A decade ago I remember a friend who had a small business selling some niche collectors items. One day, he was scammed. The guy reported that the package was never delivered and, without even investigating, Paypal banned my friend's account and awarded the buyer their money back.
Paypal has always, and will always be a shit company. Charging people $2,500 for wrongthink is simply asinine. They must be betting BIG on either woke politics being mainstream for the long term, unbreakable bonds with their existing customers, or both. I can't even think of someone around me that uses paypal regularly.
I will be interested in reading the technical report on how they plan on implementing this because I'm sure it'll be silicon valley diarrhea. I am currently working out how to pay companies in a similar fashion to Paypal. I'm looking at Privacy.com but something is off about it to me for some reason. Once that is solved I'll get this ape off my back forever.
I wonder what happens if I just say "lol, not paying" to them. Would they put me in collections? It seems infeasible to even enforce this and it strikes me that clicking a button doesn't amount of a legal agreement.
I guess you're not in Europe. Paypal is huge here, especially in Germany. Has been useful for years here for free instant transactions without currency conversion fees (at least between some euro currencies)
Paypal got popular because it allowed people to pay for things instantly online. SEPA Überweisung didn't really solve that problem and credit cards used to be rather uncommon - even today many germans don't have one.
P2P payments between friends came later and wer just another thing Paypal could handle but at that point it was already very popular.
That's not even a requirement here - they just have to continually adjust their principles to be whatever happens to be most fashionable at the moment, just like most everybody else does.
> I wonder what happens if I just say "lol, not paying" to them. Would they put me in collections?
You can revoke paypal's ACH authorization to your accounts [0]. I would not want to deal with the headache of them falsely telling creditors that I owe them money, though.
Good luck with that. I had some random bad actor somehow get ahold of my account numbers and debit ~$40 out of my account once via something called a "demand draft." My bank refunded me the money, but they told me they'd have to close my old account and open a whole new account in order to stop it from happening again in the future.
> open a whole new account in order to stop it from happening again in the future
Not sure how that would stop it from happening again in the future, if the bank isn't going to make the barest attempt at stopping people from debiting your accounts with just the routing number + account number...
That's what I told them. They shrugged, opened a new account, transferred my balance, and closed the old one. It hasn't happened since, and I have no idea why or how it happened in the first place.
How exactly do conditions like this work in practice?
I can go ahead and write a ToS or even a contract that says "if you don't give me a blue M&M on Saturday 29 October 2022, you owe me $1M". I can get a client to sign it, perhaps it's part of my conditions as a freelancer.
I can't realistically see any court enforcing that.
As far as I can tell PayPal can only get away with this nonsense because they hold your money anyway. It's exactly the sort of reason people are fighting against cashless/custodial financial systems.
>How exactly do conditions like this work in practice?
They take the money and bet on not enough people trying to sue and the terms being ironclad enough if they do that they get away with it in general even if they have to pay out a few times.
I've wondered how far these TOS via clicks can go and what would actually stand up in court.
I'm also surprised an activist hasn't attached a TOS to sending payments such as "By accepting my money you agree to pay me $1 Million dollars for any time I spend more that 5 minutes with customer service without my dispute being settled."
I seem to remember a case where someone altered the fine print agreement on a credit card application and the credit card company lost the case with the consumer, but I forget the details.
Wow, great news! Now everyone who says anything racist will have to put $2500 into the swear jar. I expect racism will disappear overnight, and we will have a plushappy society with institutionalized love for all. Thanks PayPal!
PayPalBot recognizes your discourse as sarcastic and diminutive, both of which are specified offenses under the PayPal Terms of Service. Your account has been charged a one-time, irrecoverable fee of $2,500.
And if PayPal was funding exclusively the "white European/American male" community, such that organizations that cared equally about black people were not eligible for their cash, do you think that would pass by unremarked? Of course it's not a "contribution", it's racism in which people are being given money because of the color of their skin.
> Racism is the belief that groups of humans possess different behavioral traits corresponding to inherited attributes and can be divided based on the superiority of one race over another.
