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We got banned from PayPal after 12 years of business

• sschueller 7y ago
  PayPal will also stop letting you refund the percent they take out so you will be holding the bag when you refund a customer. There is absolutely no reason to use PayPal at this point and any place that only takes paypal should be boycotted.
  • victorNicollet 7y ago
    I dislike PayPal as much as the next guy, but I don't get this: > PayPal will also stop letting you refund the percent they take out so you will be holding the bag when you refund a customer. When I refund a customer, I wouldn't expect the power company to refund the electricity spent serving that customer, and I wouldn't expect UPS/FedEx to refund the delivery of that customer's package. Why should PayPal refund the costs of the customer's transaction ?
    • tssva 7y ago
      Also PayPal is not alone in this practice. Many credit card processors when using bundled and fixed fee pricing also don't return transaction fees when you issue a refund. For example Stripe. A good reason to get interchange plus pricing from your CC processor.
    • Reason077 7y ago
      It's common practice within the payment industry. When a refund is issued for a credit card transaction, the interchange fees are (or at least, should be) refunded to the merchant. This will be particularly true for a large payment processor like PayPal, since they will have a lot of negotiating power when it comes to the transaction/interchange fees they pay.
• alexandernst 7y ago
  It's very hard to evaluate what's actually going on here. This "post" could perfectly fit in a tweet. No details whatsoever, no details about wether they tried to reach to paypal support and if they got any replies. I'm surprised this isn't flagged.
  • chmod775 7y ago
    Did we read the same article? Because the on I read said: > After calling their support twice, explaining the situation and asking for a reason, we have received nothing but “the decision is final, and we will not provide more information”.
    • muttech 7y ago
      Great minds... :)
    • DaiPlusPlus 7y ago
      Is there any law or regulation that requires institutions that handle money handling services to be transparent in cases like this or with any right to recourse? (In any country) What happens if a multinational organisation based in one country has that right but doesn’t in another - but it’s a single PayPal account - could they get reinstated that way?
      • rickbutton 7y ago
        In the US, yes, if the organization is legally considered a bank. I believe that PayPal is not considered a bank, but I'm not sure on the specifics as to why.
        • rndgermandude 7y ago
          Paypal Europe has a banking license.
    • blantonl 7y ago
      But the post never explained what the situation was... just that they "explained 'it'" to Paypal.. They also don't explain what they are accepting payments for, other than "receiving some minor payments and paying for a few online services" I suspect there is far more to this story.
      • 7y ago
• chmod775 7y ago
  I've been preaching this since forever. Don't rely on PayPal. They're less professional than a kid selling juice next to the road. There are no grace periods with PayPal to give you time to move to another service. There is never more than a generic reason and stonewalling when they terminate you. And yes, their decision is always final. They'll happily terminate your only source of income on a friday afternoon, freeze your funds, then laugh at you as you scramble to get an alternative up and running. Don't build on PayPal. It's no foundation at all.
  • giancarlostoro 7y ago
    Theres at least third party options that leverage paypal indirectly (and other services) 2checkout comes tk mind which is what I suggest if you like having the option of PayPal. I havent touched 2checkout in ages so no idea its state. Also like they say... Dont put ALL your eggs into one basket!
  • oftenwrong 7y ago
    What alternative would you recommend? Specifically, I am interested in a method of paying independent contractors.
    • dboreham 7y ago
      A bank?
      • Fnoord 7y ago
        IBAN, indeed. Bunq's fees (except for the monthly) are great.
      • domjones 7y ago
        That's crazytalk.
    • dingdingdang 7y ago
      Yes, very interested as well, is Swipe any better? Or where do people go when both one off and subscription payments are required?
• PMan74 7y ago
  You'd hope at this stage, based on various PayPal horror stories, businesses would not need this warning. > Do not kid yourself – your business is never, never > safe with PayPal. Move away or at least have a plan B > in place so that you don’t lose your business over > their arbitrary actions. They all read like riff on The Trial: you've been banned, we're not going to tell you why, this is going to cost you money.
• brakmic 7y ago
  This and similar behavior is what ultimately drives people toward decentralized solutions, like Bitcoin for example.
  • mavdi 7y ago
    HN is traditionally anti crypto, but just want to point out that literally no one in this world can stop you accepting Bitcoin payments. That's the true power of decentralization.
    • freddie_mercury 7y ago
      Sure they can. Accepting Bitcoin for payments is illegal where I live. It is enforced by fines and jail time, just like all other laws.
      • brakmic 7y ago
        Which country? Nobody can _stop_ you from accepting cryptocurrency.
        • freddie_mercury 7y ago
          Just like nobody can _stop_ you from murdering another person or demanding a bribe or any number of terrible things. I don't understand the point of your vehement sophistry. Everyone understands how societies work. There are laws. People get punished after the fact for transgressing them. Cryptocurrency is not somehow magically exempt from that reality.
          • brakmic 7y ago
            I don't understand your point. Just wanted to talk about technology. But ok, no problem. Have fun.
            • dkersten 7y ago
• tbarbugli 7y ago
  Stripe
  • WilliamEdward 7y ago
    What if it's not available where i live?
    • falsedan 7y ago
      Incorporate somewhere where it is
  • yitchelle 7y ago
    "all eggs in the one basket" problem again here.
  • 75dvtwin 7y ago
    Stripe is a bad substitute to paypal. Stripes, wants you them to be the center point of your relation with your customers. We prefer no-big names, no information collection about my customers, almost a white-label payment processor that we could sub-contract. We still have some time, and are searching for the right company as billing and payment processor. But we naturally eliminate companies that are VC funded and, or located in high-cost areas (so that eliminates most of the CA/NY/LDN places).
