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I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No." I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point. What I did was try to pay

I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said "No." I've been using it for at least 10 years at that point. What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch. So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next day I actually get a phone call from one of their support staff. He says my transaction was flagged as "suspicious" by the fraud prevention system. So I asked, okay... but now a Human has looked at it, can you manually approve the transaction? The answer was "No, I am not allowed to tell you why". I was incredulous, so I asked "Wait... you acknowledge that I'm not a scammer or a terrorist (since my PP account still worked and does to this day), and the party I'm trying to purchase from is obviously not either since they're still accepting PP, but The Machine thinks there is something fishy about us two specifically and there is no way for someone to manually approve this transaction?" And he said something to the tune of "Yes. I'm sorry, but there is nothing I or anyone at PP can do about it, and for security reasons we're unable to offer further details." So yeah. This was just a minor nuisance for me, I purchased similar services elsewhere. But the whole thing was a real eye-opener. That was the day I realized that there is no pleading or reasoning with The Machine.

Swizec 8y ago
> I realized that there is no pleading or reasoning with The Machine. Weapons of Math Destruction was one of the most eye opening books I read recently. It's all about how Machines when set up with self-reinforcing models can become a real big problem. And how the fact nobody quite understands how The Machine makes decisions isn't helping either.
- noobermin 8y ago
  Examples of these abound, from the article to the Ethereum DAO "hack" and too often (just look a bit lower in the comment section) the response is "The Machine is working as it should." I feel like automation is great but don't forget that people are still people and someone should be able to lift the lid and fix things themselves. My solution would be to not rely too much on these systems, but at the very least, at least include escape hatches and big red emergency buttons. Engineers do, why can't hackers do this?
  - girvo 8y ago
    > Engineers do, why can't hackers do this? That can be difficult if security features rely on humans not being able to subvert the process, I think. But for other processes, this should be the default!
EGreg 8y ago
That's just the thing. Once we let the machines make the decisions, and rely on them to do a "better job" there will be cases like this where it's just cheaper and easier to just follow the program and explain what happened. Actually we are building a zoo for ourselves where humans will make no decisions at all about anything of consequence!
- tbiwiti 8y ago
  I'm incredibly sad at how much of my programming goes into monitoring the performance of my coworkers. The worst part is when I write a new tool and take a look at it before management does. Usually only 1 or 2 people are doing the tasks that management is asking everyone to do daily.
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    My former boss was once a programmer. Then he became a manager, so he wrote tools to help monitor his department. That went well for years. Then another manager was brought in to "help" him, and months later he was fired. I guess it was kind of obvious, but it still made an impression on me how cold blooded it was. The metrics* gathered on us were pretty meaningless, and didn't meet the cardinal rule of being actionable, but we still had to go over them each and every week. And some of the actual work was producing reports on productivity for other parts of the company in different places. *Despite the fact we were programmers and every person in the department had a different role, we were scored based on tickets done and tickets that failed qa.
- drak0n1c 8y ago
  Remember when the United Airlines system flagged specific passengers for removal? Throughout every step of the process employees were blocked or discouraged from exercising common sense to come up with a creative solution and bargain with passengers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_3411_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_3411_inc...
jiaweihli 8y ago
I've heard nothing but bad things about PayPal and how they often hold your own money hostage. Why don't people switch to alternatives? Are there no good ones?
- coderdude 8y ago
  Because there is a disconnect between reality and what you hear. PayPal is fantastic.
- DylanBohlender 8y ago
  As I understand it, expensive processes required for compliance with financial system/anti-money laundering laws make a moat for most money transmitting businesses. That moat prevents upstarts from challenging incumbents effectively. Presumably someday cryptocurrencies will be able to fill the PayPal niche, but that requires a more robust buyer-merchant ecosystem than exists at present.
- isostatic 8y ago
  Taking money from paypal is a risk, as there's a period of time it's in paypal before you extract it Sending money to a store on paypal doesn't seem to be a problem
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  For what it's worth, I've never had a bad experience with PayPal. I've heard all the horror stories, but nothing has come close to that. I sold something on Ebay once and the buyer didn't receive the item, and did what he should and reported it to Ebay/PayPal. Paypal started the dispute resolution process, and I uploaded a receipt of me sending it. The dispute was resolved in my favour. I started accepting donations from a community gaming website via PayPal and I was very hesitant about using it due to the bad stories I've heard. A couple of months and a couple of hundreds of dollars later, no problems yet. The biggest 'problem' I've had with PayPal is moving to a new country. You can't add International cards to your account, and you can't change the country of your PayPal account. The only solution for me was to create a new account, which is fine I guess. But then I guess you never have a bad experience until you do.
crooked-v 8y ago
