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>PayPal is the main reason I'm not positive on Elon Musk's history... they've been "known bad" for many years, including when he was there. He started his fortune from building a company that knowingly scams people. :(

There's plenty of possible things to criticize him for, but this seems like a weird one. PayPal was started by Confinity. He founded X.com in 99ish and they merged like a year after, but then he got the boot as CEO in a matter of, months? Weeks? Don't remember why, but while he still owned a ton of stock he was out in management. Then Ebay bought it all in like 2002. 20 years after his departure, itself before he had any real chance to make a mark, and 18 years after being bought, seems like a bit of a stretch to hold that of all things against him?

Edit: also man what a crazy time, I mean it was obviously crazy even at the moment but still thinking back on the timelines it's still wild.

>20 years after his departure, itself before he had any real chance to make a mark, and 18 years after being bought

You seem to imply PayPal being scummy is a new development. Always has been.

I remember reading where Elon talked about Paypal. They implemented policies he thought were stupid but he was out.

It’s even more bizarre because things like Patreon and SMS text authentication weren’t around in 2002 and hardly even in 2012.

Might as well criticise Tim Bernes-Lee for not developing the HTTPS spec in the 80s

Ahhh, I haven't really had a close interest in Elon's stuff. Only really know of him as PayPal -> Tesla -> SpaceX.

Re: PayPal, just knew he used to run it, and they've been scammy pretty much from the start. Thus the poor impression from that.

Also Re: PayPal: I used to know a guy that worked there from the very early days, and he told wild stories about employees freezing people's accounts and withdrawing the money for their own use. Apparently it was widespread, and pretty common.

That seems incredibly doubtful and highly illegal. I can’t imagine that happening without lawsuits being filed.

Yep, clearly very illegal.

It's kind of funny you say that too, as people have been saying that forever. eg "If they were so bad, stuff would have been done" (sic).

Look at PayPal's reputation going back a decade or two, and you'll see there are tremendous amounts of stories about it. People used to set up dedicated websites collecting the copious horror stories. Not kidding about that, in any way.

At the same time, there were multitudes of other people going "Oh, I've never had a problem with them, you must have done something wrong". (etc)

They've cleaned up their image _a bit_, so things don't seem as obviously bad now (latest development aside). Back then though... sheesh...

I avoid PayPal like the plague, but I would require some hard evidence to convince me that employees were regularly stealing users money.

No idea if that's still the case (hopefully not), but it was widely known when they were a young company. It shouldn't take much effort to look into, if you actually care enough to investigate. :)

Hack: As soon as you start speaking to their robot and he asks "why you're calling", say something like "speak to a human". After robot tries to evade it with further programmed bullshit, say: "GET LOST!". He will quickly respond "It seems I am having problems here" and connect you to a human. Worked perfect for me several times I had to contact their customer support with the identical problem of being locked out due to outdated phone number.

PS: I read somewhere that customers who swear on the line will be connected to agents quicker ;-) or generally receive better experience. Sigh. What a world.

Tried multiple variations of that already.

Ironically, swearing at the bot memorably just ended up in an automatically dropped phone call pretty much right away.

Not sure if that was due to them just dropping the call anyway (guessing so), or there's detection for people swearing.

Or the bot is trying to transfer you somewhere that isn't properly set up.

Yeah, could have been anything. ;)

> Just over a week ago, when I tried logging in to PayPal (2FA is not enabled) a new screen appeared saying they'd sent an SMS with code to my phone number, and I need to type it in.

Is this a European or UK account? That's them implementing the PSD2 regulation [1], and they should have emailed you quite a few times about it.

But yes, PayPal customer support is hilariously bad.

[insert usual rant about their customer support] They've asked me to provide charity information for my personal account some months ago, and subsequently limited my receiving/sending privileges.

Phone calls to them trying to sort this out have always ended up at some call centre in the Philippines, where the agents can only tell their users that the account limitation is "for their safety".

That account of mine is still limited.

They've also limited the personal account of a friend of mine (who was interestingly enough ex-PayPal) before, also asking for charity information.

[1] https://www.paypal.com/uk/webapps/mpp/psd2

Yep, it's a UK account

They did email me a few times saying they wanted my mobile number, but each time I went to the page it had the little text blurb about needing to accept marketing texts.

Again, not going to happen.

That being said, they shouldn't get to invent a phone number when one isn't provided. ;)

---

On a related note -> I remember trying to change the address in my PayPal account a few times after they emailed, as I moved from the UK back to Australia. (thanks to fucking Brexit for forcibly removing my EU citizenship, which I very much wanted to keep. Grrr :< )

Anyway, PayPal didn't allow changing account country through the UI, and there didn't seem to any other way of doing it either.

Not sure what people who move country are supposed to do... o_O

> Anyway, PayPal didn't allow changing account country through the UI, and there didn't seem to any other way of doing it either.

I believe the "proper" way is to close your old account, and reopen a new one from that country's site. Most people I know just have multiple accounts. I don't know if PayPal warns or shuts people down for doing so.

It makes sense legally, since a user would have to agree to a different set of terms in a different jurisdiction.

> It makes sense legally, since a user would have to agree to a different set of terms in a different jurisdiction.

While it's true that different terms - or at least different provisions within a single terms document - might need to apply when someone travels or (especially) moves to another location, plenty of other companies implement various versions of this without needing an account to be closed and reopened.

Last time I checked their terms (it was a few years ago), you weren't allowed to have multiple accounts. As you said when one moves to another country, they just have to close the previous account, and create a new one in the new country.

Which of course causes problems for those of us who do genuinely live in two different countries.

Yeah, I came from Australia, moved to the UK, then have moved back to Australia. And I'll probably be back in the UK for a bit, once the Coronavirus problem is solved.

So, not being able to change country in PayPal is pretty bad. It doesn't match up with the actual reality of how people live. :(

The PayPal mafia in general are interesting folks

Peter Thiel the “libertarian” went on to found Palantir, for example, which helps governments do precrime and encourages mass surveillance of their citizens.

He also opined that “competition is for losers and you should build a monopoly” which as the first check in Facebook helped influence Mark Zuckerberg, and the results we see today. Back then Mark Z wanted to make peer to peer encrypted networks like Wirehog.

Peter thiel also wrote op eds saying stuff like giving women the vote ruined the USA by making it more social-democratic instead of capitalist.

Musk I think has long moved on from the PayPal days.