If PayPal wants to mitigate risky transactions, give us a good mechanism to report fraudulent ones. I reverse dozens of donations to my open source project every month that are obviously fraudulent (testing a stolen credit card to see if it works). I have no way to report it to Mastercard/VISA or the cardholder. I have to reverse it or I get hit with a $20 chargeback fee on that fraudulent $1 donation. And when I reverse it, PayPal keeps their fee, so that has to come out of our funds.
FYI, there is no mention of "risk" in the submitted article, it's purely about copyright policing. You appear to be responding to misinformation posted by some commenters here.
You might have to institute a minimum donation amount, and link to a page explaining why. And I honestly don't think it will matter much if the minimum donation has to be $3 instead of $1 due to fraudulent charges & fees
Paypal provide fraud management filters via the API. Payments can be flagged based on a variety of criteria and automatically rejected or held pending until they are manually reviewed. If you require more sophisticated fraud management tools, I would suggest using a payment gateway service.
Until quite recently, they offered the only way of accepting credit cards without a written application and a substantial security deposit. In many countries, they're still the only realistic option.
The "problematic behaviour" you describe is invariably related to the fraud prevention mechanisms required to offer their service. That's the deal - Paypal are incredibly liberal in opening accounts, but they reserve the right to freeze an account pending investigation if something looks sketchy.
Paypal still fills a very useful role. I've used their services to receive payments for over a decade without incident.
PayPal is more relevant than ever. As simple as it seems, sending legitimate money from point A to point B could not possibly be any easier than with this service.
Their invoicing system is ridiculously simple, nearly everyone I'm working with keeps cash in there or connected to it (or very worst, a credit card attached), it hooks up easily with FreshBooks, contractors like it since PayPal handles the 1099-K themselves, and it just works.
I see no reason to change. I just don't keep an absurd amount of money in the account and I feel safe using it.
And with an absolutely useless website. They have two UIs, like windows 10, an old one and a new one with the website randomly switching between the two and many options or data that are only visible in one but not the other.
I explained this in another post about paypal. Basically, paypal has a monopoly on international transactions for Americans. I ended up switching to Bitcoin, but not everyone is able to do that.
"It's an absolute egregious shame that PayPal, after more than a decade of problematic behavior, is still relevant."
What alternatives could you offer? I really don't feel like entering my Visa details in some random website and Bitcoin is still a mess to acquire and use. Yes, PayPal has it's cons, but unless some other service arise that could offer comparable convenience (fast email & password checkout) and safety (no need to enter personal or financial information) I don't see how it can become irrelevant.
Within the last month, I've found that I can no longer access my bank's website over my VPN, and Netflix has started blocking access while use a VPN as well.
I can somewhat understand the bank's motivation, but offering two-factor authentication would be a much better way of boosting security than blocking VPN traffic.
As for Netflix, it's totally short-sighted. Netflix is literally unusable from my home connection without a VPN (thanks, Time Warner!). Now that they seem to be consistently blocking my ability to use the service, I'm planning on canceling.
In all fairness, that's probably not Netflix' decision, but a requirement of the content publishers and licensing deals.
Concerning the Time Warner issue - I can't say that I ever noticed being the victim of traffic shaping and throttling in similar fashion, but that's just outrageous; How can that be legal?
Huh, I don't get it, why are US corporations so eager to take on them the tasks that should be done by law enforcement? What does PayPal gain by playing police and taking on liability for checking the content of transations? What kind of other petty crime are they going to start policing and can they be held liable if they fail to?
PayPal looses money on fraud (charge-back fraud mostly I assume). They had to pioneer fraud prediction/detection tech to even survive, let alone be profitable.
Actually after Peter Thiel left PayPal, he founded Palantir, which is strongly inspired by their fraud tech. Just more general.
Sure - in an ideal world the law enforcement would just catch all the bad guys and manage to get the money back. But when that doesn't happen a business has to account for it.
I would guess that the policy was originally written for shady piracy merchants that are at higher risk for fraudulent payments. Now that it's in place, it's easy for a copyright holder to come knocking who wants to license their content in Australia but can't because the Australians are already watching their content on Netflix, who only had the UK rights. It's too late for them to rewrite the policy just to pick up a few hundred dollars in VPN buyers' transaction fees without angering deep-pocketed opposition.
That seems like exactly the use case for bitcoin. It shouldn't have much impact on the people who actually strongly and immediately need a VPN - they were probably not using paypal anyway. But it's still a shame they are doing that, because it will make those services far less accessible to the normal people.
