This website was basically an extreme plagiarism website - all the way back in 2014 we had articles like this:<p>"The Hacker News - Profiting Off Extensive Plagiarism from Legitimate News Sources"<p>Interesting they feel so unfairly treated by paypal, but don't treat others properly themselves.
Paypal has done this multiple times, here are some incidents.<p><a href="https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/My-Account/Permanent-BAN-limited-account/td-p/1489460" rel="nofollow">https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/My-Account/Permanent-BAN...</a><p><a href="https://medium.com/@puntofisso/paypal-closed-my-account-with-no-explanation-it-could-happen-to-you-6ff0ba4ea95f" rel="nofollow">https://medium.com/@puntofisso/paypal-closed-my-account-with...</a><p><a href="https://www.elliott.org/blog/banned-from-palpal-account-limitations/" rel="nofollow">https://www.elliott.org/blog/banned-from-palpal-account-limi...</a><p><a href="https://www.success.grownupgeek.com/index.php/2008/04/05/paypal-limited-access/comment-page-3/" rel="nofollow">https://www.success.grownupgeek.com/index.php/2008/04/05/pay...</a><p>Completely relying on any third party is a bad idea. We should consider the risks when we signup to any service. Around this month we have seen multiple companies banning accounts without giving valid reasons MailChimp, Patreon, Slack(They had a reason but they didn't notify the users earlier, however they appologized later)<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18754860" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18754860</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18715866</a><p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18724107" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18724107</a>
This is a fraud website which has mercilessly ripped off content from other sites and published as its own. Also it has published a ton of proprietary information from time to time. Good riddance!
They also reportedly shutdown Subscribe Star recently, when people started to use it instead of Patreon, in the wake of the Patreon banning of some prominent You Tuber. This isn't working. The free market doesn't seem to work well in the tech world, where we have all powerfull monopolies controlling what we say, what we know and what we buy. We need new laws.
PayPal is a disgrace. Years ago they blocked my account and freezed my money until I sent them a copy of my passport, my birth certificate, and a proof of address. But sending them wasn't enough, as this dragged on for months and months with no feedback from them. Eventually (after over a year) they cleared my account, but just a month later it was frozen again, <i>and they asked for the exact same documents</i> yet again. By that time I had made sure I had no money in the account, so I didn't even bother contacting them again.<p>This was many years ago, and I have almost successfully avoided them since. However, a few months back I had to buy something from Ebay, and I could only pay through PayPal. I now live in a different country, and I have learned that I needed to create a brand new account, you can't change the country of the old account (not that i wanted to use that old account anyway). I made a new account, paid that Ebay guy, and got my merchandise. A month later (after I had already received my merchandise and having not used PayPal after that) I got an e-mail from PayPal asking me yet again for a copy of my passport, my birth certificate, and a proof of address.<p>Unbelievable. Stay away from PayPal if you can!
As far as I know, The Hacker News is just bunch of copied articles (i.e., blog spam) - but copying and plagiarism is so prevalent and pervasive on these news sites. Nothing new here.<p>However, they did add "donate" pay button on their website which means that PayPal might be on the hook if somebody donates to The Hacker News but article is written by somebody else. Just speculating.
<a href="https://hackernoon.com/paypal-is-still-one-of-the-worst-online-examples-of-customer-service-42f3c13f6cd0" rel="nofollow">https://hackernoon.com/paypal-is-still-one-of-the-worst-onli...</a><p>I wrote this article on Hacker Noon 18 months ago or so, nothing has changed. The only good thing was the article going viral, which spawned a new golden level of PayPal customer service - they also had to disable account deletion for 48h, which was nice to know.<p>I've moved away entirely to Stripe and other services and it's been bliss.
Often, the bans are just because they implemented Federal rules in the most stupid way possible.<p>For example, the US has something called the "Office of Foreign Assets Control" (OFAC). It's a list of names that companies like PayPal are supposed to prevent from being sent payments.<p>Paypal chose to implement it with super dumb string matching in ANY field. So, for example, if you put the words "Castro", "Cuba" or "JAMES KANG" into ANY field (even a MEMO field)...your payment gets stopped and your account frozen until you send them the DOB for "Cuba", even though it was just in a memo field.<p><a href="https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160817/13505935266/paypal-stops-payment-just-because-payees-memo-included-word-cuba.shtml" rel="nofollow">https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160817/13505935266/paypa...</a><p><a href="https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Business-Archive/The-Secret-Paypal-Blacklist/m-p/925329#U925329" rel="nofollow">https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/About-Business-Archive/T...</a><p><a href="https://imgur.com/a/RnpRm" rel="nofollow">https://imgur.com/a/RnpRm</a>
Is there any viable alternative to PayPal for a EU-based micro-business wanting to accept CC payments from North American customers?<p>I run a legally operating one-man business providing electronic services to customers (mostly other businesses) in EU, US and Canada. The EU customers pay me with bank transfers like civilized human beings, but Americans and Canadians always insist on PayPal because, apparently, North American banking system charges an arm and a leg for international bank transfers, so they'd rather pay with CC.<p>I didn't mind having to provide PayPal with scans of a bunch of sensitive documents. What I do mind is pretending my PayPal balance is not real money but virtual tokens with little legal protection and the possibility of being arbitrarily frozen for an undisclosed reason. That, and their horrendous fees (including currency conversions based on rates they pull out of the ass) for which they don't even provide anything resembling a legal invoice (a screenshot of an HTML table won't cut with my IRS).<p>Someone, for the love of God, tell me there's an alternative a teeny-tiny business like mine could use.