How is helping a discriminated community racist, according to this definition ?
A group of humans possessing inherited attributes (black skin) are divided (into two groups, one being helped, the other not) based on the superiority of one race over another (only blacks need help, because other races are better off?).
I am curious to understand the reasoning behind people saying it was a mistake, like how does something that big get past all the C-suites, F-suites and every other suite people of the company...
Like I mean seriously was everyone blind!?
Well, PayPal did say, several times, it was just an internal error and that they, absolutely, weren't going to implement that measure. [1]
Some people were also reporting, that when closing their account, a message stating the measure was not going to be implemented was shown up in the screen (but I didn't see any clear proof that was true).
It could conceivable just be something like a developer using the wrong draft version, the lawyer accidentally sending the wrong version after a few rounds of back-and-forths over potential drafts, or some other fairly silly mix-up like that.
Of course calling it a "mistake" is more likely to be corporate spin and back-pedalling, but you can never be quite sure because the explanation could be true, and that's kind of the point of the spin.
Same here. I had an account from 2002 and closed it without a second thought. On the plus side, they sent an individual email for each business or person that I had a payment set up with even if it was not recurring which made it very easy to figure out what vendors I needed to update.
The stuff that concerns me just as much as the policing of opinions is all the list of things requiring pre-approval. I have web applications that my customers pay for with cryptocurrency, sometimes use telemedicine or make an adult purchase. It seems like I am supposed to discuss all of my personal life and business ahead of time with PayPal and then I would still be just kind of hoping for good will.
The beauty of this (as far as US weaponization of law is concerned) is that yes, you are correct. But because there is functionally no customer service at Paypal, the Legal Department is customer service.
So to even talk to Paypal about these things you would have to spend thousands of dollars and several months.
And when you make a mistake in a way Paypal doesn't like, you'll be obliterated.
Those of us who grew or lived in the third world will recognize the current status of US law under Biden quite clearly: "For my friends, anything. For my enemies? The law!", it's just now extended down to the consumer ToS level.
I checked the internet archive (wayback machine) and don't see that the AUP has changed significantly in recent months. While I continue to disagree with PayPal's stance and ambiguous language, the article led me to believe that they'd snuck it back in. I don't see anything mentioning "mis-information" in the AUP, but there are still plenty of completely subjective language in the document.
It seems to be this garbage has been the same the whole time.
See https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/useragreement-full and search for 2,500, which reveals: "You acknowledge and agree that $2,500.00 U.S. dollars per violation of the Acceptable Use Policy is presently a reasonable minimum estimate of PayPal’s actual damages".
So it depends on the interpretation of the Acceptable Use Policy and how that policy changes over time.
I don't think that's quite true and I don't have a copy of their terms of service from 2011. Let's apply their rules as they stand today to various artists:
"(f) the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory or the financial exploitation of a crime"
If your enemy were to again power, or an unjust ruler, how might these laws be used against you and the culture? Just because your "side" is winning now doesn't mean that will always be the case. Just because we're now "enlightened" and we would no longer jail Galileo or throw a fuss over Mapplethorpe does not mean that will always be the case. Are the rules just? Why is a finance company policing expression on the internet? Why are we turning to a finance company for moral guidance?
Admittedly I haven't done a close read, but on first skimming I didn't see anything that limits this to commercial transactions between arms-length buyers and sellers. Where are you getting that from?
To my view, there's a world of difference between "You can't use PayPal as a payment processor for gun sales" and "You can't use PayPal to pay pals back for covering your range fees last Saturday."
Yet the AUP seems broad enough to cover both: "You may not use the PayPal service for activities that... relate to transactions involving... ammunition, firearms, or certain firearm parts or accessories...." https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/acceptableuse-full
> To my view, there's a world of difference between "You can't use PayPal as a payment processor for gun sales" and "You can't use PayPal to pay pals back for covering your range fees last Saturday."
