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PayPal has permanently banned The Hacker News and hold funds for 180 days
- tyingq 8y agoOften, the bans are just because they implemented Federal rules in the most stupid way possible. For example, the US has something called the "Office of Foreign Assets Control" (OFAC). It's a list of names that companies like PayPal are supposed to prevent from being sent payments. Paypal chose to implement it with super dumb string matching in ANY field. So, for example, if you put the words "Castro", "Cuba" or "JAMES KANG" into ANY field (even a MEMO field)...your payment gets stopped and your account frozen until you send them the DOB for "Cuba", even though it was just in a memo field. https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160817/13505935266/paypal-stops-payment-just-because-payees-memo-included-word-cuba.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160817/13505935266/paypa... https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Business-Archive/The-Secret-Paypal-Blacklist/m-p/925329#U925329 https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Business-Archive/T... https://imgur.com/a/RnpRm https://imgur.com/a/RnpRm
- sonnyblarney 8y agoSo you can take someone's money and not give them a reason for it? Isn't this called theft? This happened to a very minor account we had, reasoning was dubious. Without any kind of transparency or due process ... (or competition) ... this is a problem.
- xte 8y agoWell they discover a thing: regulation may slow down things, but protect. A bank can't lock you out without facing trial, an internet company, far less regulated can. Now think many time because we generally do no see banks as something "good" especially these days. If such days arrive it means that we are really in a dangerous situation. And for we I mean "society".
- joshfraser 8y agoThis is why we need permissionless money that can't be seized by companies or the government.
- pirogen 8y agoIs there any viable alternative to PayPal for a EU-based micro-business wanting to accept CC payments from North American customers? I run a legally operating one-man business providing electronic services to customers (mostly other businesses) in EU, US and Canada. The EU customers pay me with bank transfers like civilized human beings, but Americans and Canadians always insist on PayPal because, apparently, North American banking system charges an arm and a leg for international bank transfers, so they'd rather pay with CC. I didn't mind having to provide PayPal with scans of a bunch of sensitive documents. What I do mind is pretending my PayPal balance is not real money but virtual tokens with little legal protection and the possibility of being arbitrarily frozen for an undisclosed reason. That, and their horrendous fees (including currency conversions based on rates they pull out of the ass) for which they don't even provide anything resembling a legal invoice (a screenshot of an HTML table won't cut with my IRS). Someone, for the love of God, tell me there's an alternative a teeny-tiny business like mine could use.
- Sephr 8y agoThat website has recently plagiarized an article I helped write, so good riddens.
- Simulacra 8y agoI hope we have more democratization of payment processing. I don't have an opinion of this instance either way, but the fact that a few companies dominate the payment universe is troubling.
- punanen 8y agoExecellent! Somebody was pissed enough with the HN-SJW-nazis flagging and banning participants in the recent SargonofAkkad - Patreon controversy.
- japaget 8y agoPlease note that "The Hacker News" is a separate site unrelated to "Hacker News".
- sokoloff 8y agoThis name confusion seems intentional and makes me default to unsympathetic, even though I suspect PayPal’s issue is not related to a name confusion root cause.
- gymshoes 8y agoIt probably is. A few months ago I was making a news ticker with headlines sourced from hnrss. I had used 'security' as a keyword and posts with score above 100. I was looking for other sources that provide security news and stumbled upon this one too. What I saw was all posts looked quite similar to the rss filter from hnrss, except all articles were re-written in a slightly different way. It was all just redundant news from the hnrss feed and other popular security bloggers.
- ThrowMeDown01 8y ago> This name confusion seems intentional Do you have proof, or do you just happen to feel this way without actually knowing any background story? If you make such an accusation you should state your reasons, preferably observable facts. Both "hacker" and "news" are generic terms after all. In addition, even if they did mimic the name, I would not see a problem. It's very descriptive, unlike a completely made-up word that someone spent a lot of effort on to establish as a brand.
- qha 8y ago"Washington" and "Post" are also generic terms.
- ThrowMeDown01 8y agoA concrete location is something very specific, and the number of newspapers per town is very small.
- dec0dedab0de 8y agoOff topic, but "The Hacker News" should really change their name to "The Other Hacker News"
- DonHopkins 8y agoHow about "The Other Kind of Hacker News"?
- kkarakk 8y agowhy? has ycombinator trademarked/registered hacker news?
- dec0dedab0de 8y agoI dont think there needs to be a trademark to not want to cause confusion. The majority of people in our field know that this is hacker news, sometimes they talk about it to someone who doesn't know. That new person finds "the hacker news" and thinks that their coworker is a 1337 hax0r.
