Paypal Reverses Payments Made To Indians 509
bhagwad writes "Beginning January 28, Paypal has been reversing the payments made to any Indian provider of services. In addition, Indian users have been unable to withdraw their money to their bank accounts. As a result, a large number of Indian Paypal accounts have negative balances running into the thousands of dollars. The worst part is that users weren't informed beforehand — the funds were just whisked away. Indian providers have gone ballistic, with over 2,000 posts on a thread on the reversal of payments and over 700 posts on this thread about the delay in transfers. Paypal hasn't given any explanation to this behavior other than they're looking into it. Although Paypal claims in the above blog post that payments made for 'Services' are not being reversed, this is not true. All payments not made for 'Goods' with a shipping address have been reversed — in fact, the Paypal e-mail tells the Indian sellers to encourage their clients to lie and claim that they're paying for goods with a shipping address instead."
Re:Who will be manning the call centers... (Score:2, Interesting)
Hehehe....
Nice.
However, PayPal doesn't have any call centers.
They're paypal. The only way you can contact them is by e-mail (which they ignore), or through forms on their site (which you might get a response to in 3-6 months, if you are lucky) -- as for getting your hard-earned money back from your account they randomly chose to freeze, expect it to take 12 - 18 months, again if you are lucky.
If you are unlucky, 36 to 48 months, or (possibly) never. Your luck depends little more than who you wind up talking to, how you talk to them, what sort of move they are in. And the result of a few rolls of a D20 die.
Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:1, Interesting)
How about just asking your bank to transfer the money to the other's bank account? So far it's always worked for me.
Re:Banking Reform (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, in Europe they claim to be a bank so they don't have to pay VAT on their service charges.
Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
No viable alternative? What about a normal bank transfer? I used to pay an Indian guy via Paypal but their charges are pretty steep. So I informed with my local European bank for the costs and it turns out this is much cheaper. Problem fixed.
Money laundering and terrorism (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Banking Reform (Score:5, Interesting)
What Paypal does is actually very similar to what many banks do at least from the user's perspective. Both hold money in accounts, and provide ways to transfer money. Banks provide checks and debit cards for this purpose.
I will admit that Paypal does not offer loans, nor does it over things like savings accounts, but from a user experience they are very similar to a bank where they have only a checking account.
If Paypal does not bother to invest the money sitting dormant in accounts, then many regulations would have only minimal impact on them, since they would be keeping full reserves rather than fractional reserves. The regulations we really want are those that prevent banks from freezing accounts for no valid reason, and from interfering with valid transactions. The procedures already in place for banks on both of these points would really help protect users.
I will admit though that overall Paypal's primary purpose is more like that of American Express than a bank, but the way they do it is debit based rather than credit based, meaning a whole bunch of regulations that would not apply to AmEx could be applicable.
Re:Banking Reform (Score:5, Interesting)
They hold user accounts - you can keep money there.
PayPal credit [paypal.com]
PayPal Money Market funds. [paypal.com]
Sure smells like a bank to me.
Re:Banking Reform (Score:3, Interesting)
you're wrong (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm not sure how paypal is even legal frankly, they screw over both consumer and vender alike, but their biggest problem is their poor consumer protections.
Credit cards however were sensibly designed to provide a safe avenue for consumer level electronic transactions, which means they must provide strong protections for the consumer. If you don't like payment avenues that have consumer protection, then you should use older payment systems like certified check and cash.
In general, credit card companies sort out contested charges fairly reasonably and efficiently, and the fee they charge the merchant is pretty typical for banking related fees. I've seen only really two main exceptions :
(1) Non-profit organizations occasionally get some moron making lots of donations using stolen credit cards, which ends up costing the non-profit. I think the easiest solution here would be for fraud scrubbing services to donate their services to tax exempt organizations.
(2) A small company using digital delivery often sees enormous numbers of charge backs because purchasers habitually forget what they purchased. If this happens, the small business has usually failed to clearly indicating their name in the credit card billing line, often because they have recycled the merchant account from another business.
Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:1, Interesting)
Here in the US, India has recently been abruptly quashed as far as being a good source of cheap illegal substances by mail. It used to be the "go to" country. This Paypal thing probably has something to do with that.
Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
What would it take to modernize our banking system? Its 2010; paper checks should hardly ever be necessary anymore.
Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
The US does not allow for that. The banks don't link into other banking systems seamlessly. They treat the account number as a password (despite it being on the face of every check). The US just doesn't do it. Most of the other countries on the planet have banks that let you transfer money to other banks in that country with a phone call, over the web, in a branch, or maybe even other ways without any problems at all. A large portion of money moves directly between banks electronically (rather than checks, as used in the US).
Hell, I have a fellow customer at the same branch of a US bank that wanted to send me money. It's impossible, according to Wells Fargo, to transfer more than $1000 from one account holder to another. The person may have been misinformed, but the person trying to get me money tried more than once with different people and couldn't do it. The only option is to not transfer it within the bank (meaning, withdrawal the money completely, the deposit it again, which can be done at the same time at the teller, but can't be done by phone, fax, ATM, online, or such, when such options are available outside the US almost everywhere).
With that system, I declare that to be "no viable alternative."
Re:Nothing New (Score:3, Interesting)
People cannot be trialed for the same crime EVENT multiple times. But they can be trialed for unlimited separate events of the same type of crime.
