Hacker News Reader

Comment by metaprotocol | Hacker News Reader

Niteo produce a product to produce content farms and generate spam.

PayPal has done the world a favour by banning them.

PayPal should avoid doing vigilantism if they want to keep people's money under trust.

It matters very little how despicable the company is, monetary services must not hold opinions unless explicitly told one by a local government.

The Swiss bank model.

This is BS. It matters very much to me as a customer of a financial services provider what sort of company I am keeping.

For example, I don't want my bank to provide services to organised crime because I both feel that would be morally wrong and I think it'd open the bank's staff to influences that aren't in the best interests of other customers.

Also, your argument isn't with PayPal; it's with the entire FS industry.

Organized crime is illegal and content farms are not, so this is a terrible example.

A better example might be highly religious community not wanting their bank to do business with companies focused on the gay and lesbian community.

This is a good example because: it is not illegal for a company to cater to the gay and lesbian community, it is not illegal to discriminate against gay and lesbian people in many states, and there are communities that would dislike this sort of company.

Your example is irrelevant as that’s a civil rights issue.

Either way, I gave the example of organised crime not in an attempt for people to take it as a literal suggestion of equivalence but to argue against the idea that a financial institution has no place being choosey about its customers.

It's not being choosey to not support organized crime, because it's illegal; the choice has been made through the law. It IS choosey to chose not to support an organization that's doing something legal that you don't like.

> "should void doing vigilantism", "monetary services must not hold opinions"

That sounds like a very interesting idea, but how about this one?

> "You must follow PayPal's terms and conditions or should expect to have your account terminated"

Because that's how every payment processor in existence works. Don't like it? Use bitcoin.

If every payment processor worked like this, this story wouldn't be here.

Are you kidding me?

For one example, see American Express's Merchant Operating Guide

https://icm.aexp-static.com/Internet/NGMS/US_en/Images/Merch...

See section 10.2 Prohibited Merchants. There's a whole list of them. Here's a select few:

Multi-level Pyramid Sales, Prostitution, Payday Lenders, Timeshares, Gambling, Virtual Currency, Escort Services and Non-Licensed Massage Parlors, Mortgage Payments.

American Express does not take people's money under trust. No payment processor does that, it's a bank thing.

Founder here. We're not processing SaaS through PayPal, as mentioned in the post:

> The most interesting thing is that we’ve moved away from PayPal in the last two years and have only been receiving some minor payments and paying for a few online services.

We've stopped using PayPal for our SaaS business a few years ago.

But you do enable spam.

"We do this thing that probably got us banned, but we don't do it on PayPal so what's the problem."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com