- disconnected 8y agoAccording to this: https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#trademarks https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#trademarks Hacker News is trademarked.
- joombaga 8y agoNo; at least not in the United States.
- tzs 8y agoYes/no (in the United States). In other words, they claim a common law trademark on it [1], but they have not registered it with the USPTO. This means they probably have some trademark protection, at least in some states, but not nearly as much as if they had a registered mark. For example, they might be able to get an injunction against a similar user in some states, but probably not damages or attorney fees. With a registered mark, they would be able to go for damages and attorney fees. [1] See reply to you from 'disconnected' for link to claim.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cauldron 8y agoBanning without explanation seems too common for Paypal?
- kkarakk 8y agothere are plenty of articles about paypal killing small companies due to mysterious fund freezes w/ no support in site.
- awakeasleep 8y agoIt’s common for any money transmitter service. Every time i look into the stories I’ve found the ban actually makes sense. People who get upset generally are running a business that violates their payment processor’s terms of service, or user agreement. Paypal is the most accessible, largest payment processor so we see the most stories about them.
- Havoc 8y agoPayPal up to its usual top class behaviour I see Have they ever been sued for similar?
- zarkov99 8y agoThey also reportedly shutdown Subscribe Star recently, when people started to use it instead of Patreon, in the wake of the Patreon banning of some prominent You Tuber. This isn't working. The free market doesn't seem to work well in the tech world, where we have all powerfull monopolies controlling what we say, what we know and what we buy. We need new laws.
- indigochill 8y agoCan you expand on this line of reasoning a bit? Specifically, what's stopping a competitor from eating Paypal's lunch right now? They have a majority market share now, but disruption still seems a possibility. Often it seems would-be disruptors get bought by the goliaths, but that's on the owners of the disruptors making their company purchasable such as through accepting investor money. On the flip side, if we did get new laws, why would the goliaths not use their country-size budgets to lobby for the laws to just ensconce them as the government-approved monopoly (maybe not directly, but for example by throwing up legislative barriers to entry against would-be competitors)?
- marcinzm 8y ago>Specifically, what's stopping a competitor from eating Paypal's lunch right now? There's already regulations (or industry rules) regarding money laundering, credit card processing, credit card charge backs, international money transfers, etc, etc. That alone creates a decent barrier to entry. Then there's other issues such as merchants lying, customers lying, refunds, stolen accounts, etc. PayPal closes accounts (and so on) as a consequence of trying to deal with all these issues. I'd posit that PayPal does not suck because it's PayPal but because of the product itself and anyone who tried to fully replicate it would run into the same issues (and thus suck just as much).
- barry-cotter 8y agoGee, if it’s that easy to find a new payment processor when Visa, MasterCard, PayPal, Stripe and four others all drop you on the same day SubscribeStar should have a new payment processor by now. They don’t. It’s been three weeks. No member of the payment processing cartel will touch you if MasterVisa won’t because then they’ll get you cut off. https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1076886857445711872?s=21 https://twitter.com/nickmon1112/status/1076886857445711872?s... Long twitter thread on the relation between MasterCard, Visa and Patreon and how the credit card cartel is attempting to minimise political risk.
- twayback 8y agoThis is a fraud website which has mercilessly ripped off content from other sites and published as its own. Also it has published a ton of proprietary information from time to time. Good riddance!
- EvilTerran 8y agoDo you have any citations for these claims? Not calling you a liar or anything - I'm just not at all familiar with the site in question, and it seems like it'd be important evidence if we want to fairly judge paypal's behavior here.
- floatingatoll 8y agoSee also other comments upstream in this thread.
- ryanlol 8y agoJust browse the site for a bit.
