. Directly or indirectly. Take for example the known cases where PayPal freezes accounts holding people's money. If I take someone else's money and refuse to give it back to them, it's a crime in pretty much every nation. But when banks and financial institutions do that, they get away scot-free (with maybe some small rants from the internet) and keep doing this systematically profiting in almost all cases. If we're not bound to middle men like Stripe and PayPal, we're bound to Visa and Mastercard. Is there any way out of this madness?
  • chinathrow 10y ago
    Essentially, it goes way further than what these financial institutions can do. It goes directly to what the U.S. fed can do - the clearing house for the USD. It can cut off any bank for misconduct/doing business with e.g. Cuba etc.
    • speeder 10y ago
      Also, the UN bank can threaten to kick out your central/federal bank too. Also an interesting example of bank politics is that Khadaffi made several laws in Libya against UN bank rules, for example providing loans with infinite term and zero interest for newlyweds. During the civil war, one of the first things the rebels did was create a central bank in Misrata, pledge loyalty to UN and then redquest to be recognized as the true Libyan Government.
      • JumpCrisscross 10y ago
        > the UN bank can threaten to kick out your central/federal bank too This does not exist. Central banks interface with each other. The closest thing to what you're describing is the European Central Bank. > pledge loyalty to UN This is gibberish. One can be recognised by the United Nations (UN). One can also, by accepting its Charter and paying one's fees, become a UN Member. But there is no pledging of fielty involved.
• morganvachon 10y ago
  I think I just found my new cloud provider. It's rare to see a company stand firm on their values like this.
• leommoore 10y ago
  What is the most disappointing is PayPal's lack of Customer Service. Why would any vendor want to use their services when they are so badly treated? It also throws into question the data security of other vendors's cloud storage. Is everyone looking at my stuff?!?
• mathattack 10y ago
  Since complying with this demand would violate German / European data protection laws (and also be morally wrong in our opinion) we have declined to comply with this demand. Is everyone in Germany going to have this issue?
• lucaspottersky 10y ago
  This means that it's easier than ever to spot companies that are monitoring YOUR data: just check whether they accept PayPal or not.
• ohitsdom 10y ago
  Has anyone made a site yet detailing all of these horror stories? Paypal's behavior is unacceptable and needs to change, yet years later things still seem just as bad for their customers.
  • simonswords82 10y ago
    Yep, there's loads: https://www.aboutpaypal.org/ https://www.aboutpaypal.org/ http://www.paypalwarning.com/ http://www.paypalwarning.com/ http://www.screw-paypal.com/horror_stories/horror_stories.html http://www.screw-paypal.com/horror_stories/horror_stories.ht... Some of the content is NSFW
    • ohitsdom 10y ago
      Thanks, just what I was looking for.
• benevol 10y ago
  It's time to share & spread information about PayPal's competitors: What has your experience or market research yielded (stripe.com and paymill.de probably being the most obvious ones)?
  • joergsauer 10y ago
    Paymill seems to have a somewhat uncertain future at this point: http://ecommercenews.eu/german-payment-provider-paymill-files-preliminary-insolvency/ http://ecommercenews.eu/german-payment-provider-paymill-file...
• phyyl 10y ago
  faith in humanity restored
• nxzero 10y ago
  Anyone have a link to the notices PayPal sent Seafile?
• kriro 10y ago
  That's a pretty huge WTF request. Can you sue Paypal for basically telling you "break the law or don't use us" (I think that's a pretty bad idea on ideological grounds but I wonder if it's technically possible)? Especially since Paypal has to be regulated within the EU in some way I'd say such a request should result in at least a cursory check if the EU license (iirc. they operate as a bank) of Paypal should be revoked/suspended/investigated.
• mertens 10y ago
  OP, are you from Zolder, Belgium???
• infodroid 10y ago
  To a corporate lawyer, every file sync and team collaboration solution looks no different from Megaupload.
  • 794CD01 10y ago
    To a user, too. That's why every file sharing service eventually gets taken over by the same people with the same problems.
• contingencies 10y ago
  Had to use Paypal today to make a payment to a company who can't otherwise find a reasonable way to take credit cards online. I feel their pain, having been in that position. Paypal randomly saw that it was reasonable to demand I answer a phone in another country (though I haven't been based there for perhaps 15 years) if I wanted to log in to my account. I had to work around this by having them send a payment request, then paid about USD$1000. Wish they accepted Bitcoin, I was livid at the experience. Every time I deal with Paypal it's the same. Their PR crap a year or two back about "sorting things out" was obviously empty. Stripe isn't much better: after a reasonable start, last time I wanted to use them I couldn't because my address is in a different country to my card (ANYONE LISTENING?). These abuses are reaching a breaking point, nobody is going to deal with credit cards soon. Here in amusingly progressive mainland China, they are a minor mode of payment and shrinking: good riddance!