• deaps 7y ago
  My only experience with paypal was about 8 years ago. I briefly remember signing up for it roughly 2-3 years prior to that. I linked my paypal to my (older) bank account so I could purchase something. This account had about $100 in it - it was my old left over account from before I got married and got a joint account, etc. So I kept a tiny bit of money in it. I had moved about 2-3 times since opening that account - I never used the account for anything, it just sat there with money in it. It was eventually forgotten about. Anyway, long story short. Someone managed to access my paypal and request a sum of money around roughly $40. That account had about $38 in it at the time. Paypal flagged the transaction as fraudulent, stored the money 'in my paypal account' instead of sending it to the requester, and froze my account. But this overdrew my bank account by roughly $2. Needless to say, 2-3 years of late fees added up to a substantial amount of money - two separate accounts - one for about $280 that I owed the bank and another that was about $350 that i owed to their 'overdraft' company. I didn't find out about either until they were about 2-3 years old and in collections. I realize what I'm explaining is totally my own fault for not monitoring that account and keeping it up to date, but if paypal would have either redeposited that money into my account or sent some emails, instead of freezing the assets in a holding account, I could have avoided that. In either event, that left a bitter taste in my mouth, and i severed all ties with paypal and that old account at that point. I had to explain this multiple times to different government and military agencies throughout my career - it still comes up on background investigations.
  • consp 7y ago
    I do not know how it is in your jurisdiction but where I live a collector needs to inform you in timely manner of these kind of discrepancies if they want to enforce fines or overcharge fees. The means different kind of channels of communication than the regular ones (e.g. postal instead of login to the site, or at least show some effort). Note: this is only if they overcharge without you being able to do so normally, if are allowed to have a negative balance you pay regular fees and you signed a contract to do so.
• S_A_P 7y ago
  So from what I can gather, niteo is a SAAS. For Paypal to ban them in what is a pretty non controversial business, they must have commited one of the following offenses: 1)Breach this user agreement, the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, the Commercial Entity Agreements (if they apply to you), the PayPal Cash and PayPal Cash Plus Account Terms and Conditions (if it applies to you), or any other agreement between you and PayPal; 2)Violate any law, statute, ordinance, or regulation (for example, those governing financial services, consumer protections, unfair competition, anti-discrimination or false advertising); 3)Infringe PayPal's or any third party's copyright, patent, trademark, trade secret or other intellectual property rights, or rights of publicity or privacy; 4)Sell counterfeit goods; 5)Act in a manner that is defamatory, trade libelous, threatening or harassing; 6)Provide false, inaccurate or misleading information; 7)Send or receive what we reasonably believe to be potentially fraudulent funds; 8)Refuse to cooperate in an investigation or provide confirmation of your identity or any information you provide to us; 9)Attempt to double dip during the course of a dispute by receiving or attempting to receive funds from both PayPal and the seller, bank or card issuer for the same transaction; 10)Control an account that is linked to another account that has engaged in any of these restricted activities; 11)Conduct your business or use the PayPal services in a manner that results in or may result in; -complaints; -requests by buyers (either filed with us or card issuers) to invalidate payments made to you; -fees, fines, penalties or other liability or losses to PayPal, other PayPal customers, third parties or you; 12)Use your PayPal account or the PayPal services in a manner that PayPal, Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover or any other electronic funds transfer network reasonably believes to be an abuse of the card system or a violation of card association or network rules; 13)Allow your PayPal account to have a negative balance; 14) Provide yourself a cash advance from your credit card (or help others to do so); 15)Access the PayPal services from a country that is not included on PayPal's permitted countries list; 16)Take any action that imposes an unreasonable or disproportionately large load on our websites, software, systems (including any networks and servers used to provide any of the PayPal services) operated by us or on our behalf or the PayPal services; 17)Facilitate any viruses, trojan horses, malware, worms or other computer programming routines that attempts to or may damage, disrupt, corrupt, misuse, detrimentally interfere with, surreptitiously intercept or expropriate, or gain unauthorized access to any system, data, information or PayPal services; Use an anonymizing proxy; use any robot, spider, other automatic device, or manual process to monitor or copy our websites without our prior written permission; or use any device, software or routine to bypass our robot exclusion headers; 18)Interfere or disrupt or attempt to interfere with or disrupt our websites, software, systems (including any networks and servers used to provide any of the PayPal services) operated by us or on our behalf, any of the PayPal services or other users’ use of any of the PayPal services; 19)Take any action that may cause us to lose any of the services from our Internet service providers, payment processors, or other suppliers or service providers; 20)Use the PayPal services to test credit card behaviors; 21)Circumvent any PayPal policy or determinations about your PayPal account such as temporary or indefinite suspensions or other account holds, limitations or restrictions, including, but not limited to, engaging in the following actions: attempting to open new or additional PayPal account(s) when an account has a negative balance or has been restricted, suspended or otherwise limited; opening new or additional PayPal accounts using information that is not your own (e.g. name, address, email address, etc.); or using someone else’s PayPal account; or Harass and/or threaten our employees, agents, or other users. These terms run the gamut from being bad with money (negative balance) to criminal. That is a wide swath of terms to action against you or your business, and leave plenty of room for arbitrary ban hammers to be wielded. I can agree that there are way better and safer ways to accept payments these days, and it seems PayPal hangs on with name recognition, and not by merit of it being the best choice.
• LeonM 7y ago
  Even though I absolutely agree that you shouldn't put all your eggs in one basket, it is ultimately the market that could drive you towards a dependency situation. I have had a couple of customers for which I set up both PP and another PSP (such as stripe). Then it turned out that about 90% of their transactions came from PP. So even if I set up 10 different PSPs for them, if PP bans them, they will still be out of business.
  • viraptor 7y ago
    That doesn't necessarily follow. It shows that users prefer PayPal, but not that they wouldn't use alternatives if PayPal's not available. If they really want to know the answer, they could do an A/B test with missing PayPal and see how many people drop out without it. Also, was PP the default/first payment option by any chance?
