Paypal is shit, the best thing you can hope is that you fly under the radar, because the horror stories are very real. They are not a bank, they are an unholy, unregulated "money transmitter" and if they choose to screw you there is nothing you can do about it. Have fun with your mandatory binding arbitration.
So if something like this happens to you as an european, either sender or receiver, use your rights.
> As of July 2007, PayPal provides localized versions of its service to customers in the EU through PayPal (Europe) S.A.R.L. et Cie, SCA., a wholly-owned subsidiary of PayPal that is licensed as a bank in Luxembourg.
Whereas:
> In the United States, PayPal is licensed as a money transmitter, on a state-by-state basis
I couldn't agree more that Paypal can not be trusted, in my vocabulary Paypal US stole the money from the designated charities. To say that Palpay is nice and good in Europe because they regulated by Luxemburg banking authorities, IMHO is far stretched.
1: http://www.somethingawful.com/news/paypal-fiasco-summary/
http://www.npr.org/2014/10/29/359365276/on-superstorm-sandy-...
AliPay? WebMoney? Bitcoin??
Source: I run a charity.
Cash is headed that way too but it'll take longer.
Why not just say "Paypal Defrauds Donors"?
I recall reading a bible quote or might have been another religious book. It said, when a powerless man breaks the law, a crime has been committed, but when a powerful man breaks the law, the law was unclear.
I wanted to try my hand at fighting them a year later and the account was gone entirely. Bye money.
Алты́нного во́ра ве́шают, а полти́нного че́ствуют.
Translation: One hangs the thief who stole altyn(3 kopecks), and honors the one who stole poltinnik(50 kopecks).
It's why we don't call murder suspects murderers.
Recently they got a letter in the mail explaining they had been chosen as recipients of this Amazon Smile money. The thing is, they never chose to be featured on Amazon Smile. Amazon used some database of non-profits (that they had never heard of) in order to present options to customers, then notified the non-profits later. The letter specifically said that in order to collect the money, they needed to create an account with Amazon smile.
PayPal is probably just pre-populating their list of charities, failing to fully notify recipients of the donations, then saying "Whoops, I guess we got to do something with the money."
Is Amazon doing the same thing (withholding donations from charities that don't register for their service)? Is there any way to check?
but
"Please note that donations that have been allocated to an unregistered charitable organization from customers that made their first supporting purchase more than eight full quarters ago and have not been distributed will be reallocated to other registered charitable organizations."
I'd love to hear more about how Amazon Smile works from the charitable organization's side.
https://org.amazon.com will probably be of interest to you.
Is there a way to know which charities are registered with Paypal?
On our side, for charities that are paid via PayPal Giving Fund, we require them to be fully onboarded. For our "choose your own charity" feature, which lets you customize which charity you are supporting, we only allow our customers to choose charities that are fully registered with PPGF. You can verify this by noting that we only support a fraction of the charities listed on PPGF.
Why use PPGF (or Tides.org, our backup) in the first place? There are regulations that require you and the charity to do a fair amount of paperwork and register with various states. When you are tiny, you can probably fly under the radar, but when you are approaching $100M raised for charity, it is a good idea to be fully compliant.
PPGF is an easy way to maintain sanity, because we can focus on fully complying with every state with the PayPal Giving Fund 501(c)3. PPGF then handles maintaining compliance with the states (+ UK) on their side.
However, for this to actually legally work, the PPGF needs to retain control over the funds, hence the scary disclaimer on the site. If they didn't actually pay a charity we work with, which has never happened, we would obviously let the customer know and make it right. We will be updating the disclaimer next week to be less opaque.
"It did not have an account with the Giving Fund, even though its profile page there included its logo, mission statement and tax identification number."
TLDR; PayPal is soliciting donations for over a million charities, most of whom are unaware of this.
Probably not. There are many online databases of registered charities already, and I wouldn't be surprised if new ones get scraped into them automatically. It seems likely that PayPal would have used an already existing dataset.
Having publicly visible transactions will be a huge boost to transparency and shady practices like those described in the article just won't fly. Every other month a news article about banks exploring blockchain tech keep popping up in the media and I hope banks find a way to incorporate blockchain technology into the existing system.
How much additional risk would be added by just publishing a log of all donations, with just the sender anonymized (with the sender knowing or even choosing the id, so they can verify their donation went through?), and how could that be mitigated?
They did the whole thing to get people to use Paypal but didn't want to put in the effort to run it properly. In effect they ended up defrauding charities. If you put up a sign that says "accepting donations for charity X" and then don't make every effort to donate the collected money to X, it's fraud.
"Paypal accused of defrauding charities" would have been the appropriate title.
Imagine you started to collect on behalf of the red cross, directly to your personal bank account, then sent the red cross a letter, letting them know that if they wanted to register with you and accept your terms, you might give them some money that you fraudulently collected by abusing their name and good will.
Fuck PAYPAL
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/31/trump-fan-peter-thiel-sa...
But this offense will tried in a different courtroom, the same that VW and Uber have lately been 'splaining themselves in.
Truly a garbage company.
Aside from the contributions themselves, they are seeking $1,500 per occurance in "treble damages" and an unspecified amount for punitive damages.