It's easy to understand: PayPal is mitigating risky transactions. It makes sense, is perfectly legal, and frankly... I applaud their continued efforts to combat fraud and other bad actors.
EDIT: Downvote all you want for disagreeing... but this (fraud and risk mitigation) is exactly why PayPal "won" the P2P payments space.
I'd have no problem if they just said, these products have an enormous rate of fraud, so we're dropping them.
But instead, their reason is that these products bypass copyright protections. No mention of fraud or anything related to the actual transactions they're processing, they just don't like the products.
Which, fine, PayPal can choose to support or not support whatever products they like, but I'm not going to applaud them for playing copyright police with products which have, as the Supreme Court would say, "significant noninfringing uses."
I'm guessing PayPal isn't blocking all VPN services, just those which are insufficiently subtle about their ability to use them to bypass Netflix's location restrictions. Maybe UnoTelly should rename to UnoDefinitelyNotForWatchingNetflix.
This article is about Paypal banning VPN providers who are using Paypal to accept payment for providing VPN service. It has nothing to do with people trying to buy things with Paypal over a VPN where Paypal can't log a reasonably trustworthy IP address; in that situation, there's increased likelihood that the paypal account is compromised, but preventing a VPN provider from taking payment using Paypal has no effect on fraud committed via people using their VPN service. They are separate issues.
Maybe a few VPN providers are fraudulent, but the major ones aren't. You pay them, you get a VPN. You pay for SmartDNS, you get that service. It's what people do once they have those services that's considered bad by copyright holders, and so they're applying pressure to payment services like Paypal, to get them to stop processing payments for those services.
If you look into the campaigns copyright holders are waging, the major one is an attack at funding sources for all kinds of services: file hosting, VPNs, etc. They are attacking those services and their funding, because trying to go after people who use those services—for things copyright holders don't like—has proven largely futile.
Again, what this article is NOT about: If you try to pay for things offered on a completely legitimate website and you pay with a completely legitimate credit card, but you're browsing using a VPN, it's likely to get declined. Risk of payment fraud or goods purchased using compromised accounts—via VPN which makes fraud harder to trace—is an issue but it's separate from what the article is talking about, and it's distinct from what people in this thread are complaining about regarding the article. While some people might legitimately complain about bans on payment for services over a VPN (it makes it difficult, if you don't trust your ISP or wifi service, to go VPN-only if you can't buy most things), it's fairly clear that such payment-provider or retailer behavior is motivated at combating fraud.
The issue here is entirely about copyright holders being mad and threatening the payment processors of service providers, because service providers are doing things copyright holders don't like, not because the service providers have unacceptable payment-collection risk profiles.
People always act like Paypal can just do whatever they want - they lose tons of money to fraud and are heavily regulated. That drives a lot of the annoying things they do.
I see this as a responsibility of a vendor and not PayPal. An example is an online store which only accepts payments from the UK so when I was on holiday I was unable to use that site. I had to use a VPN to be able to buy the product and deliver to my house in the UK.
I can understand a website blocking users from other locations or VPN users but for PayPal to do it seems unnecessary and a way to hurt genuine users.
Good. The more idiotic restrictions PayPal adds the more likely people will stop using it. I don't understand why the VPN service accepted PayPal to begin with.
Here's hoping this doesn't get buried, but this story isn't telling us anything, and PayPal still allows DNS and VPN services.
UNLESS they're advertised as tools for piracy/circumventing the law.
The services that got banned here were being too cheeky. They weren't advertising a VPN, they were advertising the facilitation of lawbreaking behavior.
If you advertise a high value item like an iphone on gumtree, almost immediately you will get several buyers offering to buy it right away using paypal. If you're unfortunate enough to accept, they receive item and then reverse payment.
If you use their service, you're subject to their rules. It doesn't matter that in enforcing their arbitrary rules they're killing your business or even stealing your assets. Big companies like Paypal and Amazon can do whatever they want, even break the law, with no repercussions. They can close your account for legit reasons, bullshit reasons, or no reason at all.