Example: OJ Simpson was trialed and acquitted for the alleged murder of Nicole Brown Simpson. He cannot be re-trialed for the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson, but he can be trialed for any other murders he is suspected of having committed.
If that wasn't the case, Alice could, after being acquitted of murdering Bob, not only kill Charlie and Eve, but go on a nationwide killing spree without breaking the law. That would be disturbing to say the least.
But I don't know if that is just an Urban Myth, since verdicts are commonly overturned by higher courts and that could mean a re-trial after the suspect was acquitted or convicted.
On the other hand, corporations cannot commit crimes, their employees and owners do. Corporations can be sued in civil courts, though.
Also, civil lawsuits are a completely different matter and with the usual IANAL warning, I certainly think you cannot sue for the same even multiple times, but through several levels.
A corporation still can be sued many times over for similar events, which I am very thankful for, otherwise we would have one person suing carmaker X for faulty brakes and everyone else crashing their cars with no recourse.
Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:1, Interesting)
There is good reason that the DEA is going after the suppliers and not the buyers. These sites cater to little old ladies with bad hips or crippling arthritis trying to supplement their painkiller addictions, not only kids trying to get high. If they start busting old people just trying the live out what little they have left of their lives in peace, there would be a political firestorm and heads would roll. It is the elderly that vote the most after all.
The fun part is that its the DEA that's causing the problem in the first place. I have a friend that's a doctor, a psychiatrist. He's terrified of DEA audits, and so he doesn't prescribe anything that scheduled unless the original prescription came from another doctor. If you come in with social anxiety disorder you get Paxil, not Clonazepam. Both drugs cause severe physical dependance, but Clonzapam is also psychologically addictive (ie it gets you slightly high) so in the US its DEA Schedule 4. He feels that Clonzapam is more appropriate then Paxil for anxiety disorder as Paxil in dosages high enough to treat anxiety tend to have a lot of side effects, the most pronounced one being that you can't really feel any emotions at all, or that they are "muted" somehow (oh and forget about ever having another orgasm or even wanting to). Clonzapam OTOH makes you feel very slightly drunk and more sociable. Still, despite his professional opinion he won't prescribe it because if he lost his DEA license he would be fucked.
He says its even worse when it comes to painkillers (which as a psychiatrist he doesn't personally deal in, but has colleagues who do). Some of them won't prescribe opiates (Schedule 2) at all, no matter what the condition. Even if you have a shattered disk in your back, all you are gonna get is prescription strength Aleve and a referral to a pain specialist, which depending on your insurance plan is going to cost you hundreds of dollars just to walk through their door.
So that's the newsletter. Not too funny and pretty damn off-topic unfortunately. Still, people should know these things.
Since this is
Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
As I have posted elsewhere, my wife and I sued Paypal unsuccessfully over something very similar. But the Ohio attorney general got our problem fixed, and the Washington state attorney general contacted us to follow up later, not because we asked them to or lived in Washington, but just because they ran across our case when generally investigating Paypal. So you might try that if you haven't already. I was impressed by the attorneys general, surprised to see the system working the way it is supposed to.
Yes, Paypal gave us a different lie each time we interacted with them. I thought getting bought by eBay might have cleaned them up, but it sounds like maybe it didn't.
My solution: "sandbox" bank account for PayPal (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: doesn't always work (Score:2, Interesting)
It sounds like a possible double-whammy, FCBA [wikipedia.org], and FCRA [wikipedia.org] (failure to give required proper notice before negative information is reported) violation on PayPal's part looming.
An e-mail message is not a proper/valid notice of a debt, and fraudulently constructing and attempting to collect on a non-debt, would also be a violation [wikipedia.org] of FDCPA (Reporting false information on a consumer's credit report or threatening to do so in the process of collection).
PayPal is not a court, and their independent decision to award a counterparty their money back is not binding on you, and doesn't create obligations on your part, unless you signed an agreement to that effect (and maybe not even then -- since a creditor cannot legally have any individual sign over FCRA/FCBA dispute rights, as long as you are a consumer, and not a business) .
The sister should then probably do something like going to each credit reporting agency and dispute PayPal's report to that credit reporting agency, state that the amount reported is not owed, and demand the erroneous information be validated / removed.
And make sure to send PayPal certified mail disputing the amount of the debt within 60 days of the 1st statement you received that was in error.
The CRA then has a period of time, to investigate the reporting. If PayPal then 'constructs' fraudulent information to 'validate' the debt, then there is a FCRA violation.
Send PayPal a demand they strike the erroneous debt, certified mail demand letter.
Then if they persist, sue Paypal in small claims court, for statutory damages on both counts.
PayPal can potentially be in the hole >$1,000 in statutory fees, plus reasonable attorney costs, if they have indeed violated one of those laws...
You really should find some sort of proof that you exchanged the tickets, however.
Or file suit against in small claims the person you sold the tickets to, for slander, and get a lawyer to subpoena someone (or some people) who were there to stand as witness that the person at least attended the concert.
And also, perform discovery, (assuming you can figure out ticket numbers), to determine if those tickets were actually used.
But then, maybe all the hassle in attempting this isn't worth the $500...
Re:Makes me wonder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Oh, right. Just like electronic voting is more safe than old-school pen-and-paper-ballot.
It all depends on the implementation and those in charge. Neither is automatically more safe than the other.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)