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Comment by jake_morrison | Hacker News Reader

PayPal blocked us after 10 years due to a a Kafkaesque problem, where they decided that our Hong Kong company was both a Chinese company and not a Chinese company: https://www.cogini.com/blog/paypal-know-your-customer-failur...

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I ad a similar issue when parts of Ukraine were invaded by Russia and my Ukranian developers were suddenly "Russian" developers.

Could you possibly elaborate on this? What kind of problem have you had?

US has embargo on Crymea

Sure. My payment provider told me I could no longer work with my developers, basically.

I was using odesk.com at the time and they basically banned me from interacting with the deva.

I see. Were they the Crimea or in the the Eastern Ukraine?

Stevastopol

Thanks!

Hong Kong is part of China and also not part of China. So it makes perfect sense that a Hong Kong company is both Chinese and not Chinese.

The city state has its own currency, monetary policy and legal system, enough for the department of state to treat HK as an independent entity as far as trade is concerned. Given the vast amount of money and good flowing through through HK I find it hard to believe any established payment processor would lack familiarity with the status of Hong Kong. It looks more like a (poorly) made up excuse to ban undesirable users.

I have to agree. With the amount of money involved internationally with HK I highly doubt Paypal would just decide to shut down an account because of that. If that was the really the case there would have been a LOT of other accounts shutdown.

This sounds more like an excuse from Paypal, who I fear talking bad about in case they decide to ban me too :P

If you read the actual blogpost, it was more likely an administrative mistake earlier in the process that was then difficult to undo, and no one really giving a fuck on paypal's side.

Attribute things to incompetence before malice and all that, especially when attributing it to malice requires thinking they made a fairly odd decision to outright lie to customers about why you are ceasing doing business with them.

Sufficiently prolonged incompetence, when the resources are available to easily correct it, is malice.

It isn't a

> (poorly) made up excuse to ban undesirable users.

I suppose I'm not interested in debating the definition of malice as it relates to actions by a large corporation...

It's also not not China as in Republic of China as in Taiwan. This is worse than Schrödinger's cat.

Thank you for sharing this story, I have added it and Niteo to my growing list of PayPal (and other financial service) bans: https://gitgud.io/TornTongues/torntongues/#paypal (contributions welcome). Kafkaesque indeed...

> "They don't care, because it's a numbers game to them."

This sounds so similar to all other large tech companies, specially Google. Somewhere along the line all these tech companies lost user focus.

Google has spectacular user focus on the users that pay them (i.e. advertisers).

Not really. Perhaps the huge ones, but if you are small, medium or even a big one they don't care.

As demonstrated by a $50k+/mo account who's Google reps only recommend one-size-fits-all strategy and can't be bothered to listen to feedback that such a strategy only works with advertising to end customers and not B2B advertising.

The account rep is just a marketing vector for Google to their paying customers.

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