As a business, relying on such companies is one of the biggest risks you take. Use Paypal? Risk losing access to your funds. Use Amazon? Risk losing access to your computing resources, shopping platform, etc. You have no recourse if you anger the big gods of the Internet. Best not to depend on them at all or the smaller gods that also depend on them. Paypal's not taking payment from VPNs? Use Bitcoin and cancel that Netflix account. Why pay ten bucks a month to Netflix so they can pressure Paypal into shutting down legitimate businesses when you can pay it to a legitimate business (VPN) and watch whatever you want? Sure, torrenting is probably illegal, but one method shuts down small businesses and is immoral while the other one hurts no one ("losses" from piracy are not real). You may not agree with this conclusion, but there is no doubt that this is the direction of thought companies like Paypal, Netflix, and Amazon are steering their consumers in--on purpose.
Shame, sooner or later the VPN service I've been using for the past 6 years will get one of these notices as well [1]. I've been using them to get a dedicated IP and also tunnel all my public wi-fi traffic. It's legitimate use, however I can see how over the past years their website has evolved from business-oriented to be more towards geo-blocking circumvention and targeting the average Joe.
[1] They have other payment options, too, but all are worse than PayPal.
While I don't how they can prove that the traffic primarily through those VPNs were infringing on copyrighted material, it is easier to prove that traffic through a VPN is attacking Paypal accounts for user or transaction fraud.
Paypal is an absolutely worthless organization; the recent tie-up with the Uber and other companies to directly use their app for payment has resulted in money being used directly from my bank account over the credit cards that I have added, there is no way to set default payment method. I really do not how a big company like that can operate on such shameless policies, too big to fail has hurt people more than anything else.
This will be painful for many people seeking privacy and security. But still, they would be better off if forced to use more private payment methods. For now, Bitcoin is commonly accepted, and not all that hard to use. And in many places, online payments can be funded through cash deposits at convenience stores etc. Such payment methods also reduce fraud exposure for providers.
[+] [-] JohnTHaller|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qb45|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Chirael|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdietrich|10 years ago|reply
https://developer.paypal.com/docs/classic/fmf/integration-gu...
[+] [-] mikeash|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Taek|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kintamanimatt|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jdietrich|10 years ago|reply
The "problematic behaviour" you describe is invariably related to the fraud prevention mechanisms required to offer their service. That's the deal - Paypal are incredibly liberal in opening accounts, but they reserve the right to freeze an account pending investigation if something looks sketchy.
Paypal still fills a very useful role. I've used their services to receive payments for over a decade without incident.
[+] [-] dimgl|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MicroBerto|10 years ago|reply
Their invoicing system is ridiculously simple, nearly everyone I'm working with keeps cash in there or connected to it (or very worst, a credit card attached), it hooks up easily with FreshBooks, contractors like it since PayPal handles the 1099-K themselves, and it just works.
I see no reason to change. I just don't keep an absurd amount of money in the account and I feel safe using it.
[+] [-] cm2187|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] such_a_casual|10 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10911837
[+] [-] kbart|10 years ago|reply
What alternatives could you offer? I really don't feel like entering my Visa details in some random website and Bitcoin is still a mess to acquire and use. Yes, PayPal has it's cons, but unless some other service arise that could offer comparable convenience (fast email & password checkout) and safety (no need to enter personal or financial information) I don't see how it can become irrelevant.
[+] [-] tluyben2|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chimeracoder|10 years ago|reply
I can somewhat understand the bank's motivation, but offering two-factor authentication would be a much better way of boosting security than blocking VPN traffic.
As for Netflix, it's totally short-sighted. Netflix is literally unusable from my home connection without a VPN (thanks, Time Warner!). Now that they seem to be consistently blocking my ability to use the service, I'm planning on canceling.
[+] [-] thirdsun|10 years ago|reply
Concerning the Time Warner issue - I can't say that I ever noticed being the victim of traffic shaping and throttling in similar fashion, but that's just outrageous; How can that be legal?
[+] [-] josho|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dave2000|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unethical_ban|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] izacus|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] auganov|10 years ago|reply
Actually after Peter Thiel left PayPal, he founded Palantir, which is strongly inspired by their fraud tech. Just more general.
Sure - in an ideal world the law enforcement would just catch all the bad guys and manage to get the money back. But when that doesn't happen a business has to account for it.
[+] [-] pjc50|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lern_too_spel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mnx|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vanzard|10 years ago|reply
https://www.expressvpn.com/blog/expressvpn-now-accepts-bitco...
https://www.astrill.com/pricing.php
https://doublehop.me/
Etc.
[+] [-] beambot|10 years ago|reply
EDIT: Downvote all you want for disagreeing... but this (fraud and risk mitigation) is exactly why PayPal "won" the P2P payments space.