    • jdietrich 7y ago
      >If they really want to know the answer, they could do an A/B test with missing PayPal and see how many people drop out without it. I've done these tests, repeatedly; removing the PayPal payments option consistently leads to a statistically significant increase in cart abandonment. Some customers strongly prefer PayPal (especially on unfamiliar sites) and some don't have a credit card.
      • viraptor 7y ago
        Sure. But it still doesn't necessarily mean "PP bans them, they will still be out of business". It may. But I disagree with the jumping to conclusions unless it's been tested (and it doesn't sound like OP did)
        • LeonM 7y ago
          I didn't, but that wasn't up to me, I just did the technical implementation for them.
      • LeonM 7y ago
• packetpirate 7y ago
  I can't imagine anyone is surprised by this. I've been hearing horror stories about PayPal since the mid 2000s. They're a garbage company, and the only reason people don't use something else is because they're a veritable monopoly.
• dsauss 7y ago
  Only after having a law firm, who we knew through an advisor contact, send PayPal’s legal department a letter did they release our PayPal balance funds back to us. We were banned without explanation after being a customer for 8+ years and had our PayPal balance (not yet transferred to a bank) frozen. We left a high balance with PayPal because at the time the interest rate they provided was high. No explanation was given at any point and the whole process took about 3 months to get our own funds back that we needed to operate the business.
  • isostatic 7y ago
    > We left a high balance with PayPal because at the time the interest rate they provided was high. Why can they afford to pay such a high interest? Because they can ban you whenever they feel like it. If an offer's too good to be true etc.
    • Asooka 7y ago
      That's an interesting take on the ol' Ponzi scheme. Take in money, then ban people for violating terms of service. Pay out only the very few who would be truly a problem.
• exabrial 7y ago
  The lack of customer service in the Silicon Valley is a pervasive problem. * Cody Don on YouTube teaches the masses about science and regularly gets banned. His videos are rated G to PG. Despite millions of viewers and dollars of Revenue, there is nobody he can call. * Uber charged $1500 to my debut card a few months ago. There's literally nobody you can call about it. * Lose your Instagram/Twitter/Gmail? Too bad, because it's free, you're treated as cattle. * Oh then there's the paying customers too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17431609
  • Grollicus 7y ago
    > * Uber charged $1500 to my debut card a few months ago. There's literally nobody you can call about it. And here I thought small claims court was a thing in the US as well
    • ataturk 7y ago
      Small Claims court is pretty much a joke. You go, the defendant doesn't show, you get a default judgement. You think "great, now they'll pay up" but no, they never do and nothing happens. If it's a small biz, they just change names and keep on screwing people over.
    • LurkersWillLurk 7y ago
      The problem is that most terms of service include forced arbitration clauses. Even if they don't, you generally have to sue in the jurisdiction where the company is incorporated, which for the vast majority of people, is very far away.
      • ipython 7y ago
        That's not true, you can sue a company that does business in your state, in your local small claims court. I am not a lawyer, but I have sued out-of-state companies in my home jurisdiction.
        • 7y ago
• nakodari 7y ago
  Not surprised at all. We got banned too without any warning a few years ago. I wrote about my story here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11944701 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11944701 Lots of people would simply think "It won't happen to me" and move on. But this is just another example that if it can happen to people using Paypal for years, it can happen to you too. It's better to offer other payment channels to customers so you can diversify. And if possible, move away from Paypal entirely.
  • neotek 7y ago
    You got banned for running a file sharing site, I’m afraid. PayPal’s terms require all file sharing sites to seek explicit approval before using the service, no exceptions.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • astura 7y ago
      I mean... its not even hidden in fine print or written in legalese or anything, they are pretty clear about "Activities Requiring Approval" in readable plain language. https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/acceptableuse-full >Providing file sharing services or access to newsgroups
      • nakodari 7y ago
        When we created an account, there was no such clause. We discovered that it was added later. When they pointed it out that it violates their policy, I found it surprising. At the very minimum, they should have allowed us to get permission and if denied, then at least return us 30% of our revenue at that time which was in the account. They did neither. They shut down the account and did not even answer back to our emails. I would never trust Paypal again after that bad experience.
  • djsumdog 7y ago
    I wonder if there's a potential class action suit there if you could get enough people together.
• Fnoord 7y ago
  I knew someone who worked as CS rep in 2014 at PayPal, in Ireland. He told me that if people make too many claims, they'd just close the account. In my nearly 20 years of usage of PayPal, I've a 100% success rate on all of my claims (a few, I suppose about 4 or so). I guess my buy:claim ratio is in good standing.
• CaptainZapp 7y ago
  As ar as I know PayPal in Europe is a bank with a Luxembourg banking license. I'm wondering if they could pull the same shitty here. Considering that any bank, which freezes your account, doesn't provide you with any reason and actually refuses to talk to you may draw quite some ire from their respecive regulator.
  • manuelmagic 7y ago
    Where is it "here"?
    • Arnt 7y ago
      Any location where a Luxembourg bank license applies, ie. most of Europe, from Iceland to Greece.
  • NeedMoreTea 7y ago
    Which is exactly what banks do if they decide someone is on the terrorism blacklist, or you are "risky" - often on absurdly weak grounds. Mistaken identity or not, guilty or not, it seems to leave the customers with no options. Freezing funds only seems to happen with terrorism related closures, but it does happen, and the bank is judge, jury and executioner. One instance from search: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/feb/03/natwest-closed-my-account-with-no-explanation https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/feb/03/natwest-closed...
    • CaptainZapp 7y ago
      Not quite the same thing. From the article you link to : You’ve been a loyal customer for years, but then a letter arrives saying your bank has decided it will shut your accounts, and you will have to take your business elsewhere. No reason is given and the decision is final. So, yeah; a bank can get rid of you for any and no reason at all. But they can't just keep your money and stop talking to you. That's nothing really new. Ask any American citizen trying to open an account abroad. They may be having an unusual hard time thanks to FATCA.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Account_Tax_Compliance...
