PayPal Told Customer Her Death Breached Its Rules (bbc.com) 241
dryriver shares a report from the BBC: PayPal wrote to a woman who had died of cancer saying her death had breached its rules and that it might take legal action as a consequence. The firm has since acknowledged that the letter was "insensitive," apologized to her widower, and begun an inquiry into how it came to be sent.
Lindsay Durdle died on May 31 aged 37. She had been first diagnosed with breast cancer about a year-and-a-half earlier. The disease had later spread to her lungs and brain. PayPal was informed of Mrs Durdle's death three weeks ago by her husband Howard Durdle. He provided the online payments service with copies of her death certificate, her will and his ID, as requested. He has now received a letter addressed in her name, sent to his home in Bucklebury, West Berkshire. It was headlined: "Important: You should read this notice carefully." It said that Mrs Durdle owed the company about 3,200 pounds (~$4,200) and went on to say: "You are in breach of condition 15.4(c) of your agreement with PayPal Credit as we have received notice that you are deceased... this breach is not capable of remedy." According to a PayPal staff member, there were three possible explanations for how the letter was sent: a bug, a bad letter template, or human error. PayPal is continuing to work with Mr Durdle and has written off the debt in the meantime.
Lindsay Durdle died on May 31 aged 37. She had been first diagnosed with breast cancer about a year-and-a-half earlier. The disease had later spread to her lungs and brain. PayPal was informed of Mrs Durdle's death three weeks ago by her husband Howard Durdle. He provided the online payments service with copies of her death certificate, her will and his ID, as requested. He has now received a letter addressed in her name, sent to his home in Bucklebury, West Berkshire. It was headlined: "Important: You should read this notice carefully." It said that Mrs Durdle owed the company about 3,200 pounds (~$4,200) and went on to say: "You are in breach of condition 15.4(c) of your agreement with PayPal Credit as we have received notice that you are deceased... this breach is not capable of remedy." According to a PayPal staff member, there were three possible explanations for how the letter was sent: a bug, a bad letter template, or human error. PayPal is continuing to work with Mr Durdle and has written off the debt in the meantime.
Human Error (Score:5, Informative)
Computers don't make mistakes.
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Re: Human Error (Score:3)
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I don't see what the problem is here. She clearly breached Paypal's rules by up and dying without their permission. They should prosecute her to the full extent provided by law to make sure she doesn't go and do it again.
I am very conscious of all my obligations and debts; therefore I haven't died and won't until I am no longer in breech of anyone's terms of conditions by dying.
Re:Human Error (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a pretty major human error.
How does someone write: "we have received notice that you are deceased." and not realize something is wrong? Unless the person doesn't know what "deceased" means, which I suppose is possible, but even then you'd expect someone to notice something like this in code review.
Sending a letter to a dead person (that the company knows has died) is ridiculous on its own; the letter should be addressed to next of kin.
Re:Human Error (Score:5, Insightful)
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> One can sue for damages, but once the estate is divested, the estate has zero value.
Community property applies to debts as well as assets. If this is a community property jurisdiction, than the husband is still liable for it. The fact that she died of cancer doesn't alter that.
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than the husband is still liable for it.
No... Unless the debt is jointly in both married person's name: the deceased's estate will be liable for it, if the claim against the estate is made within the time limit ---- the surviving spouse is under no obligation to assume the debt.
Key assets like Real-Estate are likely to have been titled into a trust, so unless the debt is a mortgage or other secured debt: by the time the deceased's estate is settled out: there might very well be no property for t
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Seriously? Over here you can either take (your share of) the entire estate, including all liabilities, or waive you right to all of it. Are you really claiming that in the US, debt is practically evaporating at death?
It is also depended on the local (state) laws and the kind of debt, but most likely yes the uncollected debt could be evaporated once the debtor is dead (and all the deceased assets have been probated and distributed).
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In this context there is no UK, it's England, which does not include Scotland which has a different legal system.
Basically if when the estate of the deceased is wound up it is found to be in debt, then that debt is written off.
