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Comment by ben509 | Hacker News Reader

That raises another question: why couldn't Paypal simply say this?

I can imagine several plausible reasons, related to potential liability, but does that mean that if we're trying to outsource business functions to specialist firms that we can't expect them to be transparent in their operations?

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Having worked in a different industry that also had to ban people I can make an assumption: they don’t need to, and doing so never makes anyone happy, so why bother. If they said it was because of their spam business, the owner would do exactly what they did on HN: “but we didn’t use PayPal for our spam business” - this won’t change the decision.

But failing to do so leads to increased operational costs, as customers contact CS again and again, demanding the rationale. It can also lead to negative press.

It's pretty easy to no longer support someone who is banned. The negative press is usually OK because like in this case, and in many others I've seen on HN, the one complaining is usually in clear violation of stated policy. It's completely reasonable to disagree with and complain about that policy, but they rarely do so explicitly, it drums up more support when the policy violation isn't made a highlight.

What specific violation of stated policy are you referring to?

I wasn’t being specific. When I said that policy, I mean the policy the company invoked to justify the ban, which the customer may not know.

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