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Paypal have returned the money "stolen" from Minecraft developer Notch

9 points by citricsquid 16y ago

citricsquid 16y ago
Personally I don't see why it's at all unreasonable for them to require money to be left in the account, as long as he's allowed to withdraw that money if he ceases operation through Paypal. I'm not saying that Notch is scamming people, but if he did withdraw everything, never deliver the product and run off, what responsibility should Paypal have? They'd be required to cover tens of thousands of $ in refunds.
- hga 16y ago
  Are you sure about their refund policy for an account like this? While you have some points, I just don't see them handling this responsibly, with the latest detail being their unilateral new reserve policy. The continuing major issue that all of us honest types have is that early on they developed an attitude that too many of their customers were criminals (and certainly plenty of them were). They succeeded in surmounting the loss prevention problem that has felled a lot of their competitors, but this results in a lot of false positives and it appears that for the overwhelming majority of these they just don't care and will never allow them to reestablish their business (it's pretty clear their endless requests for documentation are just a policy to get a customer to give up and wait the 6 months to get their money back). Also note that we're talking about about 3/4 of a million US$ accumulated in his account from the time of the lock down to when he first reported on the problem. Given that PayPal is a bank in Europe, I'd suspect that unlike in the US they have been collecting interest on those funds.
  - citricsquid 16y ago
    I spend a lot of time on the Minecraft forum and there are many complaints about people having to forcefully get a refund from Paypal. Notch is a single man handling over 5,000 new customers per day, the system sometimes fails (minecraft.net is poorly built) and as such many people pay, wait 2 weeks and never get access to the game, because Notch didn't get to answer their email and the payment (while made to Notch) wasn't "caught" by his IPN backend. The amount of refund requests I've seen is into the hundreds and if it was overall ~1000 I wouldn't be surprised. It seems likely to me that because of this Paypal don't want him to take out all his money and then suddenly get hundreds more refund requests that they have to cover, because Notch went and then they've got to make their customers happy. Not that I think Notch would do that, but it seems reasonable for Paypal to assume this is a possibility.
    - bartl 16y ago
      Paypal assumes too much. And they're getting away with it. Another recent case (just one month ago) that got a lot of attention was that PayPal froze the account of Burning Man, for no good reason at all: http://boingboing.net/2010/08/11/paypal-freezes-asset.html http://boingboing.net/2010/08/11/paypal-freezes-asset.html They should have to do more than merely unlock the account: they ought to have to pay compensation for the damage.
- sandal 16y ago
  citricsquid, are you affiliated with PayPal in some way? In this thread and the other (and possibly in the whole development world), you seem to be the only voice claiming PayPal is a reasonable, fair company. It's mildly amusing, to say the least.
  - omarchowdhury 16y ago
    Requiring a reserve is common in payment processing. It's a hedge against risk (chargebacks). 5% is more than reasonable.
- Gormo 16y ago
  Does PayPal actually have any legally-required responsibility for this? If I write a check to someone who turns out to be a scammer, neither my bank nor the scammer's has any responsibility to refund me.

9 points by citricsquid 16y ago

Personally I don't see why it's at all unreasonable for them to require money to be left in the account, as long as he's allowed to withdraw that money if he ceases operation through Paypal. I'm not saying that Notch is scamming people, but if he did withdraw everything, never deliver the product and run off, what responsibility should Paypal have? They'd be required to cover tens of thousands of $ in refunds.

hga 16y ago
Are you sure about their refund policy for an account like this? While you have some points, I just don't see them handling this responsibly, with the latest detail being their unilateral new reserve policy. The continuing major issue that all of us honest types have is that early on they developed an attitude that too many of their customers were criminals (and certainly plenty of them were). They succeeded in surmounting the loss prevention problem that has felled a lot of their competitors, but this results in a lot of false positives and it appears that for the overwhelming majority of these they just don't care and will never allow them to reestablish their business (it's pretty clear their endless requests for documentation are just a policy to get a customer to give up and wait the 6 months to get their money back). Also note that we're talking about about 3/4 of a million US$ accumulated in his account from the time of the lock down to when he first reported on the problem. Given that PayPal is a bank in Europe, I'd suspect that unlike in the US they have been collecting interest on those funds.
- citricsquid 16y ago
  I spend a lot of time on the Minecraft forum and there are many complaints about people having to forcefully get a refund from Paypal. Notch is a single man handling over 5,000 new customers per day, the system sometimes fails (minecraft.net is poorly built) and as such many people pay, wait 2 weeks and never get access to the game, because Notch didn't get to answer their email and the payment (while made to Notch) wasn't "caught" by his IPN backend. The amount of refund requests I've seen is into the hundreds and if it was overall ~1000 I wouldn't be surprised. It seems likely to me that because of this Paypal don't want him to take out all his money and then suddenly get hundreds more refund requests that they have to cover, because Notch went and then they've got to make their customers happy. Not that I think Notch would do that, but it seems reasonable for Paypal to assume this is a possibility.
  - bartl 16y ago
    Paypal assumes too much. And they're getting away with it. Another recent case (just one month ago) that got a lot of attention was that PayPal froze the account of Burning Man, for no good reason at all: http://boingboing.net/2010/08/11/paypal-freezes-asset.html http://boingboing.net/2010/08/11/paypal-freezes-asset.html They should have to do more than merely unlock the account: they ought to have to pay compensation for the damage.
sandal 16y ago
citricsquid, are you affiliated with PayPal in some way? In this thread and the other (and possibly in the whole development world), you seem to be the only voice claiming PayPal is a reasonable, fair company. It's mildly amusing, to say the least.
- omarchowdhury 16y ago
  Requiring a reserve is common in payment processing. It's a hedge against risk (chargebacks). 5% is more than reasonable.
Gormo 16y ago
Does PayPal actually have any legally-required responsibility for this? If I write a check to someone who turns out to be a scammer, neither my bank nor the scammer's has any responsibility to refund me.