PayPal sues Google + ex-PayPal VP for Google Wallet
thepaypalblog.com
thepaypalblog.com
Stephanie Tilenius broke her contractual agreement with eBay after she recruited Bedier (and attempted to recruit many other PayPal employees).
"Bedier was the senior PayPal executive accountable for leading negotiations with Google on Android during this period. At the very point when the companies were negotiating and finalizing the Android—PayPal deal, Bedier was interviewing for job at Google without informing PayPal of this conflicting position. Bedier’s conduct during this time amounted to breach of his responsibilities as PayPal executive."
I'm not a lawyer, but it looks like they have pretty good reason to be upset.
1. http://www.ebayinc.com/assets/pdf/fact_sheet/2011_PayPal_DOC...
You have that switched.
> Google hired Bedier after another former eBay executive, defendant Stephanie Tilenius, solicited and recruited him.
"Bedier transferred up-to-date versions of documents outlining PayPal's mobile payment and point of sale strategies to his non-PayPal computer just days before leaving PayPal for Google"
and
"At the time he left PayPal, Bedier admitted that he had confidential eBay information in locations such as his non PayPal computers, non-PayPal e-mail account, and an account on the remote computing service called 'Dropbox'"
It goes on to explain that PayPal has requested that Bedier removes the information from his personal accounts and returns it to PayPal. Bedier has not yet done that.
This almost displays intent to share this information with outside sources. Wow. This sounds like a massive shitstorm is brewing.
Case in point: "Tilenius reached out to Bedier by text message and again attempted to change his mind. On or about December 3, 2010, Tilenius messaged Bedier, “I still feel like I am missing something, for example what if we increased your offer, would that change things?"
EDIT: BlackBerry Enterprise Service is what I was thinking of. There's a least one tool that you can use with BES, Retain by GWAVA, that will track and store your employee's text message.
The law isn't the employee's friend here...employees have no reasonable expectation of privacy on company devices.
I personally had to file a fraud dispute with my credit card company after receiving two promises over two months to reverse an unauthorized charge PayPal put on my card at their own (not a third-party vendor's) behest.
Paypal had the idea first and a good 10 years worth of trying to make it work (payments from mobile devices was, after all, their first product, even pre-dating online payments). And in this case, they even had some of the same team working on the idea, but they just couldn't make it happen. Google could, and did, so they'll win.
I can understand why PayPal would be upset. But really this just strikes me as another reason why we shouldn't get too worked up about the value of ideas.
This is a clear sign of paypal's weakness. Rather than compete, sue. It's like zuckerberg said: If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you'd have invented Facebook.
I'm not a lawyer, just an engineer so maybe i'm missing something but doesn't seem as dramatic as some of the comments here imply
Edit: OK I got the details of the Coca-Cola/Pepsico case wrong. Apparently some Coca-Cola employees tried to profit from selling trade secrets to Pepsico. Article here: http://www.allbusiness.com/crime-law-enforcement-corrections...
Perhaps not, but as the filing alleges, he was the person in charge of negotiating a deal with Google for Paypal to provide these Wallet-like services at the same exact time he was interviewing at Google for a job. That sounds like the definition of conflict of interest to me.
As an aside, I wonder what the interview process is like for someone Google is hoping to poach like this? Wonder if he had to interview with Andy Rubin a few days after/before appearing on the other side of the negotiating table from him?
However, I have not used Paypal in several years so they might have fixed that.
One quick/recent example: http://www.theindiestone.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=20...
Edit: In response to following comments, I amended above where it made it sound like Paypal escaped a banking regulation to withhold your money. My issue is that they use the 180 hold on account that haven't been locked for good reason.