• peckrob 7y ago
  I used to help run a rather large fan convention. For our first 5 years (starting in about late 2003 or so), PayPal was the only option we offered for registering online. At the time, they were really the only option for implementing online payments easily without the complexity of a full merchant stack (and it was just me doing the programming, volunteering to help them while I was still in college). By the time we finally switched away from them, we were probably clearing $80k or so a year through them, with a very large percentage of that coming over the course of a week or so just before the event. People like to wait until the last minute. :) We never had any issues, but we were very vigilant about transferring funds out of PayPal every few days just in case. We did finally stop using them, probably about 2009 or 2010, when stories like OP's started to become widespread. For us, having them "hold" our funds for 6 months or cancelling our account would have bankrupted us. The hotel wants to be paid on Monday after the event. Vendors need to be paid within 30 days. Things like that would have been impossible for us to do if they decided to sit on the money or can us. We were a volunteer fan convention; we didn't have the financial cushion to withstand something like that. Not to mention the fees were higher than a standard merchant account. We finally did switch to a merchant account through Elavon and, after I left, I think they switched to Stripe. Either way, they don't accept PayPal now because the financial risk to them that could result from PayPal freezing or canceling the funds is significant.
  • ROFISH 7y ago
    Event tickets are explicitly on PayPal’s terms of service as needing a hold.
    • peckrob 7y ago
      That is the case now, yes, but I don't recall that being the case at the time. That said, we are talking sixteen years ago. Regardless, I would not recommend any business accept PayPal unless you are large enough to get their attention. There are far too many stories out there like OP's, of individuals, as well as small and medium sized businesses, getting absolutely hosed by some automated algorithm at PayPal and having zero recourse to even find out what happened. Customer "service" is nonexistent there. In my opinion, the only thing PayPal is good for is sending money between people. Short of filing a lawsuit, and you probably can't even do that because they now have an arbitration agreement in their terms.
• vinniejames 7y ago
  Great reason to switch to cryptocurrency
• jpalomaki 7y ago
  For me as a customer, having PayPal as payment option increases the propability of purchase. Especially with one-time purchases from small vendors. Reasons: No risk of credit card info misuse (by vendor), I only need username and password and I get certainly at least some kind of receipt for accounting.
  • Nextgrid 7y ago
    I’m always surprised as to why people are concerned about card details misuse. You are not responsible for card-not-present fraud (without 3D Secure). You can dispute any fraudulent charge with your bank, and I’d bet good money the bank has actually better customer service in that regard compared to PayPal.
    • ptero 7y ago
      I agree with you for US customers (and probably most of Western Europe), but situation in many countries in the rest of the world is different. Those consumers may not all be SOL in case of such fraud, but the recovery, if available, is much more involved than a single call / web action it takes in the US. My 2c.
    • isoos 7y ago
      Non-US credit or debit card owners are not in that good position wrt. disputes and getting their money back. Most of them charge for disabling the card and sending a new one. Dispute last for months, and are not automatically protecting the customer.
      • nothrabannosir 7y ago
        This is the first time I hear about this for UK. The chargeback rules are set by the network , i.e. MasterCard, Visa (sure Amex as well but they are both issuer , acquirer and network so that’s perhaps an unfair example). Is there a different rule set for MC USA vs MC rest of the world? I worked for a fraud detection company in the UK that existed precisely because chargebacks work so well, here. So this is definitely news to me.
• qaq 7y ago
  I bet paypal is running some ML based service that flags accounts so the rep could not explain the reason even if the rep wanted to.
  • viraptor 7y ago
    I'm not sure if that's what PayPal does, but whenever I saw fraud policies in companies, they never provided specific rules violated and for a good reason. If you know the exact rule you're breaking, you know what else to change for your scam to work. Pretty much the same reason you get "authentication failed" rather than "your password's 2nd letter didn't match".
    • chii 7y ago
      But the problem here is that paypal doesn't tell you if you're business is "ban-able" ahead of time. They have a list, and terms of services, but even if you followed them to the letter, they can still ban you, and not provide a reason. This isn't a good foundation for a business to depend on, so i would completely avoid having paypal as the only option.
• z3t4 7y ago
  I would guess that a clientele with spammers and black hat SEO's could have something to do with it. Paypal network graphs probably think they're top of some scheme.
• gotland_ 7y ago
  Don't know if it is the reason for the ban, but Niteos main product seems to be a service for creating spam networks. https://www.easyblognetworks.com https://www.easyblognetworks.com, https://niteo.co/projects https://niteo.co/projects
  • dmurko 7y ago
    As I mentioned in the previous comments - we're not using PayPal to process our SaaS products.
    • sirn 7y ago
      > we're not using PayPal to process our SaaS products Disclosure: I used to work in payment industry. Unfortunately from the brand's perspective (Visa, Mastercard, etc.) it doesn't matter which of your product is using their channel to process payments, if the business is involved in doing something shady, the whole company will be flagged. If you already passed KYC 12 years ago, but your business _today_ won't pass KYC if you were to apply again, then it's a matter of time until you get kicked out.
    • xtracto 7y ago
      I've got no simpathy for your business. It is spam plain and simple.
    • Someone1234 7y ago
      What were you using them to process?
    • village-idiot 7y ago
      No denial that you’re selling software designed to spam. Interesting. Maybe you should focus on making your business run in the ethical clear first. You’re not getting any sympathy from me that your unethical practices got you cut off from financing.
    • SilasX 7y ago
      Weird. Last comments from this account before today were in 2010.
