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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Guerilla ago
Well, that was expected. Paypal is a fucking terrible corporation and people should REALLY stop trusting these fucking blackmailers. How many people must these fucks screw before the public stops trusting them with their money?
edit: It seems Google Wallet is just as terrible, so the only solution for an easy to pay system is a build in site pay feature which imo should be a priority now if we want voat to survive. Unless there are other suggestions.
edit2: If you don't want to close your paypal account because you might need it in the future, which is understandable given its popularity, I urge everyone to empty their paypal accounts completely and only use it for direct transactions with their CC. Not just because you're boycotting but to protect your money from these thieving fucks (for example...). Also, if you're buying something from another country make sure to change the settings to stop paypal from converting the currency for you (the setting is in tiny fond during the transaction) because paypal's currency exchange rates are obscenely expensive. It's just another way for paypal to rip off their customers and it's actually an opt-out system which is enraging. And DO NOT "upgrade" your account unless you really need that, iirc there are a couple of scams there too.
skizm ago
I'm fighting a losing battle because the internet loves to hate paypal, but...Paypal is not trying to "scam" you. They're an enormous multi-billion dollar company with revenue around $7 billion. Do you really think paypal is really going to risk legal action in order to scam some random sellers out of a couple bucks? Hell no.
Paypal is just playing the odds. Moving money is insanely regulated. If they accidentally transfer money for the wrong reason (anything illegal) they are on the hook or if someone transfers a lot of money and then a lot of charge backs come through, they are on the hook. This last reason is the reason paypal will consistently lock/limit accounts that get a lot of volume in a short amount of time (amazon and google do this also). If someone stole a lot of CCs and all the sudden all the transactions are invalid but they already paid out, they are on the hook for all that money. Notch went through this when he had $600k in his paypal acct. Eventually when paypal in convinced nothing fishy is going on they will release the funds and let you continue business as normal.
Moving money (even with bitcoin) takes some non-instant amount of time to make sure all transactions are valid (legal, and the money really exists) so companies like stripe, paypal, wepay, etc. all do business on the side of caution. They will aggressively lock accounts if they think there is even a chance of something off.
The important thing to note here, is they will never touch money in an account they have locked. If they think a certain account has compromised money, they will leave it alone and never access it until they deem enough time has passed that they are not legally on the hook, then they generally unlock the account.
toddgak ago
Moving bitcoins around is peer to peer and there are no checks to see if they are legal because nobody controls it. If we ever see a day where bitcoin becomes common currency we won't have to worry about our money constantly being guilty until proven innocent.
skizm ago
Assuming Ghash doesn't control >50% of the blockchain. Also we'll have to wait several hours before the block chain confirms the transaction. Also, since money can be traced publicly, if your money is found to have been used in a crime or stolen at some point, it may just be taken by the cops like anything else in a criminal case. Also assuming we're not using 3rd parties to house our wallets. Also assuming we don't have a new paypal like site that keeps bitcoins centralized so you can spend them from anywhere (counter-intuitive? yes, but probably going to happen in btc ever becomes popular).
So many problems with BTC at the moment, it is tough to see it breaking through. I'm not even going to touch the deflationary argument because that's a whole different can of worms.
EDIT: also the fact that there are no checks to see if they are legal is a bad thing
immibis ago
That is because Bitcoin doesn't support chargebacks (which is a deliberate design feature).
On the other hand, you've traded one problem for another. The intermediary can't freeze your money, but if you get scammed, you have no recourse. Is scamming more common than PayPal account freezing? I don't know, but I suspect so.