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Out of curiosity, if the assets are divided in some way is the debt also divided? What if one person inherits cash and another inherits a house, do they split the inherited debt even though the house is not liquid?
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Is that true? If the debt is in her name, how is he responsible for it?
Do you really want to know? Then you should read this [consumerfinance.gov] for more information.
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Alive or dead I am responsible for my wife's debts and her mine.
There is no way an estate can go through probate in 3 weeks.
I don't know the law / regulations in the UK, but in Canada a will does not automatically require Probate.
Examples:
You name an executor, and are unmarried and died with no debt, or all your property (and it's debt) is bequeathed to a spouse.
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In addition to my previous comment:
Neither my mother's nor my father's, nor my brother's estates went through probate.
In the case of my father, he bequeathed cash to both his children, via accounts of $10,000, which is some kind of statutory limit. My sister and I had certified cheques in our hands about two weeks after death. The remaining property went to my mother. The estate did not require Probate.
In the case of my mother, who died later, she bequeathed cash disbursement from what remained in her retir
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Unsecured debt (e.g. credit cards) dies with you. It cannot be inherited or passed on. That's why you pay 25% interest on those evil plastic cards.
Re:Human Error (Score:5, Insightful)
Easy: there's a mail-merge template with the text "we have received notice that you are [reason_code]". At some point, some non-technical manager said that "deceased" should be one of the values, not thinking things all the way through.
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This is not a binary zero-sum problem.
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Ever read the terms of a life insurance policy? They say a lot of things which don't quite make sense when viewed through that lens. Like, mixed in with things intended for you to use in times of need; eg:
-if you have lost two limbs in an accident, you are entitled to a 50% benefit
-if the aircraft or other vessel you were travelling on has disappeared, sunk, or wrecked and your body has not been found within one year, you will be presumed dead.
Like, two different people are going to be reading those two l
Wrong kind of bug (Score:2)
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Or architecture is more complicated, but there is nothing magical about our wetware and every unexpected result is, deep down, a result of a bunch of rules being followed.
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Re:Human Error (Score:4, Insightful)
Saying "computers don't make mistakes" is like saying "if we knew everything, we could predict the weather". It's true, but meaningless, because it's predicated on a condition that is impossible to fulfill.
Consider how many people are involved in running a simple computer program. Start with the team that wrote the program, the team(s) that tested it, the team that maintains it, the team that specced and accepted it, and the team that documented how to fit it into your workflow. The current operator, and the person who trained them, and the person who trained them. The team that specced, wrote, tested, documented, maintained and updated the operating system it runs on, and each of the various utilities and handlers that it depends on. Then the teams that did the same for the underlying silicon architecture, the surrounding network...
There is no-one alive who even knows who all these people are, let alone is competent to review all their work. Let's assume one of them made an error - maybe an error in programming or testing, but just as likely an error in training ("deceased" should be flagged for special handling), or speccing (there should be a flag that suspends auto-generated letters when some conditions are applied, and that flag must be clearly visible to the person who's maintaining the list of conditions). It may even be an error in integration (this program is tested on Windows 7, but is being run on Windows Server 2012 R2).
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May be but this happened in the United Kingdom and as per Ferguson v British Gas Trading Ltd. the UK supreme court where quite scathing on the notion of a crappy computer system being an excuse under the law. If your companies computer system does bad then the company is legally on the hook.
Re: Human Error (Score:2)
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Except "error" is really too vague a term; many bugs are the result of a program operating as specified, it's just that the people doing the specification didn't think through the implications. The exact same thing is true for manual systems.
So in cases like this a company will say it was a computer bug as a way of suggesting this wasn't the result of corporate culture. But some bugs are the result of corporate culture.
PayPal decided it would be a good idea to send ominous letters to people who couldn't p
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And I was replying to a "would have been", which shares a tense with "were", rather than "are".
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Your logic is flawed.
Oh? Let's review.
It could have happened on any planet, and that's where we'd be.