• jake_morrison 7y ago
  PayPal blocked us after 10 years due to a a Kafkaesque problem, where they decided that our Hong Kong company was both a Chinese company and not a Chinese company: https://www.cogini.com/blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failure/ https://www.cogini.com/blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failur...
  • jzwinck 7y ago
    Hong Kong is part of China and also not part of China. So it makes perfect sense that a Hong Kong company is both Chinese and not Chinese.
    • Laforet 7y ago
      The city state has its own currency, monetary policy and legal system, enough for the department of state to treat HK as an independent entity as far as trade is concerned. Given the vast amount of money and good flowing through through HK I find it hard to believe any established payment processor would lack familiarity with the status of Hong Kong. It looks more like a (poorly) made up excuse to ban undesirable users.
      • penagwin 7y ago
        I have to agree. With the amount of money involved internationally with HK I highly doubt Paypal would just decide to shut down an account because of that. If that was the really the case there would have been a LOT of other accounts shutdown. This sounds more like an excuse from Paypal, who I fear talking bad about in case they decide to ban me too :P
      • gpm 7y ago
        If you read the actual blogpost, it was more likely an administrative mistake earlier in the process that was then difficult to undo, and no one really giving a fuck on paypal's side. Attribute things to incompetence before malice and all that, especially when attributing it to malice requires thinking they made a fairly odd decision to outright lie to customers about why you are ceasing doing business with them.
• metaprotocol 7y ago
  Niteo produce a product to produce content farms and generate spam. PayPal has done the world a favour by banning them.
  • dmurko 7y ago
    Founder here. We're not processing SaaS through PayPal, as mentioned in the post: > The most interesting thing is that we’ve moved away from PayPal in the last two years and have only been receiving some minor payments and paying for a few online services. We've stopped using PayPal for our SaaS business a few years ago.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • mprev 7y ago
      But you do enable spam.
    • CameronBanga 7y ago
      "We do this thing that probably got us banned, but we don't do it on PayPal so what's the problem."
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  • marcosdumay 7y ago
    PayPal should avoid doing vigilantism if they want to keep people's money under trust. It matters very little how despicable the company is, monetary services must not hold opinions unless explicitly told one by a local government.
    • yitchelle 7y ago
      The Swiss bank model.
    • mprev 7y ago
• ForHackernews 7y ago
  This is probably 10 years old at this point, but still accurate: https://paypalsucks.org/toon1.shtml https://paypalsucks.org/toon1.shtml
• blunte 7y ago
  This is a known risk with PayPal... so many similar stories. However, it's also a risk with Google and Facebook. I'm not sure if Apple and Microsoft are as bad. One must assume that some automated systems are involved in these terminations because no reasonable human would slam the door and refuse any attempts of discussion or reconciliation. Short of getting some significant press (here on HN where there are staff from each of these companies), one's chances of getting a termination resolved reasonably is practically nil. The problem I see is that these companies have become so large and have acquired such relative monopoly positions that they can afford to lose/screw some customers because it's cheaper expense-wise than managing human staff to resolve these issues. That's not reasonable. PayPal has much less of a monopoly position than Google, Facebook, and Apple do (because of the two app stores and the center-of-all-social). We know better than the use or depend on PayPal, but we have no choice but to depend on Google (Android) and Apple. I really was hoping that React Native and other webbish technologies would kill the mobile "app" system and return the power to the people who actually create things. So far it doesn't seem to be working that way.
• TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
  PayPal badly needs to be hit with an anti-trust suit. This behaviour is clearly harming end-users, and there are no alternative choices that won't result in a huge hit to turnover. Thus, de facto anti-consumer monopoly.
• charliebrownau 7y ago
  TODAY IS YOUR LAST DAY TO DUMP PAYPAL! (Louis Rossmann) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6APNcFOuE1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6APNcFOuE1g
• WA 7y ago
  I integrated PayPal now for 12 years. No problems whatsoever so far. Just as another anecdotal data point.
  • dkersten 7y ago
    Given the amount of horror stories about PayPal, "it won't happen to me" seems like an incredibly risky stance. Of course there are many, many people using PayPal without issue, but these stories show that it can happen to anyone at any time for no reason, no matter how long they've been happily using PP.
    • wccrawford 7y ago
      Most of the real horror stories about PayPal are about companies that are doing something that PayPal wouldn't want to be associated with, such as Spam, Porn, or filesharing. some of the stuff is already in their ToS, but quite a few of the stories came from before they had it explicitly in their ToS. So I'm not surprised that people continue to think "It won't happen to me" if they don't think they're doing anything "wrong".
      • dkersten 7y ago
        "Most" horror stories, sure, but not all. I've heard more than enough where the cause seems to be that somebody did a chargeback or other things that were out of control of the company in question. There was one particular case a few years ago, where a sudden burst in volume seems to have triggered it. Bottom line is, its a huge risk. I wouldn't want to base my business on such a significant risk and at least have a fallback in place.
• zer0faith 7y ago
  Never trusted these folks are that guy lost his 1 letter twitter handle.
• HenryBemis 7y ago
  Literally NO ONE wrote the below: Every Friday go online and withdraw all-but-the-necessary £€$$ to your bank account (transfer wire or via card number). I do get some revenue via PayPal, and the very same day (or the next) I 'download' comes it to my bank account (connected to PayPal via card) and IMMEDIATELY is shipped to another account that has all the controls to make money (relatively) unmovable. I perceive PayPal as my wallet. I do keep 'some' money in it but I keep the motherload away 'layers' deep. My money flow diagram, in the back end, includes "tax", "expenses", and "vault" (alarm Scrooge McDuck) accounts. I see PayPal as the envelope that I am given the cash in. It doesn't stay there for more than 24-48h. Edit: someone below mentioned they do spam.. if e.g. USA authorities has alerted them about doing shady things, PayPal would also receive a gag order with it to a) freeze their $$$$ and b) gag them. If I was Niteo I would get my pencils sharpened and wake up my lawyers.