Firearms are for absolutely no reason what-so-ever taboo on most payment processors. The AUP is broad enough to cover both because the pearl clutchers don't see a difference. The best part of this is "certain firearm parts or accessories" as if they had a qualified expert anywhere in their company that could identify a bolt from a slide. It's deliberately written to trap you, and now, extort you for $2,500.
I think it's simpler than that. Some executive didn't want to have to hire a PR crisis management firm if some kid shot up his school with a gun bought through their payment system. Same with a lot of other stuff. It's all about money.
But this could happen to any business, and surely does. Completely turning off a business because it receives one fraudulent payment is not appropriate. Indeed, this hasn't been my experience with other billing platforms.
Of course, we're taking the posters claim that this is what happened at face value...
If it's your first payment, you're pretty much done for. One of their targets is any operation where an entire business/yt account/paypal account is made to launder a single transaction and then left to rot.
I used to use paypal for everything but it occurred to me that I haven't used it since 2018. What niche does it support that direct payments don't? When I think of paypal, I think of delays.
>What niche does it support that direct payments don't?
For buying stuff online it removes the need to fiddle around with CCs (+ trusting individual websites with CC info) and lets you checkout quickly. It's also great if you get scammed out of your money somehow... Their chargeback system is stupidly easy and is infamous for always siding with the buyer.
It sucks when you're on the other side of the transaction, though. Used to run a Minecraft server as a teenager, and they gave me a huge amount of grief between indisputable chargebacks and locking my account once for KYC purposes.
When it comes to banking there are a lot of modern "shortcuts" that make it safe and painless pretty much everywhere in the world.
The problem is that there's also a lot of inertia. For every "shortcut" user, there are hundreds if not thousands of users who don't know about and use sub-par systems (such as PayPal) instead.
Shitty companies like PayPal (or various banks which still charge insane fees for wire/ACH transfers) rely on that.
---
For me, PayPal is only a route in, as a fallback for those who really can't use anything else. If you decide to use it to pay me (despite my warnings and alternative suggestions), I make it very clear that you are on the hook for any issues arising from it - PayPal money is only considered paid when it hits my real bank account - if they seize the money beforehand, it's as if you haven't paid me and it will be up to you to help me resolve the situation. That's how people should be using this scum.
Similarly, if I pay a supplier via PayPal and they refuse to deliver the goods, the supplier is getting their ass sued for goods/services non-rendered. The fact they use a crooked payment processor (despite my advice) isn't my fault at the end of the day.
It's really useful for small businesses that want to accept credit cards without having to get a full-blown merchant account. If your business is really tiny (like a little side project) and makes less than, say, $100k/year, a merchant account can be too expensive, plus setting up your website for the merchant account is much more difficult than PayPal integration, which is almost trivial (the simplest form is to just add some HTML buttons to your site).
I prefer to use PayPal to pay at random sites just because I'd rather not give my credit card number to a site that could be backdoored or even run by fraudsters.
I do the opposite. Paypal has no customer support and doesn't care about me or any other customer at all.
But I can call American Express, be instantly connected to an agent who at least pretends to care, doesn't sound like they're overworked, and will gladly put in the chargeback request for me. I can also do this online if I'm feeling less social that day.
So? Dispute it with the credit card, it's not a huge deal. By comparison Paypal is often linked to a bank account where you'd out the money until investigation completes. Even if you used credit cards exclusively on PayPal, PayPal's terms of service preclude you from using your credit card's chargeback. (I mean you could use it once I guess and then they ban you from using their processor)
It's a lot easier to get a refund on PayPal than a real bank. The one time that I did a charge-back on my credit card, my bank gave me the 3rd degree and made me feel like I was the criminal.
You're right about PayPal helping themselves to bank debits. I have a small eBay business and back when they dealt directly with PayPal, I would have a separate account to receive the funds and as soon as they hit I would transfer the money out. It's just part of the OPSEC that's required when dealing with our new megacorp overlords.
I agree. Bank accused me of fraud when I reported someone hijacking my card and buying ridiculous mixture of Christmas ornaments and female beauty products (I am a male atheist). Ultimately I lost after going through the full appeals and I was made to feel a criminal; like I was lucky they didn't refer me to law enforcement.