In other words, before it happened, the odds that it would this planet were, more or less, the same as the odds of it happening anywhere else. With there being so many planets, the odds were pretty slim.
We're here because it happened here.
In other words, the odds that it did happen on this planet are 100%
All you did was restate what I just said in a different way. Two different ways, actually. Except that your lottery example was flawed because no, there's not always a winner; why do you think the jackpot grows most weeks?
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This isn't an uncommon argument, especially among the creationist groups. They cite some outlandishly large chance that abiogenisis couldn't happen, or that an eye could eventually evolve,
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When a bride throws her bouquet into the crowd, there's an even chance t
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Essentially, what you've just said boils down to "nothing comes down to chance because God has already decided what should and will be."
No. What i'm saying is, once something happens, the odds of it having happened are 100%.... and BECAUSE it happened, the odds of it happening prior to that were 100% BECAUSE we know it happened. We can't tell the future; anything is possible (if not extremely unlikely). Bigfoot could be found riding on Nessie leading a pack of aliens and unicorns. We can't say that's 0% never (even though the odds would be unimaginably small), but that's because it's in the future.
Bunch of stray molecules in some sludge somewhere got together to self-replicate and ponder their own existence. Wild odds, huh.
This is the quote that started this,
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Then the humans made a mistake when designing the computer _or_ operated it incorrectly (e.g high altitude).
PayPal Credit (Score:2)
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I don't think the husband knew about it.
That could be true, but to assert it is completely invalid.
"Error" my ass... (Score:5, Insightful)
No, there's a much more plausible fourth explanation: Paypal is run by dicks.
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No, there's a much more plausible fourth explanation: Paypal is run by dicks.
Accurate but lacking nuance. Paypal is run by lawyers, who are dicks. If it's a legal complaint then some lawyer had to set pen to it before it could go in the mail. As usual, lawyers are a big part of the problem, if not the whole thing.
Didn't answer the important question (Score:2)
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Can he still be held responsible for paying his deceased wife's debts? One of my girlfriends ran up all her mom's credit cards as she was dying of breast cancer, because she knew the debt would go away when she died.
Unlikely he was liable unless it was a joint account of some kind. However, if the creditors of your girlfriend's mother found out what your girlfriend did, it's possible they could get her for fraudulently using the credit cards if her mother wasn't authorizing the charges or she was buying stuff just for herself.
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Debts are paid out of the estate before the rest is distributed to beneficiaries. If there is no money in the estate or no assets that can be liquidated then the debt dies. No one inherits debts under common law unless they were in joint names.
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Only if it's a joint account. Otherwise it's paid out of the estate and then only if you live in a community property state do the couple's shared assets become up for grabs for a debt collector.
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I'd love to know more about how this works, but quick Googling just leads to the conclusion that it's widely varying and extremely complicated.
If I read your statement correctly, if my wife dies, her debts held under her name only are her debts, and even joint ownership property that would get tangled up in her estate aren't subject to settlement of her debts -- like they couldn't force me to refinance the house to take out equity to pay them off.
I don't get how this could possibly work, as it seems like it
Re:Didn't answer the important question (Score:5, Informative)
Example number 1299006 of why you should not take legal advice from /.
https://www.consumerfinance.go... [consumerfinance.gov]
Re:Didn't answer the important question (Score:4)
> Example number 1299006 of why you should not take legal advice from /.
It's almost like we're more like 50 petty fiefdoms than a single unified country or some such.
The answer to a lot of stuff is "it depends". My state has some nice debtor protections but still has community property debt.
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Come and get it if you like boys.... (Score:2)
Sending them a copy of the death certificate was nice to do. However, after that let them chase their tails trying to collect a debt from a dead person and waste their time an money in the process...
What are they going to do? Ruin a dead persons credit? Knock yourself out PayPal. Take them to court? It will be fun to see what the process server does with that....
Re:Come and get it if you like boys.... (Score:5, Funny)
Your subject line is yet another great example of the importance of commas.