  • razakel 7y ago
    >Every Friday go online and withdraw all-but-the-necessary £€$$ to your bank account (transfer wire or via card number). I do get some revenue via PayPal, and the very same day (or the next) I 'download' comes it to my bank account (connected to PayPal via card) and IMMEDIATELY is shipped to another account that has all the controls to make money (relatively) unmovable. PayPal does have a feature they don't advertise named Auto Sweep, which withdraws any balance in your account each day. You need to contact support to enable it.
    • HenryBemis 7y ago
      YMMV I am ok doing from my app every other night. It takes 5mins to withdraw to my card/account. I keep a certain balance and everything over that amount comes down to safety.
    • howard941 7y ago
      It'd be better if there were a way to autosweep to a paper check or fedwire if Auto Sweep's terms doesn't specifically prohibit Paypal from generating a withdrawal that backs out the ACH deposit.
  • 7y ago
• stakhanov 7y ago
  I've had so many bad experiences with PayPal. (One of them was having the money in a checkout-through-Paypal transaction frozen for no reason. They insisted that they would keep my money and not pass it on to the vendor if I didn't set things straight by sending them a FAX; no other mode of communication accepted). Even as a consumer I now no longer transact business through PayPal if it is at all avoidable. If I want to buy something from an online vendor that only offers PayPal, I will go to great lengths to find another vendor that offers a payment mechanism other than PayPal.
• PaulHoule 7y ago
  My wife got kicked off PayPal in 2005 because of a password problem. Maybe she could have reactivated it by sending a fax, she never did. Since then she asks me to buy stuff on ebay.
• teddyh 7y ago
  > We were lucky that we have moved away from PayPal for actual business revenue Maybe that’s the real reason for the ban? PayPal might not like people not being completely reliant on PayPal, so PayPal might tend to ban those who don’t use PayPal for everything, hoping to make all potential non-PayPal users go out of business before they become large enough to be visible? Of course, this is all paranoid speculations.
• Communitivity 7y ago
  Others have said it, but it bears repeating. If you build on someone else's platform for free, or cheaply, you are the product not the customer. At best, you are both product and a minor customer. Paypal has a history of doing this sort of thing. I've seen articles about it with Google services as well. This is one of the many reasons why I suggest using open standards. You could accept bitcoin or eth for payment, but that is possibly too impractical for some customer bases. There are alternative payment gateways to Paypal, but many of them have allegedly done similar things, including Stripe. Here is an article with advice on selecting a payment gateway for your startup, from the folks at Chargify.
  • MentallyRetired 7y ago
    But paypal takes a fee, so it isn't free.
  • falsedan 7y ago
    > someone else's platform for free Paypal is decidedly not free
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• woofie11 7y ago
  I lost trust in Paypal after one of the most credible, respectable organizations I knew was on the verge of going out-of-business. A lot of people made donations, myself included. Paypal froze and wouldn't release those donations. I would absolutely never, ever, ever run a business which relied on Paypal. As a shopper, it works okay, though. I got scammed once, and Paypal did nothing, but the risk isn't very high. It was probably twenty bucks or something, but if it were more, I could raise it with my credit card company.
• croisillon 7y ago
  Is there some kind of a PayPal hall of shame listing all the similar blog posts?
  • superkuh 7y ago
    http://www.paypalsucks.com/ http://www.paypalsucks.com/ was the place long ago. I don't know about recent stuff.
• maxhedrome 7y ago
  Peter Thiel thinks he’s going to live forever, the only thing in his will is a note to his lawyer, upon improbable death, sue God.
• mprev 7y ago
  Spam company tries to create a content marketing moment with a dog whistle headline but buries the lede that they're a spam company.
  • Loughla 7y ago
    Question about the phrase 'dog whistle headline'. I thought a dog whistle in current popular use was a headline or sentence meant to imply something hidden, usually racist/sexist/other-ist. Like the phrase 'those people' or something like that. How is this headline implying anything other than what it says, or is my interpretation of that phrase wrong?
    • wccrawford 7y ago
      A real "dog whistle" is used to get the attention of the dogs and tell them to do something. A dog whistle headline would therefore be attempting to round up a bunch of people to fight their fight for them. And had they been doing good, wholesome things at their company instead of creating spam tools, it probably would have worked. Unfortunately for them, people are starting to learn to dig a little deeper before getting out the pitchforks.
      • deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      • pvg 7y ago
        A real dog whistle is heard by dogs but not people so the phrase is about things addressing a specific subset of the audience in some un-obvious and underhanded way. This headline doesn't - simply misrepresenting yourself by omission or trying to enlist a paypal ragemob to your cause is not a 'dog whistle'.
• chaz6 7y ago
  I lost complete trust in PayPal after my account was compromised AFTER i set up two-factor authentication (annoying to this day, they still do not support U2F. I got them to credit me some of the money back, but after cancelling my cards, they refuse to close my account unless I add a new funding source so they can send the money to me. They are too stupid to give me a deadlock letter I can take to the ombudsman. I am left out of pocket because I have no way to get my money back.
• modzu 7y ago
  i've always assumed paypal was software and hence why they were so profitable -- those decisions, appeal processes, everything is all automated. you're sending emails complaining to... the email server. actually thats a growing business (bots to handle your customer service) which simply programmatically enforce a contract. it's terrifying.
• YeahSureWhyNot 7y ago
  LPT: Always withdraw your money from PayPal. If PayPal refunds your customer and your balance goes to negative, no worries because the collection PayPal sends you to is not connected to your social.
• simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  What's the best alternative to Paypal today?
  • sameoldfears 7y ago
    I am curious in this as well.
  • harel 7y ago
    Stripe? Square?