- twayback 8y agoHere is one: http://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/thehackernews/ http://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/thehackernews/ search for others
- campuscodi 8y agohttp://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/thehackernews/ http://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/thehackernews/ If you don't believe that, than take my word. I'm an infosec reporter and had countless articles end up on that site. News sites often report on the same topics all the time, but there's a difference between running a story on the same topic and copying the text and replacing some verbs and nouns with a synonym, and then switching sentence order to pass it as your own. Every reporter has his own way of structuring a story. It's pretty obvious for us when someone steals an article, based on how you present information points and which information points from a —let's say 50-page academic paper— you decide to present. Many times, information I obtained during private email or phone conversations would also end up on their site. When I confronted the "CEO" (aka site owner) he said he found that information using Google (obvious lie) and replied with insults. They kinda stopped copying my articles after I called them out a few more times on Twitter, but I don't believe for a second they're now doing actual news reporting. I have other reporter friends who'd tell you similar stories and interactions with their staff. At one point someone tried to organize a campaign where all reporters would call out The Hacker News and Security Affairs (another site engaging in plagiarism) on Twitter, and urge security researchers to stop sharing links to their sites, but that didn't materialize because some of the bigger names in infosec journalism didn't wanna participate. In hindsight, it was kinda silly (childish would be a better word), but this only shows how many news sites TheHackerNews has angered in the past few years. They're absolutely despised by most infosec news reporters and I know at least two people who are now opening a beer in celebration. Recently, the site started declining on its own. Reporting has been awful, with tons of inaccuracies that now I don't even bother checking it in RSS feeds: https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/902600568262107136 https://twitter.com/thegrugq/status/902600568262107136
- JeremyBanks 8y agoWho was ever donating to that thing?!
- skilled 8y agoLooks like they sell online courses, with some having thousands of enrolled users.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoAre those stolen from other sites too?
- febin 8y agoPaypal has done this multiple times, here are some incidents. https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/My-Account/Permanent-BAN-limited-account/td-p/1489460 https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/My-Account/Permanent-BAN... https://medium.com/@puntofisso/paypal-closed-my-account-with-no-explanation-it-could-happen-to-you-6ff0ba4ea95f https://medium.com/@puntofisso/paypal-closed-my-account-with... https://www.elliott.org/blog/banned-from-palpal-account-limitations/ https://www.elliott.org/blog/banned-from-palpal-account-limi... https://www.success.grownupgeek.com/index.php/2008/04/05/paypal-limited-access/comment-page-3/ https://www.success.grownupgeek.com/index.php/2008/04/05/pay... Completely relying on any third party is a bad idea. We should consider the risks when we signup to any service. Around this month we have seen multiple companies banning accounts without giving valid reasons MailChimp, Patreon, Slack(They had a reason but they didn't notify the users earlier, however they appologized later) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18754860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18754860 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18724107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18724107
- jseliger 8y agoSame thing happened to me years ago: https://jakeseliger.com/2011/12/09/december-2011-links-paypals-bogusness-ribbed-tees-literary-friendships-literary-research-alex-tabarroks-new-book-and-more https://jakeseliger.com/2011/12/09/december-2011-links-paypa.... Why anyone uses Paypal today is beyond me. Why anyone doesn't expect this is really beyond me.
- privateSFacct 8y agoThis website was basically an extreme plagiarism website - all the way back in 2014 we had articles like this: "The Hacker News - Profiting Off Extensive Plagiarism from Legitimate News Sources" Interesting they feel so unfairly treated by paypal, but don't treat others properly themselves.
- 4ad 8y agoPayPal is a disgrace. Years ago they blocked my account and freezed my money until I sent them a copy of my passport, my birth certificate, and a proof of address. But sending them wasn't enough, as this dragged on for months and months with no feedback from them. Eventually (after over a year) they cleared my account, but just a month later it was frozen again, and they asked for the exact same documents yet again. By that time I had made sure I had no money in the account, so I didn't even bother contacting them again. This was many years ago, and I have almost successfully avoided them since. However, a few months back I had to buy something from Ebay, and I could only pay through PayPal. I now live in a different country, and I have learned that I needed to create a brand new account, you can't change the country of the old account (not that i wanted to use that old account anyway). I made a new account, paid that Ebay guy, and got my merchandise. A month later (after I had already received my merchandise and having not used PayPal after that) I got an e-mail from PayPal asking me yet again for a copy of my passport, my birth certificate, and a proof of address. Unbelievable. Stay away from PayPal if you can!
- snazz 8y agoThis applies to most centralized external services, but especially those that handle money. If your application or business relies 100% on one of these services that could be shut down or have your account suspended or removed, make sure to have a backup plan in place to switch it over to a self hosted option or another offering from another company.
- itchyjunk 8y agoRegardless of weather the `THN` name is confusing or not and regardless of the speculations, does paypal need to give a reason for termination? Are they legally obligated? Is it something they should do for the sake of customers? Should one get mad at `THN` because there name overlaps HN and they supposedly are `real hack` or should we be mad at paypal because it's overreaching it's powers?
- briandear 8y agoThe name isn’t the issue. It’s the plagiarism. Every article is plagiarized.
