PayPal Freezes Hurricane Relief Account 635
logan5 writes "SomethingAwful's forum denizens, on the call of site admin Richard "Lowtax" Kyanka, raised over $20,000 dollars to be donated to the Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. This was done via a PayPal donation link, and PayPal has now frozen the account on a twofold basis: one, that there have been reports of "suspicious behavior" from the "buyers," and two, that no shipping records have been provided for the donations." Since so many users are asking for it, SomethingAwful has provided a link for those wishing to still make donations to the Red Cross in the meantime.
Coral Cache link (Score:5, Informative)
I think this might be a good idea since Something Awful was hosted in New Orleans and their main servers are obviously not online at the moment, so that temporary site is probably going to be blown away soon.
Anyone with media contacts? (Score:5, Informative)
Crap like this happens all the time. (Score:1, Informative)
When a grassroots political operative needed a transplant and the opposition party got Paypal to shut down the donations.
Re:foolish and self-promotional (Score:5, Informative)
This is far from the first fundraiser SA has run. They raised another 20k or so for body armor for soldiers in Iraq, and recently a bunch of SA goons raised over 6k in a few weeks and bought toys for sick children, which they delivered in person.
I understand your suspicion but come on, this is is SA, home of one of the most populated forums on the internet. We goons care.
SomethingAwful does SomethingRight (Score:5, Informative)
EBay's Phone Number (Score:5, Informative)
EBay's toll free investor line:
1-866-696-3229
or
1-866-696-eBay
Have fun.
Re:PayPal isn't a bank, so it's not perfectly safe (Score:2, Informative)
How can I tell the difference between a real PayPal email and a fake one? [paypal.com]
What should I do if I receive a fake email? [paypal.com]
Deja Vu (Score:2, Informative)
Re:RTFA (Score:3, Informative)
Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Ah the mindless mob... (Score:5, Informative)
Of course no one seems to have thought about WHY paypal canceled the account. I mean, they're an "evil corporation" cause SA says so thus they must have done it for kicks.
Check out some of the other posts. I've heard terrible stories about Paypal screwing people over for years. With the number of stories I've heard (and the consistency) I think Paypal is a very poor company that seems to shut down accounts on a whim and rarely explain why. I'm sure they have a lot of problems with money laundering, etc, but there's just too many stories of innocent people getting burned by Paypal for there not to be something wrong with paypal itself. This isn't just an "evil corporation" story, it's a company with a long long track record of unscrupulous behaviour.
Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob (Score:1, Informative)
Re:No good deed... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob (Score:5, Informative)
God YES. If you want the money to go to the staff who you're trying to reward with your tip, you give them cash, and do it quietly. If you just want to line their managers' pockets even further, go ahead and use your card.
See this [dol.gov] if you don't believe me. Federal minimum wage is about $5/hr, except for employees who receive tips, in which case the employer can cut the "direct" wage as low as two fucking dollars an hour. They have to actually pay them the $5/hour, of course, but by making $3 of each $5 come out of tips, they basically make sure that the employee isn't actually going to benefit at all from your generosity - unless you're an unusually high tipper, they're just going to get $5/hr whether you tip them or not.
Nice one, government. Way to motivate low earners.
Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob (Score:2, Informative)
Because they can invest that money. When the account is frozen you have to do something to actually unfreeze it, like you said, calling a lawyer to send a nice letter to them.
The point is, if you keep money in paypal it doesn't do anything. It's like keeping money in a bank, you are losing money due to inflation. OTOH, even if you invest in the lowest risk fund of your bank, you will get about 1% income, and you can cancel the investment in less than a week. Actually, my current bank returns 89% of the money immediately and the rest in the next two days.
So Paypal is being the middle man: they invest YOUR money, and when you want it back, they give you the money back, but they get to keep the interests it has generated. As other posters are saying, for big quantities of people, the amount of money can sum a lot, and 1% of "a lot" with practically no risk is a nice bonus. Wouldn't you do the same if you had the chance?
Re:Ah the mindless mob... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:EBay's Phone Number (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Ah the mindless mob... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Katrina can eat me (Score:4, Informative)
Interestingly, not everyone knew how severe the hurricane was supposed to be. News travels slowly when you don't have a TV or net.
