scottishrubyconference.com
My bank statements = none of your business
As an example, for the US, see http://www.ehow.com/facts_5155455_fha-mortgage-borrower-requ... for a situation in which the bank must see two months of bank statements from a borrower in order to be able to offer them a particular kind of loan (FHA-subsidized in this case). There are similar requirements in the US for larger loans that were imposed in the wake of the subprime stuff a few years back (e.g. at least as of a year ago mortgages at certain rates and certain mortgage amounts required a certain fraction of the purchase price in liquid assets remaining _after_ making the downpayment to qualify for the loan).
Apart from all that, your assets are insurance against you losing your job (for both you and the lender!), which is why underwriting wants to know about them. If there's no legal requirement for them to know, you don't have to give it to them, of course. And just as of course they may choose not to underwrite the loan at the particular rate you want in that situation, because they can't evaluate the risk.
Your bank statement = covering sheet that proves the account is associated with you and your address, not x months of payments made and taken.
<3
The thing that's especially onerous here is the fact that they keep screwing with the same customer the same way over and over again. I agree with the author of the post -- that's just too much crap for too little return.
Possibly ironically, this has resulted in me falling back to my backup payment sending approach - paypal.
I'm not usually one for mantras, however "stay hungry, stay foolish" comes to mind.
The current incarnation of PayPal is the result of a March 2000 merger between Confinity and X.com. Confinity was initially as a Palm Pilot payments and cryptography company. X.com was founded as an Internet financial services company. Both Confinity and X.com launched their websites in late 1999. Both companies were located on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Confinity's website was initially focused on reconciling beamed payments from Palm Pilots with email payments as a feature and X.com's website initially featured financial services with email payments as a feature.
Which I sent to them, and then they say that they'll follow up and it's been like 4 days. What pisses me off, is that they don't return the same courtesy / haste that they expect from us.
I got down to half hourly emails to the customer services manager "in charge of my case", but was ultimately worth it.
"Stella is out of office recent days for holiday. She will follow up the investigation of your account when she comes back."
I hope you e-mailed them back, told them this was unacceptable, and asked to be transferred to someone who is actually there.
Of course, I told them that asking prompt replies, especially on non business days (with the threat of limitation) was unacceptable if the same courtesy was not going to be returned, and asked someone else take over.
To prevent too much back and forth, the 'reply' button disappears, but if you click on 'link' to go to the page directly, you should still be able to reply anyway.
It's the repeat nature - asking for the same documentation over and over again - that's so annoying here.
"4/ Our bank statements are none of your business. 5/ The details of our venue agreement and insurance are also none of your business."
So they're refusing to prove it's a conference but requesting that Paypal are "reasonable"? Having your account verified once and then go dormant in payment receipt for the majority of the year then start again would seem suspicious to me... especially when their justification isn't something they're willing to prove.
But they have proved that they are a conference for the same dates for the previous three years.
And the implication is that Paypal are asking for more documentation than previous years ("the documentation you are asking for this year...").
Even assuming paypal aren't crooks - is doing this OK with the Scottish Data Protection Act, Charities commission or Company registration?
alter table accounts
add column confirmed_not_a_fraudster boolean
not null
default false;(Granted that the OP's questions seemed to focus on the former, rather than the latter)
Go raise yourself 20-50 mil in VC money, then get several suites of legal types. PayPal has licenses in (by my count) 42 states. To operate in foreign countries, I'm sure the issues become much more involved. This isn't a matter of writing some cool code and getting server space somewhere.
https://www.paypal-media.com/licenses (which for me Safari is unhappy about the certificate for some odd reason)
In short, I can't wait to get the "delete merchant bank/switch all processing to PayPal" task to the top of my to do list.
PayPal has never required us to leave a reserve amount in our account. I believe that is due to our low complaint/chargeback rate.
I signed up when it was only available in the US now it's avialable in Scotland I tried to register for the UK version. You can't register for the UK cos you have a US account, you can't use the US account with a UK credit card. I asked them to delete the US account and it's now stuck in some sort of Limbo where I can't open a UK account cos I have the US one, and I can't log into the US one because it's been deleted. Once a year I spend a few days emailing them to try and sort it out.
