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This is neither shocking, nor new.

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)


Interesting. I'd imagine here most of the apps people use for that (Cash app, Zelle, etc) are just frontends for Paypal.


They are not. Cash was built using unlinked refunds over visa to do direct deposit onto visa debit cards. For ACH, it uses normal ACH rails.

Zelle…was built by the big banks…


> Cash was built using unlinked refunds over visa to do direct deposit onto visa

That sorta sounds like violating visa tos?


Nah, they just used a hack before working directly with visa to create a standard for this


Zelle is absolutely bad, imo. It's like an incomplete Paypal but with a $3.5k transaction limit.


Zelle is a direct bank transfer system.


SEPA payments and TransferWise are a complete replacement.


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 doesn't negate or contradict my point.

>even today many germans don't have one

Thankfully debit cards are a thing!


> woke politics being mainstream

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.

[0] https://www.consumerfinance.gov/ask-cfpb/how-can-i-stop-a-pa...


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.




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