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PayPal steals our money!
By: Mark Schmid
Version: 2009.01.12
Total Reads: 605 (En: 333)
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PayPal turns out to be a criminal organization which steals money from its customers on a systematic basis. Here's how we were "liberated" of our hard-earned donations by PayPal:
On August 22'nd, 2007, almost one-and-a-half years ago, we opened two accounts at PayPal for the Organization for Animal Dignity to handle our online payments and donations. One account in English for our English speaking readers coming from our English webpage and one in German for our German speaking readers coming from our German webpage. There was no mention or any kind of a requirement thereby for any kind of documents or proof for non-profit organizations such as us.
Until a few weeks ago two readers have donated a total of 20.- US-Dollars to our English account at PayPal and one female reader 10.- US-Dollars to our German account at PayPal. From these donations, PayPal deducted a total of 2.03 US-Dollars for its services (roughly 10%). Apparently PayPal thought this is not enough though and they wanted more out of our relationship.
A few weeks ago we received two emails from PayPal, one in English and one in German, stating that the accounts at PayPal of the Organization for Animal Dignity have been "restricted". In effect, PayPal has confiscated our funds at PayPal without any prior warning or explanation and has canceled our ability to transfer our hard-earned donations to our safe bank account in Switzerland.
The explanation for this theft was that: "In a routine check, we noticed that we are missing some documents from you, proving your non-profit status". PayPal demanded that we provide a plethora of legal documents which require lawyers, government institutions and a lot of very expensive legal work, as well as hundreds of hours of time to produce. And until we faxed or uploaded these documents, which of course, as PayPal is well-aware of, are impossible to come by for a small non-profit organization as us, PayPal would hang on to our money in order to enrich themselves. Not to mention that we don't have a working fax machine and that the upload form provided by PayPal was defective and did not accept any documents for upload at all.
After spying out a working email address of PayPal with quite a bit of work (the emails we received all stated to NOT answer to the sender email address, as those emails were machine-generated - nor did they provide an email address which one could respond to), I wrote several long and pleading emails to what PayPal calls "customer care" (which is nothing more than a bunch of snotty kids getting kicks out of harassing their customers by abusing their powers over them). After about 5-6 very long and elaborate explanations and pleadings from myself, I managed to get PayPal to release the confiscated 20.- US-Dollars on our English account.
However, the confiscated 10.- US-Dollars on our German account were not released. I told PayPal that we had two accounts, and effectively needed two accounts, which was accepted, and that the English account has been released, but PayPal was not interested in that. PayPal demanded that we repeat the entire explanation and pleading I provided in my 5-6 long and elaborate emails to release our funds on the English account. When I simply copied the entire email conversation lead for the English account, PayPal stopped entirely responding to any of our emails. Even after demanding the immediate release of our stolen funds and threatening legal steps PayPal refuses to answer our emails or to return our money which they stole from us.
As legal steps are not an option when fighting over 10.- US-Dollars which someone stole from you, which PayPal is well-aware of, especially for a small non-profit organization like us, PayPal is very sure that they can get away with such thefts from small customers like us.
We can therefore do nothing else than make this behavior of PayPal public and warn people of this "company": BEWARE of PayPal! They are criminals which will steal your money when they can! And they think they can get away with ANYTHING because they have a monopoly and there is no real alternative for online payments for small organizations like us.
BEWARE! Do NOT trust PayPal just because they seem to be a big "company"!
Obviously, for these reasons we canceled all our associations with PayPal to limit future damages to our organization through theft by PayPal.
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