Does anyone here know what condition 15.4(c) says? (Score:3)
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Re:Does anyone here know what condition 15.4(c) sa (Score:5, Interesting)
I would like to know what this is too. Looking up the terms and conditions, there is a 15.4, but no subclause (c): :P
15.4 In the event you do not agree to the terms of a release amount, you may close your account unless otherwise prohibited under this Agreement. However, if your account is closed for any reason, we have the right to hold the amount retained in your PayPal account for up to 180 days.
Can anyone else find more?
catchpa: mystery
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It seems to be from the PayPal Credit Agreement. Maybe she had a PayPal credit card or something, probably ran up the debts paying for costs associated with her treatment for cancer. Anyway, it says:
"We may close the Credit Account and demand repayment of the full amount you owe us if you die or become of unsound mind"
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You can't die... That's ILLEGAL! (Score:5, Funny)
Billable termination clause... (Score:5, Interesting)
That was literally the opening plot of Brazil. Guy gets murdered during a swat-style raid looking for a guy whose name was one typo different, and as a result his family has to pay for his termination costs, despite it being the government's fault.
That movie is an excellent watch by the way, although it is hard to tell what part of it is taking part in 'reality' and what part of it is in his mind, whether crazed, or after he is broken.
Or just bad policy (Score:2, Insightful)
"a bug, a bad letter template, or human error. "
Or you just have crap policies where you fail to delineate other avenues of outcomes that occur but you do not consider legitimate. This leads to absurd conclusions any normal review or check would recognize as unacceptable.
PayPal is set up this way -deliberately-. They want you to give up. They don't want to be contacted. THey make many being pricks.
Get unsolicited email from PayPal, to an address you own and has never had anything to do with them? You h
The same old story (Score:3)
"You are in breach of condition 15.4(c) of your agreement with PayPal Credit as we have received notice that you are deceased... this breach is not capable of remedy."
You can't win.
You can't break even.
You can't even quit the game.
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You can't win.
You can't break even.
You can't even quit the game.
That's the laws of thermodynamics.
They break down near black holes like PayPal.
"this breach is not capable of remedy." (Score:2)
No shit. Brilliant.
The universe is insensitive by default (Score:4, Interesting)
Even worse are the carpetbaggers who thrive on misery. When a loved one dies, be as prepared as you can for this sort of thing -- letters commiserating with you at this terrible occasion, and offering to buy your house immediately for cash. Half of these letters will be addressed to the deceased.
In general (at least around here), the carpetbaggers are not breaking any laws, and the most you can do is write to them or call them, and ask "Does your mother know what you do for a living?" Not that that does any good with those illegitimate sons of crack whores, but it might temporarily make you feel better.
The big companies are sometimes somewhat trainable, and I comment Mr. Durdle for attempting to train Paypal. I myself have attempted to train a few companies, such as Netflix. After trying multiple times to get their customer service people to do the right thing, I finally sent an email to their general counsel:
From: Netflix <info@mailer.netflix.com>
To: xxxx@zzzz.com
Subject: xxxx, come back today to more TV shows & movies.
More TV Shows & Movies to Love
A lot has changed since you left. Come back to Netflix and enjoy newly added TV shows & movies. There's something for everyone to enjoy and we're always adding more, including Netflix original series and movies.
(ad copy, buttons, etc.)
From: yyyy <yyyy@zzzz.com>
To: David Hyman <dhyman@netflix.com>
Subject: Re: Fwd: xxxx, come back today to more TV shows & movies.
Dear Mr. Hyman:
It would be great if xxxx would come back. She could watch all the netflix she wanted and I wouldn't mind.
But she's not coming back.
(link to obituary)
I canceled her account two months ago; somehow I managed to explain the situation to one of your people. But that's not good enough; now, in order to get your system to stop sending her email, I either need to provide information I don't have (a credit card number from a bank account which I closed), or I need to get a code so I can log into her netflix account.
This is apparently done in the name of PCI compliance. Like SOX, or ISO-9000, those things done in the name of PCI compliance often don't actually help and may actually harm. E.g. I want to give her privacy, and absolutely do not want to log into her netflix account.
