We've been going around in circles with stories like this for years. In spite of all the horror stories, people are still using PayPal. That would indicate to me that either PayPal are exploiting a monopoly position, or there is a massive gap in the market for a fast, easy payment system that doesn't treat serious customers like dirt.<p>I completely understand the Googley argument that you can't provide much customer service if you have millions of users with a tiny average revenue, but what sense is there in treating a €600,000 account so poorly? Surely they must know that they have lost him forever as a customer.<p>The only logical answer I have as to why PayPal do this to big customers is that they know that as soon as anyone gets big they leave for a cheaper merchant account, so their account freeze is just a way for them to hold on to a customer long enough to make some real money out of them. I can't believe that they would, but I'm struggling to work out why else they would act like this.
At least he's a known internet guy, it's pretty clear where the money is coming from and this post alone will get paypal to sort it immediately.<p>But why do you have to be a celeb to get decent support from paypal? Freezing over half a million euros and they don't even assign him a dedicated support person? They don't call him? Disgraceful.
Another Paypal horror story added to the list.
If someone was wondering (as i did), no, he didn't let 600k on his paypal account. That's what he's earned since they limited his account 25th august.<p>See <a href="http://twitter.com/Toucanator/status/24089600756" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/Toucanator/status/24089600756</a> and <a href="http://twitter.com/xnotch/statuses/24089647124" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/xnotch/statuses/24089647124</a> .<p>EDIT: Minecraft complete steam sales data,amazing: <a href="http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/" rel="nofollow">http://m00d.net/minecraft/sales/</a>
The "paypal blocked my money" stories are frequent.<p>I'm curious to which extent this is legal. I'm pretty sure a bank isn't allowed to block access to your accounts without a formal request from a legal entity.<p>Paypal doesn't "own" the money. This sounds to me as extremely abusive.<p>Is that this frequent?
I'm building a website that I would like to launch soon and were planning on selling digital goods. My initial idea was to just use the PayPal shopping cart, since I already have a PayPal account and it so easy to set up(I definitely don't want to go through the hassle of setting up a merchant account).<p>But all these horror stories I have read on HN the last few days have scared me a bit. I also seems that its even worse if you're not a US citizen, especially if you live in a "suspicious' country (I'm South African, not really a country with high internet fraud cases, but all African countries are painted in a bad light for some reason). But are there really any good alternatives?
What.. just bought Minecraft last week, awesome :)<p>Hope he gets this sorted out.. Also i think it's quite interesting to see one person making such an amount of money with an alpha version of a game that has not much content and graphics from the last century but fun gameplay. EA and friends should learn from this.
I run a browser based MMO that once upon a time earned a fair amount of money (not at Minecraft's astonishing levels though!) and Paypal is my only method of payment. The first time I made a large withdrawal (10s of thousands) they did something similar.<p>I think people are being very knee-jerk with their reactions about all of this. Yes, it's annoying to have your money frozen temporarily, but Paypal is basically on the line for all of that money if it turns out to be fraudulent. All they need is a series of business documents proving you really are who you say you are, and then they will hand over the money.<p>Let's face it, few people show up out of nowhere and earn a million dollars in a month!<p>Notch even knows this, if you read his blog post he says he's sure it'll get sorted out. Once you go through this process once they will not do it again.
I wonder what someone's legal recourse is in a situation like this. I mean what gives Paypal the right to claim 'suspicious activity, your money is ours' without having to provide some kind of evidence.<p>And IF something is a legitimate case of fraud, aren't they required to simply freeze the assets and turn the account holder over to the appropriate authorities ?<p>It's hard to imagine that this type of due process can be waived simply by having agreed to certain terms & conditions.
We ditched paypal because:<p>1. Their site is very slow which hurt conversions. People who may have simply paid using a regular credit card went down the PP funnel and got frustrated and simply left.<p>2. Retention for monthly subscribers was 10 to 20% lower than credit card subscribers.<p>3. Refund policy sucked. It would take several days for our customers to get their money back if we refunded them.<p>4. Tools to manage bulk recurring subscriptions sucked.<p>So glad we're free of them.
I had a similar case with PayPal, back in 2001, but the sums were much smaller. I was doing freelance work, and most of my clients paid me via PayPal. Then PayPal froze my account, when I had about $2,500 in it. I needed that money to pay rent. It took about 6 weeks before they re-opened my account. To pay rent I had to borrow money from friends and family. PayPal was very hard to deal with. They kept asking for proof that I was me. They wanted me to send bills that verified my address, but I was subletting an apartment for 3 months and had very little evidence that I was really me.<p>At another time some friends of mine started a business with me and we had a PayPal account for awhile. At some point we stopped using it, and then someone sent us $200. I've no idea what happened to that $200. Possibly it got auto-refunded at some point. Possibly it is still sitting there, in the account. Whatever email address we used for that account was tied to the company we had, which had a domain name we gave up on years ago.<p>All the same, PayPal is the easiest way to go when you are starting up a new site. And PayPal has aggressively bought up some of the competition that used to be a lot better than PayPal. (PayFlow Pro, for instance)
I bought Minecraft so I guess part of this money is/was mine.<p>I never understand why people still use Paypal. There are so many horror stories and so many alternatives. Just don't use them.