- wccrawford 8y agoWhen PayPal bans a site it's always for breaking their TOS. Sometimes the specific parts of that TOS are bullshit, but most of the time it turns out that it was a pretty flagrant violation of those terms. I don't feel sorry for anyone who still uses PayPal to collect money for a use that has been specifically banned in their TOS, and anything that even starts to encroach on illegal matters falls into that. Information about how to break into computer systems (hacking) definitely falls into that and they should have known they were on shaky ground.
- gomox 8y agoThat is quite simply wrong. I have been on the receiving end of this problem, and there is zero transparency about the reasons behind banning, zero warning or recourse, and of course the good old 180 day locking of funds which can kill any e-commerce platform that runs on anything other than absurdly high margins. The company in question moved to Stripe where it operates to this day. PayPal is just a very large, shady as fuck company. Im hoping cryptocurrency matures to a point where they are not needed.
- user5994461 8y agoThey are legally obligated to NOT give a reason for anything that relates to money laundering, fraud and customer verification.
- 8y ago
- hirundo 8y agoFrom the follow-up tweet: > Instead of giving a valid reason, company says "specific reasons for such a decision is proprietary & it is not released since that could impair PayPal's ability to do business in a safe and secure manner" I've been trying to close my PayPal account for the last week and will keep trying, but so far have not been able to. I've had this account since 2000. I want to close it because of the treatment of SubscribeStar and others. I've never watched a video by Sargon of Akkad. But even if it was Adolph of Hitler I'd be concerned about this behavior by Patreon. For PayPal to back them up by dropping a competitor is enough for me to want to reciprocate. First, PayPal required me to individually cancel most of the vendors I've paid via PayPal in the last decade or so, and made it difficult to discover how to do that. But I finally figured it out and cancelled them all. If they weren't being mulish about this it seems like it would be easy for them to do the same as part of the process of closing the account. Now that I've done this I still can't cancel via their web site. I get the message "Before you close your account -- Sorry, there's a problem. If you keep seeing this, please contact customer service." There is no email address on their contact page. Their pop-up chat app on the contact page freezes immediately and is unusable. I'll call them if I have to, but I shouldn't have to. The issues closing the account are by themselves enough to make me want to close it. When I do manage to close the account I'm hoping that they ask me for a reason, at which point I plan to tell them "specific reasons for such a decision is proprietary & it is not released since that could impair my ability to do business in a safe and secure manner."
- outoftheabyss 8y agoI'm with you. The problem is, PayPal weren't the only payment processors to bail on Substar, if we want to purchase online which popular/accessible processors are not engaging in similar? Genuine question
- hirundo 8y agoI'd like an answer to that too. If one emerges I'm inclined to support it. Hopefully there are enough people like us to make that profitable.
- benmarks 8y agoWow, the "bitcoin" responses to that thread. Talk about trading one problem for another....
- DonHopkins 8y agoAt least they didn't say "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Then they'd have two problems. http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247 http://regex.info/blog/2006-09-15/247
- aiven 8y agoYeah, everyone suggest to move from platform with 0.001% incidents rate, to the scammy bitcoin where no one is responsible for anything.
- sparkie 8y ago> where no one is responsible for anything. Where everybody is responsible for themselves* I'm sorry for you that you still need a babysitting government to protect you from those horrible scammers.
- dang 8y agoCrossing into personal attack will get you banned here. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and post civilly and substantively, or not at all.
- Buge 8y agoIn bitcoin there's no central authority responsible for everything that has the power to censor you. You are responsible for your own safety.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- linkmotif 8y agoOf all the legit PayPal outrage stories this one doesn’t seem outrage-worthy. Looks like a bad blog spam account trying to capitalize on this community’s name. Good for PayPal and for everyone really? What am I missing?
- outoftheabyss 8y agoNo rhyme or reason given, the other times Paypal have withheld funds from or barred others for less legitimate reasons, most recently substar. For me big tech actively sabotaging the careers and income of folks with whom they, often arbitrarily find problematic is a big problem, particularly given how reliant people are on the web for these purposes and the increasing lack of competition
- paulftw 8y agoReal Hacker News would’ve known to avoid PayPal :) This story only made the front page because of the name confusion. Other comments claim that name choice to be intentional
- birksherty 8y agoWhy do visa and mastercard want to ban people from receiving money? If anyone here have the answer please share.
- mothsonasloth 8y agoThe same reason banks and countries put sanctions on countries.
- iDemonix 8y agohttps://hackernoon.com/paypal-is-still-one-of-the-worst-online-examples-of-customer-service-42f3c13f6cd0 https://hackernoon.com/paypal-is-still-one-of-the-worst-onli... I wrote this article on Hacker Noon 18 months ago or so, nothing has changed. The only good thing was the article going viral, which spawned a new golden level of PayPal customer service - they also had to disable account deletion for 48h, which was nice to know. I've moved away entirely to Stripe and other services and it's been bliss.