> and for security reasons we're unable to offer further details To give a little behind-the-scenes here, I worked for a bit for a web hosting company that had this as standard policy. This was because, before it was put in place, scammers would actually use coordinated campaigns of support calls with otherwise legitimate accounts in order to extract piecemeal details about how the company's fraud investigations worked, then reorganize their scamming to precisely evade the time periods and credit card checks used at the time.
- bhtru 8y ago
  This was how Simplii and BMO (two Canadian banks) were hacked earlier this year. > The hackers explained that they were able to breach the banks’ sub-par security by using an algorithm to generate account numbers and then posing as customers who had forgotten their passwords. “They were giving too much permission to half-authenticated account which enabled us to grab all these information,” the email said, adding that the system “was not checking if a password was valid until the security question were input correctly.” Source: https://www.ccn.com/hackers-demand-1-million-in-xrp-after-breaching-two-canadian-banks/ https://www.ccn.com/hackers-demand-1-million-in-xrp-after-br...
- dpark 8y ago
  That part makes total sense. It doesn’t make sense that a human could not override.
  - crooked-v 8y ago
    At my company, there was a specially-trained fraud department that could handle cases like that, with specially arranged hoop-jumping to prevent social engineering for information. I would expect that Paypal has something similar, but maybe the phone drone in that case was too untrained or unmotivated to transfer things to them.
sonnyblarney 8y ago
Financial fraud prevention gambits are complicated. It may be possible that PP thought someone else was using your account. What should happen in these scenarios is simply a validation of some kind ie payment only goes through if you click on the email your received. I used to travel to SF from Canada a lot and my bank would block my Visa even though I told them not to. In the US there's no password in Visas, i.e. no chip-and-pin, which is totally crazy = huge fraud. It's funny to think in the Silicon Valley, top tech companies in the world ... everyone is still using that old mag stripe stuff when pretty much the rest of the world has moved on.
- pbh101 8y ago
  The US largely migrated to chip and signature in 2015. I think a large majority of credit card uses today are chip in the US because the issuers quickly sent out chip cards, most terminals got updated to use them, and swipe is rejected often if chip is available. To be clear, this is chip (and sometimes signature for large purchases) but not chip-and-pin, so the original statement of no passwords generally holds true, but the mag stripes are generally not used anymore.
  - joering2 8y ago
    Put your chip card quickly in and out three times, next the machine will tell you to “swipe your card”.
    - girvo 8y ago
      This even works in chip-and-pin systems, at least here in Australia. Makes me sad, I don't really understand why falling back to what we're trying to replace is considered a good idea :(
      - eythian 8y ago
        It's temporary. Typical readers where I am in Europe don't even have the magstripe hardware any more.
philliphaydon 8y ago
I tried to delink my bank account from PayPal, so I could close it, and it refused cos I apparently owed $1.27 even tho my balance said $0. I tried to add a credit card but it was flagged as suspicious. Contacting PayPal they said I needed to go into the bank and put some money, my account so PayPal could take it. But I had already closed the bank account. After PayPal refusing to help. I resolved it by opening a new PayPal account. Adding my credit card (not flagged suspicious) and transfer $2 to the account. Then I could delink the bank account and close it. Then I closed the new account I opened.
- icebraining 8y ago
  Curious, why did you care? I think I'd just leave the account open.
  - philliphaydon 8y ago
    I never knew I had a negative balance. Until after 2 years of it using PayPal they sent me a random email to inform me I had 30 days before they would pass it to debt collectors. So I figured better to close the account. Never use PayPal anyway.
    - icebraining 8y ago
      They were sending your account to debt collectors over $1.27? I think that's an even bigger WTF than the original story.
      - philliphaydon 8y ago
        Sorry, 2 years of NOT using PayPal. I donno. This is PayPal Australia, maybe they operate differently. I couldn’t even figure out how my account got into a negative balance to begin with. Unfortunately I don’t have any of the old emails otherwise I would upload it.
        icebraining 8y ago
shitloadofbooks 8y ago
I purchased the board game "Cuba" from someone on gumtree (we're both Australian) and paid them with Paypal. For the transaction note I wrote "Cuba" and my (Australian) address. This is what I received from Paypal: To ensure that activity and transactions comply with current regulations, PayPal is requesting that you provide the following information via email to ComplianceTransactions@paypal.com 1. Purpose of payment XXXXXXXXXXXX attempted on 29 May 2016 in the amount of 53.00 AUD, including a complete and detailed explanation of the goods or services you intended to purchase. Please also explain the transaction message: "Cuba and postage to 4113. <my address>." They obviously have a block on the word "Cuba" and there was some back and forth to let the transaction through.
Zak 8y ago
I had a related experience wherein I asked Paypal for a debit card. They denied my request and locked my account (with money in it) until I provided a multitude of documents to verify my identity and ownership of my bank account. Of course, they could provide no information about why this happened or how to avoid it. I became a lot more conservative about using Paypal again, and never did make another request for a debit card.
tjr225 8y ago
I make and upload electronic music to SoundCloud. Once I sent a joke DM to my friend, another SoundCloud user, mimicking a typical spam post at the time. SoundCloud's spam filtration system autobanned and deleted my account. I had it back a couple days later but a bunch of stuff is still off with my account(fewer plays, likes, followers, etc).
znpy 8y ago
Actually the more i read about Paypal, the less I want to use it. I try to pay with my prepaid card directly whenever I can.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

