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Comment by mattmanser | Hacker News Reader

At least he's a known internet guy, it's pretty clear where the money is coming from and this post alone will get paypal to sort it immediately.

But why do you have to be a celeb to get decent support from paypal? Freezing over half a million euros and they don't even assign him a dedicated support person? They don't call him? Disgraceful.

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> it's pretty clear where the money is coming from and this post alone will get paypal to sort it immediately.

I wouldn't bank on that. It's possible, but by no means sure.

> But why do you have to be a celeb to get decent support from paypal?

Consider the fact that he is a celebrity and does not get decent support, you can imagine how it is for the rest of the world.

Especially when you're not in the US.

> Freezing over half a million euros and they don't even assign him a dedicated support person? They don't call him? Disgraceful.

Business as usual for PayPal, see below.

Minecraft games sales.

Unless the whole minecraft thing is a cunningly disguised money laundering scheme for the illegal sale of fjords to rich American businessmen...

We've heard this one before, a surge in sales triggers Paypal's fraud systems.

So what? In my case it was a bunch of newspaper articles about our website that made us grow quite a bit in a short time. A surge is not always fraud related and in the case of an account with long history of being 'in good standing' it is not entirely unexpected to do a bit of follow up after you've frozen the account 'just in case'.

Unfortunately paypal and courtesy only appear in the same sentence when there is a negative in there somewhere.

Ah, sorry, misunderstanding what you meant, you meant paypal sorting it out, I thought you were talking about where the sales were coming from.

If it is, then it's a money laundering scheme with a very good game. I recommend participating.

I am not in the US and I do have a dedicated account manager which I can call or write. He even calls me occasionally just to hear how things are.

With >€600,000 in revenue since the 25th of August there is no doubt that this qualifies for an account manager.

As for the blog post saying that “if they decide something bad’s being going on, they’re going to keep the money” — I think that must have been part of a misunderstanding, e.g. if PayPal find out that the €600.000 are collected via fraudulent means, yes, he will not get the money because people will be reimbursed, but PayPal doesn’t keep peoples money. Even with an account freeze (where the account owner doesn’t get it lifted), the money can be paid out after 6 months.

> As for the blog post saying that “if they decide something bad’s being going on, they’re going to keep the money”

That's complete nonsense. I'm not aware of paypal never paying out money owed, they just drag their feet about it.

A 6 month holdback is enough to kill a smaller company, so it's bad enough.

Look how they recently froze $10m that was donated to Burning Man.

Seriously, how does they review process work, exactly? They could try Googling the customer and find out it's an internationally famous festival that has been going on for years and years. Instead, they just seem to notice the money involved and try to seize it. I bet that somewhere in paypal, it works like DEA style asset forfeiture, and the people who freeze accounts stand to benefit financially, personally and directly.

  >   I bet that somewhere in paypal, it works like DEA style 
  > asset forfeiture, and the people who freeze accounts stand 
  > to benefit financially, personally and directly.

You'd lose that bet. They refund the money to the original payer. For better or worse. My company loses a few hundred euros each month to this. They keep asking for proof of delivery. Yet we sell internet access. No proof in that unless I'm willing to break the law (and my client's trust) and tcpdump my clients. No way I'm doing that so I swallow the losses. No client ever filled a complain in the first place and no client ever complained about returned funds for consumed services either. :P

To get around this situation, mark your paypal invoices as 'Services' and they can not refund them at all (unless however the card was stolen, etc). But 'Services' don't require shipping proof.

Thanks for the advice. Will look into it.

I'm sure they do that on a bit by bit basis, when they're isolating one transaction at a time, but are you sure that when they 'freeze' an entire account, they reverse all of the transactions?

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