I have fulfilled my responsibilities here; it is up to your company to insure that you stop sending advertising to my dead wife.
It would also be great if you could empower your people enough so that issues like this could be taken care of with a single phone call, but that no longer seems to be the American way.
Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
Best regards,
yyyy
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4 grand owed in debt? (Score:2)
The only thing I see that being from is a credit card debt through PayPal, otherwise there's no fucking way in hell a PayPal account like that should be in a negative that deeply.
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If I die tomorrow my estate will owe £13k in credit card debt.
I clear my credit cards every month. I just happen to have spent rather a lot this month. 4k isn't a trivial sum but it's well within the bounds of credibility.
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Timing is everything. If I die 1 day before my CC bill is due, my debts could be quite different than if I die the next day.
They weren't wrong (Score:2)
" this breach is not capable of remedy."
Seems accurate, unless you have the Doctor and his TARDIS ready to bring a cure back from the distant future, to her past. >_>
Re:Luckily, he's not in Germany ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't believe that is entirely true. You can decline an inheritance if the estate in Germany is indebted.
Re: Luckily, he's not in Germany ... (Score:5, Informative)
You must do so in a timely manner, in writing, notarized by a lawyer. It's assumed by default that you accept it if you don't do this.
Re: Luckily, he's not in Germany ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but, in this case it's inheriting _debt_ by default unless you explicitly opt out.
the law does not differentiate (Score:2)
Re: the law does not differentiate (Score:2)
I mean, under US law, the estate must be settled, and if at the end of it all, the balance is negative, nobody automatically inherits it.
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Also, there's the issue of timeliness. If you don't respond in time (perhaps due to grief, or being unaware of the situation of the estate with regards to actual values of debts and assets), then debtors can come after you well after your time to disown the inheritance has elapsed - whereas in the US, you would be shielded against such a thing, unless you misappropriated funds from the estate, in which case you would be responsible for those funds only, not the entire value of the debt.
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The default in Germany is 1. You assume all debt and assets, even if there's a thousand dollars worth of assets and twenty thousands of dollars worth of debt. In order to not inherit the debt in such a situation, you must disown your inheritance as I described above.
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Notaries in Germany are apparently lawyers. https://guides.library.harvard... [harvard.edu]
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Re: Luckily, he's not in Germany ... (Score:5, Funny)
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That's interesting, I guess it's fairly cheap insurance since the payout value declines as the mortgage balance declines. Great idea. What percentage does it typically add to the mortgage payment? Is it personalized based on the applicant's age/health or is it standardized?
Actually wrong (Score:4, Informative)
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First of all, Nazis did more than round up Jews and gas them, so there are plenty of ways to be like Nazis without actually murdering Jews.
Second, is your objection that he hasn't gotten around to persecuting Jews, or that he hasn't implemented mass murder yet? Because Hitler didn't campaign on a platform of death camps. His platform was about getting rid of illegal immigrants and making Germany great again. There were even Jewish organizations that supported Hitler because they also didn't want to be infes
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These days you could get seriously rich if that sort of thing were actually worth any money. You could have retired in style before Grandmaster Troll was even elected.
Re: Luckily, he's not in Germany ... (Score:2)
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Yup. Nothing to see here. They're asking for their money back, getting a claim in on the estate. Big whoop.
Re:regardless of her death she had debt (Score:5, Interesting)
the wording might be insensitive but notifying her husband about it isn't that unusual, is it?
Nope, this is just an attempt to collect a debt by PayPal. Poorly worded and untimely given his wife's death was already legally established by the copy of the death certificate he provided, but just SOP for debt collection. Common, even when the person in debt is dead. I got lots of demands for payment when my mother died. I wasn't liable for any of the debt, yet the letters came and got shreded.
I do think that PayPal was stupid to try this, mainly because of the risk of a bad PR outcome. Receipt of a death certificate should suspend the account and all debt collection activities for any unsecured debt associated with the deceased.
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No, you can certainly offer an apology. It's up to the offended party to accept it or not.