PayPal Freezes Cryptome's Account 253
grimwell sends in the news that after Cryptome's little run-in with Microsoft and NetSol, the activist site has now had its funds frozen by PayPal. Cryptome founder John Young notes, "Google lists thousands of instances of this asymmetrical high-handedness." "We have reviewed your PayPal Account, and due to the excessive risk involved, we would like to begin parting ways in a manner that is least disruptive to your business."
Paypal AUP only states sales of infringing goods (Score:3, Informative)
Paypals AUP states as part of its AUP "prohibited activities" that you may not receive payments relating to the *sales* of goods that "infringe or violate any copyright, trademark, right of publicity or privacy or any other proprietary right under the laws of any jurisdiction". Keyword here being sales. Given that cryptome does not actually sell anything and paypal is used for donations only makes this act by paypal to be somewhat unwarranted I would have thought. Even tho companies tend to do as they please. Will be interested to see what happens.
Re:What's a Paypal? (Score:1, Informative)
The thing is, in Europe, wire payments seem to work quite well for this sort of thing.
It's just that here, domestic wire payments only make sense for transfers in the thousands of dollars.
Re:What's a Paypal? (Score:4, Informative)
It's the merchants that really get shafted...
I noticed that paypal is really the only option for selling software in the webos appstore. That's pretty depressing imo.
Re:Paypal AUP only states sales of infringing good (Score:5, Informative)
Yes you do. Unless specifically configured to do otherwise, funds transferred to your PayPal account will remain there as available balance.
Re:What's a Paypal? (Score:3, Informative)
Banks do this all the time. Any merchant provider can stop your processing and withhold all your money due to "risk" at any time.
Federally-regulated means nothing.
Re:Oh great. (Score:3, Informative)
Their T & C say they can even keep the money without refund, so interest is the last of your worries.
(the Xorg foundation lost $5k in this manner.)
Re:What's a Paypal? (Score:1, Informative)
I run a small business selling online.
Google checkout is an alternative to paypal.
It was just as easy to set up as a merchant with google as it was with paypal (yes, I accept both). For my customers both are secure, and names that they know and trust. Neither requires that the customer register in order to pay me -you can just enter your cc info and pay.
I don't trust either of them with my money any longer than I have to, but I am happy to use their services to provide my customers easy and convenient ways of paying me.
fool (Score:5, Informative)
as long as there are fools like you who naively believe that crap, we can get out of this mess.
1 million americans risked losing their homes. lets say these were bought from $500,000 at the market's prime. now their value is devalued to $300,000. it makes $200,000 per house difference. multiply it with 1 million houses at risk, it makes $300 bn. it means that the total loss from this was $300 bn.
go even further, and TRIPLE the risk. make it $900 bn.
america itself provided more than $1.2 trillion to banks. europe provided similar ~$1 trillion amount. switzerland and other countries provided separate amounts to their banks.
it means that as of now, the governments worldwide covered approx SEVEN times the loss in this crisis.
then WHY the fuck we are not getting out of it ? despite ALL potential losses are covered in multiples ?
BECAUSE IT ISNT A HOUSING CRISIS.
it is a crisis of investment tools. the banks have created bonds indexed on these houses, and then moved to create EXTRA assets indexed on those bonds and so on. in the end, they created WATER VAPOR assets, which were traded at around SIXTY times the entire worth of all houses they were based upon.
this means wall street banks peddled worthless paper that is inflated over SIXTY times of what value they should have to people around the world. even leaving aside the big fraud that is creating derived assets over other derived assets in the first place.
and the SOLE reason this has happened is, because bush administration left banks unregulated, didnt even touch them, and let them do this immense fraud. while whole world has been trusting that since usa was a G5 country, its banking and finance mechanisms would work properly. it didnt. because fraud was allowed.
as said, as long as there are fools like you who still doesnt know how they really been screwed, and as long as there are fools like the one modded you insightful, this fraud is bound to repeat.
Re:What's a Paypal? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What's a Paypal? (Score:2, Informative)
I'm not saying you don't. I'm calling them on it, too. I am refusing to do any further business with them. This is a very stupid stunt on their part, but they are legally entitled to do this stunt (rtfa and the saga on Cryptome's site). Does that make it right? No. The law is retarded and is known to be subverted. Does PayPal have the right to do this? Yes. It sucks, and I wish John was able to get those donations to help him with the costs for the site, but it doesn't change the fact that PayPal has a right to do business with whomever they want (or not do business with whomever they don't want).
Re:What's a Paypal? (Score:2, Informative)
What a laughable comparison.
If you had read about the saga on Cryptome, you would learn that if John had waited the six months, he would have had those funds dispersed to him. Instead, he chose to refund those who donated and cease doing business with Paypal.
All PayPal did was decide to stop doing business with him completely (for whatever reason).
Re:What's a Paypal? (Score:4, Informative)
Paypal may not be evil in all cases (Score:4, Informative)
I dont know the specifics of this case but in some cases they may do the "freeze the account until a full ID check has been done" because they have detected activity that would require the filing of a US government "suspicious activity report". Because normal PayPal sign-up does not involve carrying out the ID check you get with regular banks, anytime transactions happen that would require a SAR (which requires disclosing full details of the account holder), PayPal has to freeze the account and conduct the ID check so they can file the SAR.
Any transaction over $10,000 requires a SAR, as does a series of transactions between A and B that total to more than $10,000. There are other triggers but I cant find any sources of info on those.
Re:What's a Paypal? (Score:5, Informative)
And regulation never stopped them. We have plenty of regulations on banks, and take a look at their condition right now. Regulation didn't prevent the recent collapses.
This is the exact opposite of the truth. In the late 1998, congress moved to weaken the Glass-Steagall [wikipedia.org] act, which prevented banks from engaged in the risky securities trading that got them in trouble and caused this recent financial implosion. The Glass-Steagall act was passed after Great Depression when banks got themselves into exactly the same sorts of trouble they are in right now.
In short, regulations kept exactly the situation we're in now from happening for some 70 years. Yes, regulations do work. Not just any arbitrary hammerings, but rules specifically designed to prevent bad, foolish things from happening. If the Glass-Steagall act had been in effect this whole time, we would have never had the tarp and never had to bail out the banks. The old rules didn't apply any longer, and the bankers went nuts dreaming up ever more clever schemes to make money out of nothing. The banking sector lacked regulation.
Try GunPal Instead (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What's a Paypal? (Score:3, Informative)
For the sake of this argument, let's take the statement that Paypal froze their funds as being true (I know, this is Slashdot, where the summary is usually wrong).
I saw this on Friday at his site (http://www.cryptome.org) and he indeed did have his paypal account frozen. No assumption is required this time.