4 ms·

I was recently banned from Paypal for life, with no reason given. I have literally used PayPal for over a decade, usually once or twice a year to pay family or

by ciguy 4y ago

I was recently banned from Paypal for life, with no reason given. I have literally used PayPal for over a decade, usually once or twice a year to pay family or friends back from something small. I have heard all the horror stories so I intentionally didn't use for anything unless the recipient had no other easy way to receive funds. I never used to pay for anything shady, or even buy anything really. It was almost always to pay someone back for dinner or something small like that. And then one day last month I got an email saying my account had been banned. They would not give me a reason, and told me if I tried to open a new account it would be banned as well. Good riddance, I don't need them anyway, but talk about burning any vestige of good will they ever had. It seems Stripe has gone the same way now. Time to move on to the next hot payments processing startup until they get big enough that they decide to start fucking their customers too.

guntab-dan 4y ago
I work for a company that helps a lot of PayPal refugees. We hear these stories all the time. In many cases people know exactly why they were banned, but it's amazing how often they have no clue (like OP). Apparently these mystery bans tend to originate from automated systems, and there are too many automated bans for it human agents to be able to investigate them all. While it feels like rule of the machines, it's actually rule of the fraudsters. If these payment processing platforms weren't so broadly vulnerable to fraud, they wouldn't need to rely on machines to make these critical decisions. An we can blame the credit card and ACH systems for both heavily prioritizing convenience over security via "pull" payments. Yes, crypto offers "push" payments, but those actually increase the risk of fraud for buyers. I think the killer combo is crypto with escrow, to protect buyers. But of course escrow has higher costs than just blindly transferring funds like the payment processors do. That's why this is one of those perennial problems of commerce.

by ciguy 4y ago

guntab-dan 4y ago

I work for a company that helps a lot of PayPal refugees. We hear these stories all the time. In many cases people know exactly why they were banned, but it's amazing how often they have no clue (like OP). Apparently these mystery bans tend to originate from automated systems, and there are too many automated bans for it human agents to be able to investigate them all. While it feels like rule of the machines, it's actually rule of the fraudsters. If these payment processing platforms weren't so broadly vulnerable to fraud, they wouldn't need to rely on machines to make these critical decisions. An we can blame the credit card and ACH systems for both heavily prioritizing convenience over security via "pull" payments. Yes, crypto offers "push" payments, but those actually increase the risk of fraud for buyers. I think the killer combo is crypto with escrow, to protect buyers. But of course escrow has higher costs than just blindly transferring funds like the payment processors do. That's why this is one of those perennial problems of commerce.