PayPal Fires Customer, Refuses to Provide Explanation | Hacker News Reader

PayPal Fires Customer, Refuses to Provide Explanation

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41 pointstony1018 comments

they refuse to explain why "so people dont game the system"

Like being accused of a crime, but not told which crime, so you "don't game the legal system".

Assume it's a false positive for fraud. If you have false positives in your fraud detection and refuse to explain the situation to customers so they can refute the claim, how do you ever fix your broken detection system? Do you simply claim you're batting 1000 and call it a day?

I just logged in to PayPal a couple days ago using my residential IP (unchanged for 2 years), a random (strong, unique) password, and a Yubikey only to be told suspicious activity on my account required me to change my password. From my point of view they randomly picked something they think is suspicious and it triggered something somewhere I guess? Is it suspicious login activity / attempts or suspicious activity like the person here is describing? Am I doing something suspicious or is a nefarious 3rd party doing something suspicious?

Thankfully I don't really use PayPal for anything important and I never will given the terrible stories I've hear for most of my adult life.

You're probably using Firefox anti-tracking capabilities or something similar, that's what caused issues for me on both Paypal and Amazon.

Been happening for years if not decades

His twitter profile has "spiceshop = https://etsy.com/shop/RavenholmSpices" and "food pornographer"

I wonder if it triggered a block for drugs or porn.

Automated systems blocking people for unknown reasons isn’t a world we want to live in if we could help it

According to a later tweet, it was not an automated decision - https://twitter.com/Viss/status/1366898646562660354

"okay so i was able to get through to a person an this is what I learned: - this was a "back office" decision, meaning a human being made it - its "un-appealable", paypal has outright fired me as a customer - they refuse to explain why "so people dont game the system""

If he's a minority, he could maybe accuse them of being discriminatory/racist, which would force them to defend via revealing the true cause? The "is it because I'm black" "argument". It's completely assholish, but they were the assholes first - i.e. if you want to win win a psychopath (or a psychopatic organization), you have to behave like one yourself.

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