- twayback 8y agoOn Why this site was banned? http://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/thehackernews/ http://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/thehackernews/ Plagiarism to begin with!
- tlogan 8y agoAs far as I know, The Hacker News is just bunch of copied articles (i.e., blog spam) - but copying and plagiarism is so prevalent and pervasive on these news sites. Nothing new here. However, they did add "donate" pay button on their website which means that PayPal might be on the hook if somebody donates to The Hacker News but article is written by somebody else. Just speculating.
- VMG 8y agoEven assuming you are 100% correct, it is interesting that this violation is not decided by the legal system but by a secret court inside PayPal. They will not even tell you the offense you are guilty of.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoSecret court? They're a private company, they're entirely free to choose who they do business with for whatever reason (barring a few protected classes that would fall foul of anti-discrimination law, of course).
- bougiefever 8y agoEvery chance I get, I tell people not to use PayPal. They have done this repeatedly, and the people who are affected have absolutely no recourse unless they happen to own a popular newspaper. PayPal has been shamed into doing the right thing, and that seems to be the only recourse. From reports I've heard, their internal system doesn't exist, and they aren't a bank, so there is no legal recourse either.
- sys_64738 8y agoI wouldn't use ebay if I couldn't use paypal. I don't want to use my CC for any online xacts if I don't need to. I'd rather use paypal to protect myself or just shop at a site I trust (e.g. Amazon). People who receive monies via PP need to protect themselves by assuming PP could freeze their account at any time. That means keeping the minimum amount of $$ possible under PP's control. I know there are regs to that but you need to protect yourself.
- root_axis 8y agoSome of the banks and some 3rd party companies are now offering a system to digitally generate "one-time" use card numbers that are automatically destroyed after a successful transaction.
- sys_64738 8y agoI've seen virtual CC numbers for one time use here in the USA but not sure if they're still available. It's still a hassle to setup, configure, use, etc, which is its fall down. Simplicity is PP's strength, IMO, which is why it's got staying power.
- root_axis 8y agoThey're definitely still available, there are even companies offering card generation API as a service (google Marqeta). I agree with you on simplicity, but one clear advantage to the temporary card approach is that it's automatically revoked without you having to take further action, whereas paypal still offers merchants the ability to automatically bill you on a recurring basis.
- eximius 8y agoAll this talk of monopoly in this sector of finance makes me wonder how you'd start a service in this space. And it made me realize I have no idea how it works. I swipe (or insert w/ chip) at a POS... which then beamz the transaction to VISA? So do you need to get a partnership with all of the POS vendors? Is that open or closed? Of course, that presupposes that someone has your card. VISA doesn't make cards, they just get banks to issue cards using their network (why don't banks do this on their own?). So now I also need a partnership with at least one large bank to have a decent enough exposure to get those partnerships with those POS vendors? The challenges sound largely political, in making those initial connections with the right company. Which doesn't make them easy, but it elevates a deceptively simple technical problem to a hard one, I think.
- farazbabar 8y agoThere is a lot more to it than that, there is merchant acquiring (merchant relationship with a payment services provider that gives merchants the credentials and equipment to accept payments), there are sometimes aggregators that transactions then funnel into. Next the transactions hit a network which acts as the router between acquirers and issuers (more on this later). The network can also act as a default stand in when the issuing bank is not reachable. From here the transaction goes into the issuing bank which runs a host of fraud and risk rules to answer the questions: 1. Should I authorize this? <- this is bank's prerogative and mostly deals with financial risk and 2. Can I authorize this? <- this is regulatory in nature and can be very binary and very binding. Its the the second question that also comes with binding regulations in some jurisdictions that prevent all parties along this chain from disclosing the reasons for declining, withholding funds or delay processing to affected parties. Even more interestingly, PayPal operates at most of these tiers almost entirely independently (PayPal API as the acquirer, PayPal as the aggregator, PayPal as the network of network AND of-course PayPal as the issuer with PayPal credit. Obviously not all transactions go through all tiers in case PayPal (a credit card transaction goes to card network and card issuer in the back for example) but Pay upon invoice, Bank transfers and PayPal credit (bill me later) are all examples of PayPal extending credit to buyer. Payments are quite fascinating, you are correct that a lot of issues are political but don't underestimate the complexity of the ecosystem, especially in global context. And I have not even gotten into bad faith actors and the war between good and bad guys yet.