The email the bank sent me to prove 'I did it.' -- something very close to 'piratearrgghhhh34398903@yahoo.com' The fucking scammers taunted me by literally calling themselves pirates in the invoice. The one upside of paypal is the customer basically always wins to the point you're almost relying on the good faith of the customer not to take the money back.
Seems to be overstating the case in some ways, and understating in others.
My reading is that this applies to transactions that promote violence, obscenity, etc. Yes it is indeed awful and deserving of ridicule, but it's not a charge against your non-transaction related activity. So in that sense the headline is overstating the case.
I'm only finding pitchfork raising junk sources right now, but anyway those say that this applied to seller activity in the last go-round. My reading of https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/acceptableuse-full is that this "now" applies to either side of a transaction. So in that sense, the headline is understating the new problem.
That AUP happens to also have a date of 9/21/21 so apparently this has been in effect for over a year. Why isn't that called out?
Yeah just like how the 5th amendment prevents your funds from being stolen by law enforcement for baseless suspicion. Those amendments are iron-clad, water-tight, and applied evenly to all citizens!
You can't vote directly for supreme court justice. At best you have to temper guessing when the next one is gonna croak and deciding whether you want to vote for the candidate who will nominate/confirm the justice you want, or vote for the candidate that better fits your position in the event none of them croak.
A CDBC tracks every transaction and creates a system rife for abuse by tyrants at large organizations. They say that reasonable people have nothing to be concerned about. Ok, Just define "reasonable" by who's standards on which subject.
It looks like these TOS are slightly narrower than before — they removed the word "depict" from the clause about violence/discrimination/etc.
As originally drafted it would have included using PayPal to sell a DVD of a movie that depicts violence. The new TOS are still very broad, but they don't include these ridiculous cases, which obviously should never have been included.
Perhaps when they said "oops, it was a mistake" they meant that the inclusion of a couple words like "depict" was a mistake, but the general thrust was exactly what they wanted.
That's the money you were already giving them to hold on to. They have now decided that you also agree to pay them even more money when they decide they don't like what you're doing.
The clause says they may deduct it from any of your PayPal accounts, but if you haven't given them that much money to hold on to, you still owe them, and presumably they will come after you.
PayPal doesn’t have a monopoly anymore so this just seems bizarre. Visa, Google, Apple, etc run similar services on a massive scale. Then there’s of course crypto.
For how rarely they are likely to actually enforce this, it just seems like a rather stupid hill to die on. Not just the initial decision but the attempt to try and sneak the terms back in.
Paypal is well known for randomly stealing money from user accounts and has been known for this for over a decade. Their reputation is already rock bottom to anyone who would know about this latest debacle, and they make massive amounts of money for free by doing this. There is no reason at all for them to stop, unfortunately.
They are but the optics here are especially jarring. First the political angle which is bad when you’re trying to sell to the entire population, and now the just very obviously cruel move to small business during economic hardship.
It’s tempting people who shrugged their shoulders and used PayPal because they were a monopoly to re-evaluate if they should click PayPal in a checkout with Visa Checkout for instance.
They won't pull it from a linked account, just your PayPal balance... for now.
"You acknowledge and agree that $2,500.00 U.S. dollars per violation of the Acceptable Use Policy is presently a reasonable minimum estimate of PayPal’s actual damages.... PayPal may deduct such damages directly from any existing balance in any PayPal account you control."
Hmm. And what do they do if you don't maintain a $2500 balance in any linked accounts? Do they send it to collections? Garnish any received money recieved to the account until the amount is paid in full? Both?
::knock:: ::knock::
"Who is it?"
"This is Guido and my buddy Johnny Boy. We just want to talk about your negative Paypal balance and your recent injury to your kneecaps."
"My knees are fine..."
The first person who gets charged this fine could make a lot of money from publicity if they're smart about it. It's nice that this has been so widely circulated.