Some people may be able to get customer service. They offer different kinds of accounts and maybe with a merchant account through Paypal or a business account. I've personally found Paypal to be lacking when trying to get in touch with them. I had someone attempt to scam me out of money by doing a chargeback for an eBay product I shipped via USPS (no tracking number). When they opened a hold on the account because the person said they didn't receive the item, Paypal had a field where I could put the tracking number. Having no tracking number, I tried to attach a note saying I shipped via USPS. I tried contacting support and no one ever answered. I offered to sign something making my personally liable if there was a lawsuit (as I had shipped the item). After all of that, their response was to refund the money so I was out the product and money, and close my account.
Don't act like I'm the only person who's got problems with Paypal. If you have had only great experiences with them, more power to you, but there's many more people who have been wrong by Paypal than other money processors:
"paypal sucks" About 65,800 results
"visa sucks" About 3,970 results
"mastercard sucks" About 1,760 results
If they had a true competitor, they'd be struggling to stay in business.
PayPal has customer service by phone, and they answer on the first ring. No automated system on the business support line either.
Your opinion on PayPal is entirely baseless.
I don't agree with proexploit's assertion that we'd be better off without PayPal, but I also wouldn't carry signs and chant slogans in the streets if the US government forced them to be better stewards of their customers' hard-earned money.
The point of my comment was that proexploit makes it sound like the 180 day hold follows from PayPal not being a regulated bank, where the reality is that regulated banks have the same 180 day hold.
I fear I may sound fishy standing up for PayPal considering its unpopularity (despite so many on HN using it without problems), but I don't like to see the perpetuation of untruths. The people that write these complaints must have never read a merchant account agreement. The list of banks that underwrite the Payments Pro accounts are on the PayPal website under the Legal Agreements link. I do read every contract I agree to.
Even if only 1% of PayPal's users were dissatisfied you'd have much more activity than a couple dozen forum posts a month spread across the web and an outdated PayPalSucks site. That'd be over 2 million people with a reason to vehemently complain. The level of chatter you hear makes it much more likely that significantly less than 1% of their user base has serious problems with the service.
No, I'm not using a different product than you. I've been using the plain-jane standard PayPal payment links and subscriptions since 2000. I'm not immune to their risk department either; someone called me just this month to express concern at my account's refund rate after I cancelled some suspicious looking orders.
I'm sure my account has enough notes on it that I'm a single mis-step away from being frozen myself through no fault of my own. But that's nothing less than I'd expect from any of my payment providers. This is business, I understand why their policies are what they are, and I'm prepared for the chance that they may choose to stop doing business with me at some point in time. A little bit of basic knowledge about the financial industry they operate in and you'd run your risk department the same way.
For a good read, get a copy of the book "Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days". One of the stories is that of the founding and early growth of PayPal. The only reason they are here today, where their great many competitors during the dot-com boom aren't, is that they figured out how to manage fraud risk. They were hemmorhaging tens of millions of dollars a month to fraud losses, but they held on long enough to build the risk management systems you need to provide payment processing to the masses.
"bank of america sucks" About 106,000 results
"chase bank sucks" About 138,000 results
"wells fargo sucks" About 621,000 results
What, exactly, does that refer to?
I realise "Doe" is "John Doe" - a pseudonym for an unknown person. But I can't see why they are included in the suit (all 50 of them).
6. eBay and PayPal (collectively “Plaintiffs”) are ignorant of the true names and capacities, whether individual, corporate or otherwise, of defendants named herein as Does 1 through 50 and Plaintiffs sue said defendants by their fictitious names. Plaintiffs will seek leave to amend this complaint to assert allegations against the Doe defendants when their true involvement in these matters and capacities are ascertained.
In other words, PayPal employees that PayPal alleges that the former employees recruited to Google.
It's about the experience another HN user had incorporating his startup in Delaware and also generated a nice discussion about things to think about before you decide to incorporate (and specifically in Delaware).
Mobile was the next obvious step.
Of course, we're only hearing one side of the story at this point, but at least from PayPal's perspective, this isn't just about losing a couple of executives to Google.
This could get ugly.
Remember Yahoo Wallet?