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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

>saying that they will process payments unless the payment is prohibited by government sanctions

if they say that they will process payments unless prohibited by government sanctions and then do not process payments that is not prohibited I guess they would be getting sued for those payments.

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evidently not given the downvotes, but then I don't understand, if their terms of service say we pay out unless the payment would be of type X and then they keep from paying out on payments of type Y they have violated their terms of service and thus would be open to being sued.

PayPal can pretty much always refuse to process any given transaction. They are not keeping anyone’s money, they are just refusing to accept a transaction request. There’s no money to “pay out.”

Of course, that makes sense, reading the parent comment I thought it implied that they were letting some money in and not letting it back out. In fact I could swear I've read about PayPal doing that - letting money in, not letting it out.

PayPal DOES do that frequently, mostly if you trigger some risk threshold on your account. But, then again, so do regular credit card processors.

>They are not keeping anyone’s money, they are just refusing to accept a transaction request.

Wrong. Assets under U.S. jurisdiction that are owned by or being transferred to persons or organizations on the Specially Designated Nationals and Blocked Persons List must be frozen. Furthermore, the Department of Treasury has a right to seize these funds without due process.

Please read the article. These are people trying to buy tardigrade-themed items from an online store. PayPal is not taking and then freezing their funds, they are just refusing to process the transaction.

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