The first person they fine will be someone so undesirable that no one will like them or care to defend them. It's the same way the government commonly builds precedent into questionable laws -- start out for years to decades persecuting only extremely unlikeable persons who no one wants to defend, then after years of precedent and slowly boiling the frog unleash it on the greater populace.
This might be true, but I wonder if there's really anyone so unlikable that they couldn't find an audience in the long tail. Extremism unfortunately seems to be able to find a way despite deplatforming. See examples like Nick Fuentes who recently attracted some of the most prominent politicians to his conference.
Is there an easy way to scrape the TOS posted by each of the different services en masse? It'd be interesting to check them into a git repo and track changes.
I don't think the language they are citing was ever gone from the TOS. I checked it couple weeks ago and it was there. Essentially if you have a seller account and any funds in PayPal, you agree that they can take $2500 from it for anything they don't like about you, per instance. Doesn't seem to apply to regular transfers or non-seller accounts though. Also, technically they are right saying "misinformation" is not on the list - it isn't, only a dozen of other things among which is "other forms of intolerance", "promotion of hate", "considered obscene", - which is determined by them and you agree in advance each time will cost you $2500 per pop.
One could try typing "PayPal terms of service" into a search engine. If your experience mirrors mine, it will be the first link. Here, I'll save you some scrolling:
> including, but not limited to, internal administrative costs incurred by PayPal to monitor and track violations, damage to PayPal’s brand and reputation, and penalties imposed upon PayPal by its business partners resulting from a user’s violation - considering all currently existing circumstances, including the relationship of the sum to the range of harm to PayPal that reasonably could be anticipated because, due to the nature of the violations of the Acceptable Use Policy, actual damages would be impractical or extremely difficult to calculate. PayPal may deduct such damages directly from any existing balance in any PayPal account you control.
This is such a board statement than they an decide whatever they want and pull that fine.
And if we look for the Acceptable Use Policy, there is a line:
> (f) the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance that is discriminatory or the financial exploitation of a crime
I mostly used PayPal so I didn't have to get up off the sofa when ordering stuff on my phone to find my credit card. Given the threat of fines for wrong-think, that's not a compelling enough use case.
The Grit Daily article cited in the linked-to tweet is fake news. It alleges that PayPal's proposed misinformation clause and associated $2500 penalty, which was cancelled by PayPal earlier this month, has been quietly "added back into the terms of service with equally ambiguous language."
This can be proven wrong with a quick check of PayPal's acceptable use policy in the WayBack Machine. The $2500 fine that the article alleges has been added back after "criticism on social media died down" has been there since 2021. [https://web.archive.org/web/20211013092233/https://www.paypa...]
So there is no justification to the article's allegation that the clauses have been quietly added back to PayPal acceptable use policy.
Furthermore, in building its argument that the misinformation clause was sneakily "added back into the terms of service," the article erroneously makes the assumption that a prohibition on intolerance equates to a prohibition on misinformation. This doesn't follow.
I'm not trying to support PayPal's acceptable use policy. But if you're going to attack it, at least use facts.
Remember the guy who collected tens of thousands of dollars for Katrina victims and PayPal just closed their account and stole all the money?
This POS company is a blight on humanity. Neither their executives nor the government officials that should be regulating them care, since they’re all laughing all the way to the bank.
I honestly want to see govt. regulate this, I am honestly curious how can these guys have been evading govt regulation for so long, like this is getting as bad if not much worse than Big Tech. Or maybe it's part of big tech, this bs just doesn't make any sense to me.
See I would rather 1 scammer get away if it means 100 legitimate fund raisers get to keep operating.
Canada's Trudeau showed the world what the nightmare scenario is: he single-handedly and with no evidence, decided that donating to a cause was retroactively illegal and every donor in his jurisdiction will have their assets frozen extra-judicially. No thanks.
> Remember the guy who collected tens of thousands of dollars for Katrina victims and PayPal just closed their account and stole all the money?
I do remember that guy, his name was Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka (he died). PayPal offered to donate the money to United Way, and Lowtax refused. The money was refunded by PayPal to the donators minus forex fees[0].