  • NightlyDev 7y ago
    I'm having security issues with PayPal payments(customers making fake chargeback in an attempt to get things for free). Stripe seems like a better choice and I plan to switch, but PayPal is well known and trusted by buyers. Sellers should not trust PayPal, at all.
• qwerty456127 7y ago
  This is a great example why need ctyptocurrencies so we could just pay without relying on any 3rd party. People who run around yelling ctyptocurrencies are for drugs only should think about this.
• jlg23 7y ago
  > The most interesting thing is that we’ve moved away from PayPal in the last two years and have only been receiving some minor payments and paying for a few online services. Albeit it would be really, really nice to do so, there is absolutely no incentive for a payment provider to have someone look into a case like this when the salary of that person (for the time spent on the case) exceeds the revenue made with the customer.
• chii 7y ago
  paypal has no business in regulating what software their customers are allowed or not allowed to sell. Even if it's spam creation software. If it's not illegal to sell, it should not be blocked by paypal. If the software is spam and is bad for society, let society introduce a law to ban the software, the same way you can't sell drugs using paypal. This moral policing by businesses is bad for society - and lets businesses dictate more than they ought to be able to.
  • elbrian 7y ago
    > paypal has no business in regulating what software their customers are allowed or not allowed to sell. PayPal is a private company. They do have business in regulating what types of customers they'd like to serve, and they are well-within their rights to create and enforce their own terms of use. Certain types of customers (scammers, spammers, etc) are a greater liability and can end up causing more issues (and less revenue) than they are worth, so it makes perfect sense for PayPal to choose not to do business with them.
  • astura 7y ago
    Literally 100% of payment processors heavily "regulate" what their customers sell/do and who is profitable to do business with and what clients are profitable to associate with. For example, if an industry has a humongous chargeback and fraud rate, then they become unprofitable and get dropped. This is why American Express stopped allowing porn (there was news articles about it at the time and they went on record saying massive amounts of chargebacks and fraud from porn sites were solely the reasons). American Express and Visa also don't allow you to use you to use your credit card to pay your mortgage (Mastercard does). I don't know the reasons why, but I'm sure it's not arbitrary. They also have to conform to laws and regulations. This is an offshore company, PayPal is based in the United States. I don't know if its legal to sell this sort of spamware-as-a-service in the United States, but I think there might be AT LEAST copyright issues content harvesting that they appear to be doing (based on other comments). These are businesses, not charities.
    • magduf 7y ago
      >These are businesses, not charities. It's not just that: these are businesses, not the government. A lot of free-speech advocates and libertarian thinkers seem to think somehow that private businesses somehow have a responsibility to uphold free speech, and they simply don't. It's the government that can't restrict you from free speech (in the USA); but companies don't have to put up with it on their property or when using their service.
• ingenium 7y ago
  This same thing happened to my personal Paypal account out of no where one morning. I hadn't used it in over a month. My mother's personal Paypal account (lives in a different state) was also banned at the exact same time. She hadn't used it in months. We still have no idea what triggered it.
• intrasight 7y ago
  Paypal? Seriously? I've no sympathy.
• Leader2light 7y ago
  PayPal is the worst. I must use stealth accounts with both PayPal and eBay to do basic selling now after being banned. I make it work just fine, but its a pain.
• WhiteOwlLion 7y ago
  Does PayPal still require you to arbitrate in California? This is why auto-sweep is so useful. At most, they can only have 3 business days of your money.
• jedberg 7y ago
  PayPal spends a lot of money on lawyers to make sure that no state or country considers them a bank. The reason is so they can avoid banking regulations. If they were subject to regulations, they wouldn’t be able to freeze your account without warning, nor hold your money for 180 days. As they say internally: “we don’t make money by letting people have it back”.
  • jedimastert 7y ago
    > As they say internally: “we don’t make money by letting people have it back”. I'm gonna need a source for that.
    • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      Just in case you don't know I'm almost certain jedburg is the person in the profile here https://www.meetup.com/devops/events/191408942/ https://www.meetup.com/devops/events/191408942/.
    • jedberg 7y ago
      It’s a joke. :)
  • mprev 7y ago
    This is demonstrably not true: https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/16927/paypal-gets-banking-licence-in-europe https://www.finextra.com/newsarticle/16927/paypal-gets-banki...
    • jedberg 7y ago
      That’s Europe, not the US. If they were subject to US banking regulations they couldn’t hold your money for 180 days. And I didn’t say they were always successful, they just try really hard.
      • mprev 7y ago
        You wrote "no state or country".
• shams93 7y ago
  Then if you're an indie musician on Bandcamp they give you no option but to use PayPal however if you're not on Bandcamp nobody is going to buy your music directly from your website anymore and for underground acts Bandcamp is better than Spotify but the whole forced use of PayPal there meant for a decade I couldn't use Bandcamp until I got a new PayPal account after they killed the account I had had for 15 years.
  • lukeholder 7y ago
    Longest sentence ever, upvoted.
    • mojomark 7y ago
      Most uses of the word "Bandcamp" in single sentence. Upvoted.
    • butterpeanut 7y ago
      Without that second 'had' it would have been too close to call.
      • mathieuh 7y ago
        “John, where Jane had had ‘had’, had had ‘had had’; ‘had had’ received the better mark”. And now ‘had’ has lost all meaning for me. I forgot which verb it was conjugated from for a second there
        • lemoncucumber 7y ago
          You missed a couple hads at the end: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_had_a_better_effect_on_the_teacher https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_while_John_had_had_had_h...
    • sandworm101 7y ago
      Musicians.
• gambler 7y ago
  Yes, I too want banks and payment providers to act like moral authority for all their clients and freeze funds and close accounts with no explanation or recourse whenever an entity does something I don't like. This will totally make things better and not be relentlessly abused after the practice is normalized. Who needs a stable society anyway.
