The reason given was "Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for certain sexually oriented materials or services or for items that could be considered obscene". This is wrong/false on so many levels. We used PayPal only as a means to receive voluntary donations from people who wanted to support further development of Voat and to help pay for our hosting fees. This is beyond crazy.
According to PayPal User Agreement, our funds can be kept by PayPal for 180 days. I requested further clarification from PayPal, but I would like to advise everyone who planned to donate to Voat - to NOT do so via PayPal.
Honestly, I don't know what I expected when I trusted PayPal with our donation money. I apologize to everyone who donated to us through PayPal and I will badge everyone who did so even if the funds are never released by PayPal.
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twitterhitter ago
[email protected] is the manually read escalation account for all issues regarding violations of ToS and specifically relegated to illegal content. Send them an email stating, very clearly, that the allegations made against voat.co were intentionally falsified by a suspicious individual with ZERO ties to the website (and zero monetary interaction to boot), that an investigation as long as ten seconds will show they were falsified and that these allegations were filed with specific malicious intent of shutting a private business down. Use these as proof of the identity of the false reporter https://archive.is/VvIrK https://archive.is/Jwbo7 and be polite if possible.
The phone centers just take claims, false or not, and move them up a chain. If there was a phone call to make this happen, it would have ended where mine did by talking to a supervisor who gave me the email and advised me to escalate it manually. If this was done with one person that has no ownership or financial ties to the website then by theory I should be able to undo it in a day. But sending more emails with more proof should make this go by easier.
If the owner of the account makes an appeal, as in the owner of the PayPal itself, they will be able to receive direct updates on the investigation progress. I strongly advise anyone and everyone here concerned with this issue to send in emails. Even if you're sworn of PayPal for good from this, it's still possible to recover and a thousand voices is always more visible than one or two. This should be an easy fix if we all civilly contact them that something on their end went wrong.
twitterhitter ago
I've sent mine. I included the archives because they make it grossly apparent that this person is just doing this for 'teh lolz' and not out of any concern for any broken rules. I still advise anyone to do the same, with your formal email if possible, and let them know that they are being made fools of. If it's this easy to shut down a business on PayPal, then no business on PayPal is ever guaranteed safe.