Swizec 8y ago

> I realized that there is no pleading or reasoning with The Machine. Weapons of Math Destruction was one of the most eye opening books I read recently. It's all about how Machines when set up with self-reinforcing models can become a real big problem. And how the fact nobody quite understands how The Machine makes decisions isn't helping either.

noobermin 8y ago
Examples of these abound, from the article to the Ethereum DAO "hack" and too often (just look a bit lower in the comment section) the response is "The Machine is working as it should." I feel like automation is great but don't forget that people are still people and someone should be able to lift the lid and fix things themselves. My solution would be to not rely too much on these systems, but at the very least, at least include escape hatches and big red emergency buttons. Engineers do, why can't hackers do this?
- girvo 8y ago
  > Engineers do, why can't hackers do this? That can be difficult if security features rely on humans not being able to subvert the process, I think. But for other processes, this should be the default!

EGreg 8y ago

That's just the thing. Once we let the machines make the decisions, and rely on them to do a "better job" there will be cases like this where it's just cheaper and easier to just follow the program and explain what happened. Actually we are building a zoo for ourselves where humans will make no decisions at all about anything of consequence!

tbiwiti 8y ago
I'm incredibly sad at how much of my programming goes into monitoring the performance of my coworkers. The worst part is when I write a new tool and take a look at it before management does. Usually only 1 or 2 people are doing the tasks that management is asking everyone to do daily.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  My former boss was once a programmer. Then he became a manager, so he wrote tools to help monitor his department. That went well for years. Then another manager was brought in to "help" him, and months later he was fired. I guess it was kind of obvious, but it still made an impression on me how cold blooded it was. The metrics* gathered on us were pretty meaningless, and didn't meet the cardinal rule of being actionable, but we still had to go over them each and every week. And some of the actual work was producing reports on productivity for other parts of the company in different places. *Despite the fact we were programmers and every person in the department had a different role, we were scored based on tickets done and tickets that failed qa.
drak0n1c 8y ago
Remember when the United Airlines system flagged specific passengers for removal? Throughout every step of the process employees were blocked or discouraged from exercising common sense to come up with a creative solution and bargain with passengers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_3411_incident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Express_Flight_3411_inc...

jiaweihli 8y ago

I've heard nothing but bad things about PayPal and how they often hold your own money hostage. Why don't people switch to alternatives? Are there no good ones?

coderdude 8y ago
Because there is a disconnect between reality and what you hear. PayPal is fantastic.
DylanBohlender 8y ago
As I understand it, expensive processes required for compliance with financial system/anti-money laundering laws make a moat for most money transmitting businesses. That moat prevents upstarts from challenging incumbents effectively. Presumably someday cryptocurrencies will be able to fill the PayPal niche, but that requires a more robust buyer-merchant ecosystem than exists at present.
isostatic 8y ago
Taking money from paypal is a risk, as there's a period of time it's in paypal before you extract it Sending money to a store on paypal doesn't seem to be a problem
madeofpalk 8y ago
For what it's worth, I've never had a bad experience with PayPal. I've heard all the horror stories, but nothing has come close to that. I sold something on Ebay once and the buyer didn't receive the item, and did what he should and reported it to Ebay/PayPal. Paypal started the dispute resolution process, and I uploaded a receipt of me sending it. The dispute was resolved in my favour. I started accepting donations from a community gaming website via PayPal and I was very hesitant about using it due to the bad stories I've heard. A couple of months and a couple of hundreds of dollars later, no problems yet. The biggest 'problem' I've had with PayPal is moving to a new country. You can't add International cards to your account, and you can't change the country of your PayPal account. The only solution for me was to create a new account, which is fine I guess. But then I guess you never have a bad experience until you do.

crooked-v 8y ago

> and for security reasons we're unable to offer further details To give a little behind-the-scenes here, I worked for a bit for a web hosting company that had this as standard policy. This was because, before it was put in place, scammers would actually use coordinated campaigns of support calls with otherwise legitimate accounts in order to extract piecemeal details about how the company's fraud investigations worked, then reorganize their scamming to precisely evade the time periods and credit card checks used at the time.