[+] [-] mikeash|10 years ago|reply
But instead, their reason is that these products bypass copyright protections. No mention of fraud or anything related to the actual transactions they're processing, they just don't like the products.
Which, fine, PayPal can choose to support or not support whatever products they like, but I'm not going to applaud them for playing copyright police with products which have, as the Supreme Court would say, "significant noninfringing uses."
I'm guessing PayPal isn't blocking all VPN services, just those which are insufficiently subtle about their ability to use them to bypass Netflix's location restrictions. Maybe UnoTelly should rename to UnoDefinitelyNotForWatchingNetflix.
[+] [-] harshreality|10 years ago|reply
Maybe a few VPN providers are fraudulent, but the major ones aren't. You pay them, you get a VPN. You pay for SmartDNS, you get that service. It's what people do once they have those services that's considered bad by copyright holders, and so they're applying pressure to payment services like Paypal, to get them to stop processing payments for those services.
If you look into the campaigns copyright holders are waging, the major one is an attack at funding sources for all kinds of services: file hosting, VPNs, etc. They are attacking those services and their funding, because trying to go after people who use those services—for things copyright holders don't like—has proven largely futile.
Again, what this article is NOT about: If you try to pay for things offered on a completely legitimate website and you pay with a completely legitimate credit card, but you're browsing using a VPN, it's likely to get declined. Risk of payment fraud or goods purchased using compromised accounts—via VPN which makes fraud harder to trace—is an issue but it's separate from what the article is talking about, and it's distinct from what people in this thread are complaining about regarding the article. While some people might legitimately complain about bans on payment for services over a VPN (it makes it difficult, if you don't trust your ISP or wifi service, to go VPN-only if you can't buy most things), it's fairly clear that such payment-provider or retailer behavior is motivated at combating fraud.
The issue here is entirely about copyright holders being mad and threatening the payment processors of service providers, because service providers are doing things copyright holders don't like, not because the service providers have unacceptable payment-collection risk profiles.
[+] [-] tyingq|10 years ago|reply
I would argue that Paypal being the default payment method for eBay transactions might have been a more significant factor in their success.
[+] [-] tomasien|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mootothemax|10 years ago|reply
I imagine it's a bit like hosting, where an astounding number of signups are fraudulent.
It's not great that PayPal don't say that directly. Either explanation definitely adds up though.
[+] [-] Havoc|10 years ago|reply
How are these risky? Or rather "more risky" than the average online transaction.
[+] [-] thescriptkiddie|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adam12|10 years ago|reply
This is a stupid move by PayPal.
[+] [-] ppyil|10 years ago|reply
I can understand a website blocking users from other locations or VPN users but for PayPal to do it seems unnecessary and a way to hurt genuine users.
[+] [-] driverdan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] KhalilK|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jpindar|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awakeasleep|10 years ago|reply
UNLESS they're advertised as tools for piracy/circumventing the law.
The services that got banned here were being too cheeky. They weren't advertising a VPN, they were advertising the facilitation of lawbreaking behavior.
[+] [-] dreamdu5t|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] petemc_|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NamPNQ|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joesmo|10 years ago|reply
As a business, relying on such companies is one of the biggest risks you take. Use Paypal? Risk losing access to your funds. Use Amazon? Risk losing access to your computing resources, shopping platform, etc. You have no recourse if you anger the big gods of the Internet. Best not to depend on them at all or the smaller gods that also depend on them. Paypal's not taking payment from VPNs? Use Bitcoin and cancel that Netflix account. Why pay ten bucks a month to Netflix so they can pressure Paypal into shutting down legitimate businesses when you can pay it to a legitimate business (VPN) and watch whatever you want? Sure, torrenting is probably illegal, but one method shuts down small businesses and is immoral while the other one hurts no one ("losses" from piracy are not real). You may not agree with this conclusion, but there is no doubt that this is the direction of thought companies like Paypal, Netflix, and Amazon are steering their consumers in--on purpose.
[+] [-] StanAngeloff|10 years ago|reply
[1] They have other payment options, too, but all are worse than PayPal.
[+] [-] chris_wot|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] reviseddamage|10 years ago|reply
While I don't how they can prove that the traffic primarily through those VPNs were infringing on copyrighted material, it is easier to prove that traffic through a VPN is attacking Paypal accounts for user or transaction fraud.
[+] [-] bunkydoo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] machbio|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mirimir|10 years ago|reply