> PayPal offered to donate the money to United Way, and Lowtax refused
It's important to remember why Lowtax refused:
>The Paypal representative said they can only donate money to the United Way; you know, the organization where the president was sued for stealing half a million dollars from them. You know, the organization with a loathsome two star rating, that spends nearly double the amount of money in "administrative overhead" (read: advertising) as Red Cross. It turns out that this is what the United Way is famous for. They weasel their way into companies and sign contracts with them, blocking the corporations from accepting donations to any other charity. I guess it's fitting Paypal chose to team up with them.
Thats why decentralised value exchange is important. Any centralised solution is subject to arbitrary imposed limitations. Imagine if Paypal controlled the air you breath.
I use PayPal to collect rent, I was waiting until the end of the month to cancel my account to make sure another method would work before cancelling my account. To be honest I kind of forgot I was going to do that, but now this has definitely renewed my determination to delete my PayPal account. What a scummy company.
This is fake news clickbait. Let's look at what this actually says: This only applies to sellers who have violated the TOS. And you are only agreeing that $2,500 is the likely minimum fine for a TOS violation, and that they can take that from any account you have linked. (Of course, I'm not a lawyer.)
That's a nice trite little saying, but it doesn't fit reality. I mean it's not like an angry group of right-wing people reply to every single tweet by democratic politicians, right? Why do you think HN is above that kind of thing?
And a story that claims that PayPal is out to hamper free speech is exactly the kind of lightning rod that would attract such people.
Trite? You're the one who brought up BlueAnon. (And if you're going to virtue-signal "HN is above that kind of thing," I'll remind you that whining about downvotes is against the guidelines)
There seems to me to be plenty of room for interpretation (and potential for foul play) in the TOS. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but to call it a "fake news clickbait" is disingenuous.
If there's room for interpretation, and you say "it absolutely means this very clickbaity interpretation" then yes, you are doing a clickbait, my friend.
I’m very wary of this change but it’s also very hard to discuss it rationally when people exaggerate it. Quoting the new User Agreement:
“If you are a seller and receive funds for transactions that violate the Acceptable Use Policy, then … you will be liable to PayPal for the amount of PayPal’s damages caused by your violation of the Acceptable Use Policy. You acknowledge and agree that $2,500 U.S. dollars per violation … is presently a reasonable minimum estimate of PayPal’s actual damages.”
I don’t think I do agree with that estimate. On the other hand, it’s a complete lie that PayPal said they can withdraw money from your bank account for saying something they don’t like. This is about sellers and transactions that violate the (somewhat vague) AUP.
I think in the end I’ll choose not to engage in extended dialogue with people who misrepresent facts. This kind of crap just strengthens the divide in the US.
> I’ll choose not to [...] dialogue
> just strengthens the divide
Non sequitur, but ok.
There seems to me to be plenty of room for interpretation (and potential for foul play) in the TOS. Maybe that's an exaggeration, but to call it a "complete lie" is itself to misrepresent facts.
The linked tweet and article claim that PayPal can pull money out of your bank account. There's no way to interpret the ToS like that; it clearly says this possibility only applies to your PayPal account and any money in there.
A decade ago I remember a friend who had a small business selling some niche collectors items. One day, he was scammed. The guy reported that the package was never delivered and, without even investigating, Paypal banned my friend's account and awarded the buyer their money back.
Paypal has always, and will always be a shit company. Charging people $2,500 for wrongthink is simply asinine. They must be betting BIG on either woke politics being mainstream for the long term, unbreakable bonds with their existing customers, or both. I can't even think of someone around me that uses paypal regularly.
I will be interested in reading the technical report on how they plan on implementing this because I'm sure it'll be silicon valley diarrhea. I am currently working out how to pay companies in a similar fashion to Paypal. I'm looking at Privacy.com but something is off about it to me for some reason. Once that is solved I'll get this ape off my back forever.
I wonder what happens if I just say "lol, not paying" to them. Would they put me in collections? It seems infeasible to even enforce this and it strikes me that clicking a button doesn't amount of a legal agreement.