  • hbosch 7y ago
    Legal marijuana shops are still mostly cash only specifically because they can’t bank, due to weed being federally illegal. Bank monitoring is in place to battle illegal activity, fraud and laundering. If you are doing something reprehensible, a payment company can be seen as endorsing that behavior by your association with that bank. I mean, you have a spam network here that was proudly displaying PayPal’s logo on it. I agree that it’s not right for payment processors or banks (PayPal is, unofficially, kind of both) to pass judgement on what their users spend money on... but I also agree that it is not out of line for a payments company to stop offering their services to businesses designed to spam, defraud, mislead or abuse people. Gambling websites are also known to trigger these detections when you try and deposit on to shady accounts.
    • gambler 7y ago
      >Legal marijuana shops are still mostly cash only specifically because they can’t bank, due to weed being federally illegal. There is a world of difference between closing accounts that are used to pay for activities that are illegal and closing accounts because the client does something you don't like, especially if the service provider can't even point out which part of their TOS was violated. >businesses designed to spam, defraud, mislead or abuse people If you don't draw any distinctions between "defraud" (illegal and well-defined activity) and "mislead" (can be applied to almost anything), there is literally nothing to discuss here. You don't draw any objectively defined lines between what should and should not be bannable and your stance boils down to "I like when PayPal bans someone I don't like".
      • sfkdjf9j3j 7y ago
• instaheat 7y ago
  So what should we use? Stripe?
• wetpaws 7y ago
  I stopped using PayPal after they froze 600k on the Minecraft devs account nearly putting company out of business - you can't imagine the worse advertisement for your service
• scarface74 7y ago
  What the hell? “You can’t remove your credit card or bank information from PayPal”. So even after they closed your account they still want access to your account? I haven’t thought about PayPal in years, but I had forgotten about this. When I did use it, I had a separate bank account, immediately transferred from money from Paypsl to the account and then transferred the money from the linked account to another account.
• Legogris 7y ago
  I was banned from PayPal after 11 years - because my account was initially registered when I was under 18, which is a breach of ToS. They explicitly forbid me to register again. It really came out of the blue from nowhere. Luckily for me I don't rely on PayPal so I put it in the "good riddance" category.
• joeblau 7y ago
  My question to the op is: Where were you for the few years of posts when other people wrote the same thing, yet you stuck with PayPal? It feels like people don’t want to actively move their payments processor and no amount of blog warnings are going to change that. The one thing I will say is that the growing amount of responses of teams that have similar experiences should be worrying to PayPal.
• chimen 7y ago
  The internet is literally saturated with Paypal horror stories. Why do we still see so many tears so often? How many bad reviews does a business like Paypal has to have before people start learning from the mistakes of others and not trust them with their business?
• ezoe 7y ago
  Paypal doesn't satisfy the Japanese regulation by money transfer law(資金決済法) which protect users from malicious money transfer service and alike. That tells something about their moral.
• pombrand 7y ago
  Got my Paypal account and money frozen for shipping a product that was legal to sell in the US, but not online in the UK. After asking around they told me the reason, and after implementing a system that stopped orders to the UK of said product they unfroze the account. Yes they could have given me a warning and been more transparent, but overall not too mad.
• bdibs 7y ago
  This also happened to me. They shut down the account with no warning, and ended up holding the balance (a little over $10k) for 180 days. Switched to Stripe and I haven’t been happier.
• whydoyoucare 7y ago
  Any service that favors self-designed moral and ethical values over business sense should be ditched quick and now. Yes, this is PayPal.
• chaostheory 7y ago
  Good thing there's Stripe
• rock_hard 7y ago
  Given that there is pile on of negative comments about Paypal already I figured it be nice to share that I have never had a single issue with PayPal in about 15-20 years or so. Neither on my private account nor business accounts. Not even with the paypal account for my burning man camp. Just my 2c
• miguelmota 7y ago
  Hope people learn that vendor lock-in can be a terrible experience when stuff like this happens. Always have alternatives lined-up.
• arielm 7y ago
  We use PayPal as “another” way to pay and withdraw money either weekly or when it reaches a very low set amount. It’s kind of a hassle, but if this happens at least we don’t have to worry about money we already earned. In general, PayPal has been losing a lot of traction over the years, and is one of the reasons eBay spun them out a while back. Lack of “decent” support and a week to reply to a critical email just isn’t acceptable in 2019 + the UI really isn’t that user friendly when you look at Square Cash or Apple Pay in iMessage. I won’t be surprised if they don’t exist within the next five years. Sure, they’re still integrated into a lot of things, but one competition becoming much bigger can change all of that quickly. I don’t think they’d be missed...
• dreamcompiler 7y ago
  Why is PayPal not yet regulated as the bank that it is?
• WC3w6pXxgGd 7y ago
  Having worked at PayPal in the past (and then Braintree), both companies are a total mess internally. Basically nobody knows exactly how the system works, and every new "feature" is just a hack upon the existing system. In many ways, I'm surprised either company still functions without massive blackouts all the time. That's quite the testament to the founders' code, I guess.
• mrb 7y ago
  And that's why we need financial alternatives. Alternatives where third-parties can't unilaterally decide to freeze your account, disrupting your professional and personal financial flows. Cryptocurrencies solve this specific problem, because users are in control of the cryptographic keys therefore they authorize themselves the transactions without a third party having to be involved.
• Addning 7y ago
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• Addning 7y ago
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• prirun 7y ago
  PayPal suspended my account once when I paid $5 to the NoScript guy. I called, they wouldn't tell me why they suspended my account because "that would allow people to get around the rules", and they gave me zero warning in email or anything. Next time I went to use the account, it was frozen. I don't remember how/why/when it was unsuspended, or maybe I just opened a new one. Not telling people what rules they supposedly broke is unreasonable, even if it lets bad guys figure out how to get around them.