  • sisk 10y ago
    Am I misinterpreting something? It sounds like you're upset with PayPal because you tried to make a payment from a country other than the one on record (which trips every fraud detection out there) and that they tried to contact you for verification with the number they had on file which you haven't updated in 15 years. That sounds like reasonable behavior from their end.
    • contingencies 10y ago
      ... except that I haven't changed my behavior and the 'reasonable' action they took was permanently locking me out of my account. Note that they presented this whole experience to me in a foreign language because obviously my GeoIP is the same as my location because privacy, China and VPNs don't exist. And of course, I had no choice but to leave that number on record because it matches my credit card address. Because of course, there is no such thing as a credit card with an address outside of the issuing country, or someone that lives at many addresses or an address where there is no reliable mail. It's basically a number of bad assumptions layered with bad customer service and algorithms. Every year my credit card company randomly stops my card because they think it's weird a transaction occurred in some country or other. I say "See how I just bought a plane ticket right before that? How is that strange?". Right on my card it says "World Mastercard". I have or have had accounts with this same bank in 5 countries. They know this. But we can't just blame the bank, it's the credit card system. Apparently in every corner of the world, idiots run these algorithms. Finally, note that for this wonderful experience I pay 5% of USD$1000 = USD$50. The US intelligence sponsored monopoly of card companies on payment has to end.
• INTPenis 10y ago
  Well, sorry paypal, but I've seen a host of new payment services crop up lately. Now is not the time to push your clients around.
• Taylor_OD 10y ago
  I use PayPal often for online stores where my Discover card isnt accepted but I cant believe they are still around and have a huge market share. The platform is so broken.
  • DavideNL 10y ago
    For me it's the opposite, i never use Paypal because i keep reading evil stories about them - i don't want to support a company which behaves like this...
• sjreese 10y ago
  "AML" this is all cover for CIA economic espionage as always the people asking the questions are the competitors. Who need know how, who and where your customers are marketing reasons to undercut your prices for selected customers! You see never hand over your member list when you don't know who the end users are. Think T-mobile and at&t then about the switch offers to selected user based on data usage.
• mrbill 10y ago
  Last year I worked for a Dropbox-like service, and PayPal was continually giving us grief over using them as a payment service as well. I don't recall them asking us to monitor every user's traffic, though.
• 0xmohit 10y ago
  Paypal apparently has plans of coming up with a sequel to "The Lives of Others" [1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lives_of_Others
• CommanderData 10y ago
  Isn't this why we pay paypal fees in the first place?
• mzd348 10y ago
  I was under the impression that European wire transfers were cheap (free), fast, and reliable. If that's true, why is something like PayPal even needed? Can't Seafile just have their clients transfer money to Seafile's account? Or are wire transfers not free for "retail" use like this?
  • Strom 10y ago
    One time SEPA transfers are already really simple, yes. Recurring ones, not so much. However SEPA Direct Debit [1] does look like an interesting new recurring system, with a compliance deadline of 31 October 2016. I will definitely be looking more into this, and probably will be trying it out in the wild. [1] http://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/index.cfm/sepa-direct-debit/sepa-direct-debit-core-scheme-sdd-core/ http://www.europeanpaymentscouncil.eu/index.cfm/sepa-direct-...
• xavier9050 10y ago
  Compliance Officer in financial sector in Luxembourg here. The request you have received is related to anti money laundering regulations. As you guys seem to be based in Germany. So bear in mind that PayPal operates across the European Union as a Luxembourg-based bank. Anti-money laundering regulation is typically stricter in Lux than in the USA. The Lux regulator is the "CSSF", and you can find the detail of the regulation here: http://www.cssf.lu/en/supervision/financial-crime/aml-ctf/laws-regulations-and-other-texts/ http://www.cssf.lu/en/supervision/financial-crime/aml-ctf/la...
• sandworm101 10y ago
  For those thinking this has something to do with "regulation", it does not. Paypal has done this sort of thing for years. In the past it has been the "cyberlockers" and VPN services, even Wikileaks. Someone is putting soft pressure on Paypal. Someone in government or, more likely, someone within the copyright-lobby is threatening them. That has been the pattern in the past.
• derFunk 10y ago
  AFAIK PayPal only do this if they have internal proof that laws are already being broken on the according websites. I don't know Seafile, but the same happened to other file hosters in the past which silently and willingly accepted that copyrighted material is exchanged by using their services.
• reiichiroh 10y ago
  I've seen detractors lambaste Seafile as an untrustworthy Chinese company/app originally. Anyone know if there's any truth to this?