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Paypal shut my account today because my business donated money to wikileaks
- alnayyir 16y agohttp://hackerne.ws/item?id=1982856 http://hackerne.ws/item?id=1982856 What did I say HN? What did I say?
- gcb 16y agoSo much for political freedom
- scrod 16y agoWhat do you mean, you have complete freedom! Why, all you have to do is simply to start your own international payment processing system, convince enough people to use it, and voila; convenient money-transfer freedom by your own rules! Oh, what's that you say? You don't have a multimillionaire co-founding CEO to force your idea on the masses by partnering with existing internet monopolies? Well, then obviously you just need to work harder for your liberty (erm, I mean, it's not as if you're actually entitled to political expression or anything—that's for people with money).
- gcb 16y agoyou forgot that to convince enough people i can't be silenced every step on the way.
- tptacek 16y agoLots of people donated to Wikileaks. Did they all get locked out? Or is something else going on here? We can't possibly know from this, can we?
- tedunangst 16y agoWhat's going on is that posting "paypal disabled my account" gets more karma than posting "paypal could disable your account".
- jcr 16y agoAgreed. There's obviously trolling for karma going on, but then again, there's the other side of it, namely, the author trying to use the reddit post as leverage when trying to sort things out with paypal.
- tedunangst 16y agoIf the point was to convince paypal to restore the account, posting the same text to his business web page and then linking to it from reddit would be an instant 100x credibility boost.
- ergo98 16y agoThere's a complete lack of detail in this story, and the wikileaks bit almost seems like an aside looking to cash in on some of the wikileaks sympathy. It's humorous how bitchy people are about PayPal -- do this sort of stuff with your bank and see how that turns out. Long before wikileaks, and before 9/11, banking and financial regulations have been very tight. Every single payment system on the planet has to abide by the laws of the countries that they are operating in. Anti-money laundering regulations, in particular, apply to every organization that does money transfers of any sort. Further still, many of the recipients of PayPal cash got paid via credit card. For those who don't know this, when you pay someone with a credit card they normally don't get a penny for 60 days or so. PayPal, in letting you withdraw cash against credit card payments, is essentially fronting you a loan with the CC receipts as the collateral, though obviously they have risk if you have significant fraud or chargebacks. It's that element that so many fail to understand.
- siculars 16y agoYou could not pay me to use paypal.
- jjoe 16y agoAs a person, you do have the freedom to donate to whomever you like but you, alone, have to bear the consequences. But to use your business account to donate money puts you and your clients (and their livelihood) at risk. I don't think it's responsible. Regards
- mey 16y agoUnder US law, you can not donate to whomever you wish. Sending money to organizations flagged as terrorist organizations is illegal. (Not that the US has officially declared the wikileaks org to be a terrorist organization.)
- scootklein 16y agoI guess the moral of the story, whether PayPal is justified or not, is to have another payment solution in the wings ready to go at any time.
- activationreq 16y agohttp://www.paypalalternatives.net/ http://www.paypalalternatives.net/
- pasbesoin 16y agoOT, but I recently updated my credit card information in PayPal. New information is valid and verified. Bank account information remains unchanged and is the first choice as a source of funds. My couple of crappy little subscription payments start failing. "No secondary source of funds specified." I look through all the configuration settings -- which it turns out are not at all clear about funding sources for existing subscriptions. About three times. It all looks fine / as good as I can set it. I email PayPal. It's like talking to a blank wall. Customer support? Buwahahaha! (That would be their response, not mine.) Fuck them. I wouldn't trust them to buy a lollipop. (Which reminds me, I should probably just close my account, though I've kept it up to this point for the occasional crappy little payment.) CORRECTION: I recall now, I used their own web site form to 'report a problem / as a question', not email.
- jonursenbach 16y agoThey finally let me close mine today. Had an "instant" payment pending for the past week for some reason. Good riddance.
- wowfat 16y agoi hope my hackernews account is not shut for upvoting this post
- tzs 16y agoIf you read past the top dozen or so comments on Reddit, you get to the likely real explanation. The guy is (1) emptying his account every day, and (2) making unusual large oversees payments. These are things that correlate pretty well with scammers, and that is probably why his account is being investigated.