bhtru 8y ago
This was how Simplii and BMO (two Canadian banks) were hacked earlier this year. > The hackers explained that they were able to breach the banks’ sub-par security by using an algorithm to generate account numbers and then posing as customers who had forgotten their passwords. “They were giving too much permission to half-authenticated account which enabled us to grab all these information,” the email said, adding that the system “was not checking if a password was valid until the security question were input correctly.” Source: https://www.ccn.com/hackers-demand-1-million-in-xrp-after-breaching-two-canadian-banks/ https://www.ccn.com/hackers-demand-1-million-in-xrp-after-br...
dpark 8y ago
That part makes total sense. It doesn’t make sense that a human could not override.
- crooked-v 8y ago
  At my company, there was a specially-trained fraud department that could handle cases like that, with specially arranged hoop-jumping to prevent social engineering for information. I would expect that Paypal has something similar, but maybe the phone drone in that case was too untrained or unmotivated to transfer things to them.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

Financial fraud prevention gambits are complicated. It may be possible that PP thought someone else was using your account. What should happen in these scenarios is simply a validation of some kind ie payment only goes through if you click on the email your received. I used to travel to SF from Canada a lot and my bank would block my Visa even though I told them not to. In the US there's no password in Visas, i.e. no chip-and-pin, which is totally crazy = huge fraud. It's funny to think in the Silicon Valley, top tech companies in the world ... everyone is still using that old mag stripe stuff when pretty much the rest of the world has moved on.

pbh101 8y ago
The US largely migrated to chip and signature in 2015. I think a large majority of credit card uses today are chip in the US because the issuers quickly sent out chip cards, most terminals got updated to use them, and swipe is rejected often if chip is available. To be clear, this is chip (and sometimes signature for large purchases) but not chip-and-pin, so the original statement of no passwords generally holds true, but the mag stripes are generally not used anymore.
- joering2 8y ago
  Put your chip card quickly in and out three times, next the machine will tell you to “swipe your card”.
  - girvo 8y ago
    This even works in chip-and-pin systems, at least here in Australia. Makes me sad, I don't really understand why falling back to what we're trying to replace is considered a good idea :(
    - eythian 8y ago
      It's temporary. Typical readers where I am in Europe don't even have the magstripe hardware any more.

philliphaydon 8y ago

I tried to delink my bank account from PayPal, so I could close it, and it refused cos I apparently owed $1.27 even tho my balance said $0. I tried to add a credit card but it was flagged as suspicious. Contacting PayPal they said I needed to go into the bank and put some money, my account so PayPal could take it. But I had already closed the bank account. After PayPal refusing to help. I resolved it by opening a new PayPal account. Adding my credit card (not flagged suspicious) and transfer $2 to the account. Then I could delink the bank account and close it. Then I closed the new account I opened.

icebraining 8y ago
Curious, why did you care? I think I'd just leave the account open.
- philliphaydon 8y ago
  I never knew I had a negative balance. Until after 2 years of it using PayPal they sent me a random email to inform me I had 30 days before they would pass it to debt collectors. So I figured better to close the account. Never use PayPal anyway.
  - icebraining 8y ago
    They were sending your account to debt collectors over $1.27? I think that's an even bigger WTF than the original story.
    - philliphaydon 8y ago
      Sorry, 2 years of NOT using PayPal. I donno. This is PayPal Australia, maybe they operate differently. I couldn’t even figure out how my account got into a negative balance to begin with. Unfortunately I don’t have any of the old emails otherwise I would upload it.
      - icebraining 8y ago

shitloadofbooks 8y ago

I purchased the board game "Cuba" from someone on gumtree (we're both Australian) and paid them with Paypal. For the transaction note I wrote "Cuba" and my (Australian) address. This is what I received from Paypal: To ensure that activity and transactions comply with current regulations, PayPal is requesting that you provide the following information via email to ComplianceTransactions@paypal.com 1. Purpose of payment XXXXXXXXXXXX attempted on 29 May 2016 in the amount of 53.00 AUD, including a complete and detailed explanation of the goods or services you intended to purchase. Please also explain the transaction message: "Cuba and postage to 4113. <my address>." They obviously have a block on the word "Cuba" and there was some back and forth to let the transaction through.

Zak 8y ago

I had a related experience wherein I asked Paypal for a debit card. They denied my request and locked my account (with money in it) until I provided a multitude of documents to verify my identity and ownership of my bank account. Of course, they could provide no information about why this happened or how to avoid it. I became a lot more conservative about using Paypal again, and never did make another request for a debit card.

tjr225 8y ago

I make and upload electronic music to SoundCloud. Once I sent a joke DM to my friend, another SoundCloud user, mimicking a typical spam post at the time. SoundCloud's spam filtration system autobanned and deleted my account. I had it back a couple days later but a bunch of stuff is still off with my account(fewer plays, likes, followers, etc).

znpy 8y ago

Actually the more i read about Paypal, the less I want to use it. I try to pay with my prepaid card directly whenever I can.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]