People stayed for a variety of reasons, but mostly because they had no choice/car. Interestingly, if you walk, the freeways (at least on one side, I'm not sure about the other) are one of the worst places to be, because they are flooded early and often.
Lea
Re:PayPal Is Like The Mob (Score:5, Informative)
If someone gives bad service they get complaints and they get fired.
Update (Score:4, Informative)
Paypal / Donation / Server Update 9/04/2005 - 10:07 AM - Rich "Lowtax" Kyanka
I finally got ahold of a Paypal customer support person this morning (when I called last night, their automated "screw off" system told me they were closed for the night). I explained everything to her and she asked me to fax in a bunch of junk like my driver's license, statement from my bank account, statement from my credit card account, and various other things. I guess I should be lucky they didn't ask for DNA and sperm samples as well.
I told them the only reason, and I repeat ONLY REASON I was using their service was to raise relief funds, and the representative made a comment along the lines of "well you can see how it's counter-productive to get this resolved when you're writing 'Paypal sucks' on your website." Gee lady, maybe the whole issue could've been resolved beforehand if your company actually gave a crap about their customers and made even the tiniest bit of effort to resolve things without immediately hitting the "off" switch like that one jerk from "Ghostbusters?" The representative herself was nice, and I don't have a problem with the people working there; I do, however, have a problem with their automated systems making arbitrary decisions without providing customers ANY time to rectify the situation without risking downtime / account closure. You don't run a business treating all your customers like criminals and making them prove they aren't.
I'll be faxing in that information right now, so the money you donated to the Paypal fund WILL get to the Red Cross, but it all depends on the speed of the world-famous Paypal Complaint Appeals Department or whatever the hell they're called.
On 9/4/05, Rokas Kirvelis norgin@gmail.com wrote:Instead of writing a fucking essay about PayPal how about you FUCKING CONTACT CUSTOMER SUPPORT like it told you to do? I wouldn't be fucking surprised if you photoshopped those pics (because text is so hard to photoshop) and took the money. You're not even doing anything to get the money back.
Yeah, okay. Thanks again for the support, Internet.
Still no ETA on when the servers and SA will be up again. No idea when we'll be able to get the servers and move them to another hosting facility either. Running a small business is awesome because, not only are you in charge of making sure a bunch of people get service and employees get paid, but you're constantly responsible for everything and you can't stop worrying about what will happen. At least your standard 9-to-5 job lets you leave work at your office when your shift is over; a small business is a boulder you carry around on your shoulders every hour of every day. Some days the boulder crushes you, and this past week has been a series of those days.
My apologies to everybody.Re:??? revealed AKA embezzlement (Score:2, Informative)
Suggestions for next steps:
This ongoing and repeated abuse must stop now!
Re:Can't really disagree with them... (Score:3, Informative)
Looks like I was right. Lowtax completely went on a tyraid about it and as a result PayPal didn't want to work with him. The CSR even asked him why he would put up a whole article about how paypal sucks on the front page of his site and then expect them to help him. Paypal does suck in a lot of cases; Lowtax is correct in this case; Paypal ought to held to the same standards as banks and other financial institutions, etc. but as of right now they aren't a bank and when they have $30K of your money, you don't kick them in the balls and expect them to do everything you say.
What's worse is that the first reason the account was shut down is because of his own idiotic users. He had the users submit payments for merchandise in order to get a shipping address to send them free stuff. While this is a good idea for a fundraiser, his users started sending demands for proof of shipping via paypal (probably thinking how funny it would be to do that sort of thing) and hosed the whole damn thing.
You know these same SA users even went around to other forums who were running donation drives and insulted their efforts claiming that the "SomethingAwful donation drive is going to [crush your drive]" and the like. Great fucking job, guys.
What is EVEN worse is that people gave money to SA to be donated to the Red Cross, then when it seemed that PayPal was willing to send the money into their United Way fund, Lowtax immediately jumped at the chance to misappropriate $30,000 of other peoples' money. Another fucking brilliant move.
Now I am applauding PayPal for their decision and their willingness to refund the money. I can only hope that the donors will immediately spin it back out to a charity or relief organization through a proper avenue, but honestly I suspect that many will not.