Also: have a US bank and stick with it. If you leave the US, don't tell your bank! (I've had the same account since the 80's - it's gone through four banks now - and that might also be one factor in my looking stable.)
One of my agencies is a lady who did a round-the-world trip over two years, getting back a year ago. PayPal locked her payments - every time - while she was in Africa.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-greenspan/a-public-comme...
Now add the invasive requirements of various governments to track the movement of money (formerly to "fight organized crime and money laundering", later to "combat the funding of terrorism"). All of a sudden an incredibly trivial problem requires piles of lawyers, legal research, logging, information collection from account holders, information verification, responding to "requests" for information, shipping around physical paperwork, and generally dealing with a pile of stuff that should have nothing to do with a payment system.
On top of that, even if you don't want to deal with issues of fraud (hey, cash doesn't), the various other payment services you'll have to deal with to get money into and out of your account still have piles of ways to screw you with it. If you take credit cards, cardholders will do chargebacks to take money back from you. If you take other Internet payment services, you get to deal with the issues raised in this article just like any other merchant. Most people don't want to trust a new payment service with a bank transfer right away. If you accept mailed or scanned checks you'll probably have to deal with check fraud. And without a physical presence and giant piles of extra money you can't convert to and from cash.
Oh, and if you want to make a service as close to cash-equivalent as possible despite all these requirements, then the first time your service transfers money for some notable illegal or questionable operation, you'll probably get shut down over one of the details you missed, which would probably get overlooked if you operated just like every other "financial institution".
I'm expecting to take about £2k in the first few days, so I'm almost certain the account will be limited; I've preemptively supplied most of the info listed in this article to try to mitigate that.
I'll be sure to update HN on what happens.
That is the problem. It appears to be impossible to know in advance whether your documentation is sorted out.
Even if PayPal had a 'how to not get locked out and look like a shady operator' HOWTO somewhere on their site the situation would be more acceptable but right now it seems people have to live their life with the (vain?) hope that their capricious payment-processing overlord will continue to smile upon them.
So what's the point? Complain all you want, you're still using Paypal THIS YEAR, after being screwed over 4 years in a row. When push came to shove, you picked.... Paypal.... to process your payments. So by your own actions, you've shown you think Paypal is the best processor available.
So contacted support and their reply was, well how do we know they actually subscribed.
Well I don't know, maybe they could have looked at their records and seen the IP address and paypal account associated with the subscription with their attached bank accounts and credit cards.
Paypal is great when it works but when something goes wrong it really goes wrong and support just doesn't help.
Anyway, I use a proper merchant now for CC payments. I will most likely implement PayPal once again but just as an option and right at the bottom of the list.
Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.
-- Clark’s law
Typically I've found that with Paypal there's no immediate cost of entry (just start accepting payments) but paperwork is required over a certain threashold. But try to use any regular credit processor, they'll require your paperwork done in advance, and since you're doing an event with tickets, it might take a few applications until you find one with decent rates who will accept your risk.
We tried AlertPay which works fine, but the fees are too high, still, they seem a good alternative if you want something that just works for now.
I hate all these "don't use PayPal" comments but even for first-world countries like Australia, setting up a merchant facility that can accept foreign currencies is really, really hard and very expensive.
Its a Scottish conference.
(The historical UK alternative to PayPal is Nochex, of which a cursory Google search also reveals plenty of dissatisfied customers).
It's also why Apple/iTunes is so important and why the mobile carriers should be rubbing their hands with glee (if they had any sense).
If someone screws over a Paypal customer, it's Paypal who have to swallow the loss. Can't really criticise them for the way they act when it's their bottom line that gets affected.
In one case I was able to find the guys new Paypal account, but they refused to go after him.
Agree that Paypal has a lot of challenges to run their business, but I disagree that the bulk of risk is being taken by them...
If you need international payments and you don't want to be credit card only then PayPal more or less is the only option. (in many countries credit cards are not nearly as common as in the US)
"I keep hitting myself with this hammer, but it keeps hurting! What am I doing wrong!?"
At least until they change their policies. They seem so arbitrary sometimes.