We operate a large site with thousands of PayPal payments per day. This is a sample email we just got from PP:<p>Hello ....,<p>We were recently notified that a payment you received was reversed by the buyer's bank.<p>As a result, we have reversed the following transaction:
Transaction date: xxx
Transaction amount: xxx USD
Buyer's email: xxx Buyer's name: xxx Your transaction ID: xxxx<p>PayPal is committed to maintaining a safe environment for our buyers and sellers. You can help protect yourself against claims and reversals by following the guidelines of our .<p>Thanks,<p>PayPal<p>Note that their email template has a bug: it says " following the guidelines of our ."! Cannot they fix their email templates? They are dealing with f..ing real money! The Viagra spam that I get has less bugs in their email templates!
I keep wondering why there isn't a Ycombinator-funded paypal killer.<p>I'm not a developer/coder/anything close to one, or I would do this myself.<p>Come on, guys! Get on this!
Google is trying to create their own payment system. It hasn't gotten much traction. Why don't they go ahead and support countries throughout the world (if they want to leave out a FEW places like North Korea that would be fine)? Seems to me that then they would have a ready-made constituency. Not to mention pleasing a huge number of Android developers. Yet they don't do this... Why? There must be something difficult or dangerous about it, but what? Does anyone know the answer?
Paypal has the most customers of any financial institution in the world, they have some of the largest challenges of any financial institution in the world. Not the least of which being that everybody who is capable of using paypal is simultaneously connected to the biggest and most efficient megaphone ever invented (the internet) and the unique consequences for bad press that situation entails.<p>You can decry paypal's customer service, no doubt, but recognize that the root cause of these problems are all of the very real scammers who have abused the system and never make the news. Consider an analogous situation, check fraud. There are many stores and restaurants that do not accept checks, is this because banks are evil and hate honoring checks? No, it's because of repeated abuse from fraudsters devaluing checks as a method of payment. The same is happening here with online payments. You can get around the problem by paying more money for a merchant account but that only protects you from the immediate effects of the problem for a little while.
I work at PayPal, though not in fraud detection, and it always seems interesting how much bad publicity the company is getting lately. I personally wish they would address the social part of doing business on the web.<p>There's a reason why the hold explanations are vague but it has nothing to do with questionable intentions.
We've experienced this issue in the past. If you're gonna use PayPal, here are some tips:<p>1) Use your full legal name when creating the account.<p>2) If you're creating the account for a company, make sure the owner of the account is an officer of the company (CEO, Vice President, etc).<p>3) Have only one account. If you're creating an account for your business, and you already have a personal account, you're gonna run into problems.<p>4) Make sure the mailing address you give is actually accessible. PayPal's gonna mail a verification code to you once you start making a sizable amount.<p>And just in general, once you start getting money into your account, PayPal's always gonna come knocking. At one point, PayPal prevented us from even receiving payments. But eventually, after a while of working with them, they got off our backs and we stopped having problems with them.
Most of the paypal horror stories always relate to paypal users not providing or not willing to provide valid information to identify their accounts.<p>In Luxembourg (and paypal is a registred and regulated bank in Luxembourg), the government requires the bank to know it's customers identities, otherwise the bank is not allowed to do business with their customers. And an email will not be enough. You have to provide passports/identity cards.<p>And I guess that's what happens here. After a certain transaction amount, paypal requires more information than just an email address.
When will:<p>1) Companies learn that to cheap out on the payment process and go through PayPal is stupid and things like this WILL happen. You deserve what happens when you go through PayPal as it means you either didn't research it's history or didn't listen to the warnings.<p>2) Customers learn not to do business with a company that is too cheap to setup their own payment process and not go through PayPal. By supporting business' that are using PayPal we allow the cycle to continue.
We need some way to force paypal to stop defrauding honest people (as well as being faster, but that isn't such a big problem).<p>Unfortunately there doesn't really exist a good alternative outside the US.<p>Anybody knows how to start lobbying against paypal?
Everyone has known for years that Paypal is awful, regularly steals large amounts of money held by perfectly legitimate customers, and does it all through inscrutable, unfriendly, customer-service processes.<p><i>I know this, man.</i><p>Yet Paypal is bigger than ever, and there's no glimmer of improvement on the horizon.<p>So either we assume Ebay, the parent corp, is so clueless about milking Paypal for profit while reinvesting as little as possible back into it, or we assume Ebay has a reason for not improving Paypal in any significant way in the past 5+ years.<p>I'm starting to suspect there's a great financial reason for Ebay to keep doing this. And it might be a similar financial strategy that Amazon has famously used from day 1. Amazon collect payments immediately, yet ships items much later. This means their cashflow is always more than their inventory expenses at any given moment. For however much time there is until that gap closes, Amazon is in a great position—essentially getting a short term loan, and if you consider their volume of transactions, that is billions of cash being held in floating pools.<p><i>What if Paypal provides a similar benefit to Ebay's bottom line?</i> Paypal isn't a bank, so they can do whatever they want with the held funds. I suppose what actually happens to the held funds is a corporate secret they guard carefully. But I bet it props up Ebay's cashflow in a major way. If Ebay changed ways and forced Paypal to provide better guarantees, much like a bank, then their cashflow would take a hit.<p>Good idea or am I off?
PayPal recently pulled this stunt on me. While very frustrating at the time, especially since there was no phone support available for the next 3 days due to labor day weekend, at least now I have scanned copy of my Passport on my computer.