One of my side projects is a small gay discussion group online. It sells certain services (not pornographic in nature, it is the digital equivalent of a support group) and I had to use PayPal for payments for certain business reasons, unfortunately.
Today my entire PayPal account was frozen, 700 dollars was stolen from me, and I can't seem to get anybody at PayPal to deal with me rationally and overturn this decision.
I believe that some automated filter at PayPal saw the phrase "gay phone sex" on the site, but missed out the total description around that text that made it perfectly clear that it was NOT any kind of gay phone sex or any kind of pornographic service.
I'm not a rich man and I depend on this money to pay rent and I'm in a real jam here. If anybody at HN has any connections at PayPal and can help me out, I would really appreciate it.
Please email me at wd1993 AT gmail if you can please help me out. Thanks.
To the OP: Like so many people, I lost money when PrayPal[0] locked me out of my account. No amount of faxing documents, emails or phone calls would convince them that it was my account and my money. I ended up just walking away.
A suggestion might be to go talk to a gay rights group and try turn this into a civil rights / discrimination issue ... they won't want the bad press.
[0] PrayPal: Put money in and pray you get it back out again.
It's obvious the account wasn't shutdown due to 'gay rights'.
This is like an incompetent woman who was sacked suing for sexual discrimination.
https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&c...
you have:
"You may not use the PayPal service for activities that:"
"relate to sales of [...] (e) items that are considered obscene [...] (g) certain sexually oriented materials or services"
I work on (amongst other things) a gay online discussion group/social network. A lot of what's discussed on there would probably be considered obscene by the population at large, and is certainly sexually orientated in many cases.
I suspect your site is similar. Care to post a link to it?
eg, Someone saying "Gay phone sex is great!" is probably ok. Someone saying "I just had a gay phone sex call where they said they'd do [x] to my [y] while swinging from the [z]" may not be.
My goal with this thread is to try and get some connection to somebody at PayPal that can help me.
There was nothing obscene on the site, and in our FAQ, it was made clear that this wasn't a gay phone sex service. Regardless, the PayPal employee I spoke to agreed that it wasn't some obscene porno or sex service.
This seems like complete discrimination. They shouldn't be able to freeze your account for having any references to "gay X" any more than they should be able to freeze your account if you were advertising "african american X".
I don't think they realize just how noxious this is to small companies. Pay pal is convenient but they are Earning a recommendation for unreliability large this kind od thing is enough to put a start up in serious danger. I hope star ups are not forced to play it squeaky clean and forced to discriminate in order to avoid loss of liquidity.
It sounds like it takes no more than a bad word or rumor of some outspoken group to get cut off. By bad word I mean gay black muslim independent.
I feel sorry for our non white non catholic friends. There seems to be a growing movement in the US to fragment our nation and KUt the others off from income and protection of law.
Is it related to orientation or do just the words "phone sex" trigger something? I have no idea how PayPal works internally.
http://twitter.com/#!/hotdogsladies/status/12525667593752576
If you chose to use Paypal for business reasons, then you should own up to having possibly made a bad business decision. There are alternatives: Amazon Payments, Google Checkout, WePay, and 3rd party payment processors.
It's unclear to me that you've actually contacted them - by phone, not via email or their online support gadgetry. Have you? If so, what (specifically) was their response?
I asked to speak to a manager. They said a manager would get back to me, but no response yet and I'm guessing they won't ever call me back.
For future reference, seems that a merchant account with Visa or Mastercard is fine even for hate groups like the KKK. http://www.christianconcepts.net/informat.htm
If those douchebags can charge cards, Im sure you can figure something out.
Generally, every time you call, you'll have another shot at it. Even if they're taking/referencing notes, if your case truly is reasonable, someone will make it happen on their end. In every case, that's always worked for me.
The phone is the secret for everything - customer support, making sales, getting jobs, etc. :)
I've found that there is another problem related to payments too. Fraudulent chargebacks. Small businesses often aren't good at following up on things and end up throwing a lot of money away because some customers habitually do chargebacks for things like "don't recognize charge," etc... and then get their money refunded because the business owner doesn't reply to the request quickly enough (the window to reply is very short).
I don't know if any services address this or not, but I would be interested in helping to solve problems around merchant accounts.
If there were a centralized site that people like WillyDmz could go to then maybe the individual could garner a bigger voice. How cool would it be to see how much money any specific merchant is holding back? Maybe a site like this could get a little more attention.
What do you think? If anyone would be willing to work with me on this, we can make it happen. I'm capable of building out the code for it; would need a designer and a marketing person to help. If anyone interested, let me know.