All this talk of monopoly in this sector of finance makes me wonder how you'd start a service in this space.<p>And it made me realize I have no idea how it works.<p>I swipe (or insert w/ chip) at a POS... which then beamz the transaction to VISA? So do you need to get a partnership with all of the POS vendors? Is that open or closed?<p>Of course, that presupposes that someone has your card. VISA doesn't make cards, they just get banks to issue cards using their network (why don't banks do this on their own?). So now I also need a partnership with at least one large bank to have a decent enough exposure to get those partnerships with those POS vendors?<p>The challenges sound largely political, in making those initial connections with the right company. Which doesn't make them easy, but it elevates a deceptively simple technical problem to a hard one, I think.
Of all the legit PayPal outrage stories this one doesn’t seem outrage-worthy. Looks like a bad blog spam account trying to capitalize on this community’s name. Good for PayPal and for everyone really? What am I missing?
Every chance I get, I tell people not to use PayPal. They have done this repeatedly, and the people who are affected have absolutely no recourse unless they happen to own a popular newspaper. PayPal has been shamed into doing the right thing, and that seems to be the only recourse. From reports I've heard, their internal system doesn't exist, and they aren't a bank, so there is no legal recourse either.
Real Hacker News would’ve known to avoid PayPal :)<p>This story only made the front page because of the name confusion. Other comments claim that name choice to be intentional
On Why this site was banned? <a href="http://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/thehackernews/" rel="nofollow">http://attrition.org/errata/plagiarism/thehackernews/</a> Plagiarism to begin with!
Regardless of weather the `THN` name is confusing or not and regardless of the speculations, does paypal need to give a reason for termination? Are they legally obligated? Is it something they should do for the sake of customers?<p>Should one get mad at `THN` because there name overlaps HN and they supposedly are `real hack` or should we be mad at paypal because it's overreaching it's powers?
Well they discover a thing: regulation may slow down things, but protect. A bank can't lock you out without facing trial, an internet company, far less regulated can.<p>Now think many time because we generally do no see banks as something "good" especially these days. If such days arrive it means that we are really in a dangerous situation.<p>And for we I mean "society".
I hope we have more democratization of payment processing. I don't have an opinion of this instance either way, but the fact that a few companies dominate the payment universe is troubling.
From the follow-up tweet:<p>> Instead of giving a valid reason, company says "specific reasons for such a decision is proprietary & it is not released since that could impair PayPal's ability to do business in a safe and secure manner"<p>I've been trying to close my PayPal account for the last week and will keep trying, but so far have not been able to. I've had this account since 2000. I want to close it because of the treatment of SubscribeStar and others. I've never watched a video by Sargon of Akkad. But even if it was Adolph of Hitler I'd be concerned about this behavior by Patreon. For PayPal to back them up by dropping a competitor is enough for me to want to reciprocate.<p>First, PayPal required me to individually cancel most of the vendors I've paid via PayPal in the last decade or so, and made it difficult to discover how to do that. But I finally figured it out and cancelled them all. If they weren't being mulish about this it seems like it would be easy for them to do the same as part of the process of closing the account.<p>Now that I've done this I still can't cancel via their web site. I get the message "Before you close your account -- Sorry, there's a problem. If you keep seeing this, please contact customer service." There is no email address on their contact page. Their pop-up chat app on the contact page freezes immediately and is unusable. I'll call them if I have to, but I shouldn't have to. The issues closing the account are by themselves enough to make me want to close it.<p>When I do manage to close the account I'm hoping that they ask me for a reason, at which point I plan to tell them "specific reasons for such a decision is proprietary & it is not released since that could impair my ability to do business in a safe and secure manner."
So you can take someone's money and not give them a reason for it? Isn't this called theft?<p>This happened to a very minor account we had, reasoning was dubious.<p>Without any kind of transparency or due process ... (or competition) ... this is a problem.