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Comment by dm03514 | Hacker News Reader

I'm so happy to see this. I am working on publishing a book on leanpub, and leanpub disburses payments using paypal. Yesterday, I logged into my paypal account and I remembered that this happened to me and my funds and account were frozen since 2010 (something I must have put out of my mind :p).

I was searching for this issue and found this lawsuit and cannot wait to be part of it.

Dealing with Paypal during the time was borderline abusive and I felt helpless every step of the way. In 2010 when they froze my account they mailed me a physical letter with an activation code which took weeks, and when I called to confirm my account I was told that the code was incorrect...

I had very very little money in my account < $100 and I can't imagine how frustrating it would be for someone who needed paypal for their income.

I'm happy to be in a position where I can choose to never use paypal again and I hope they are punished for the way they treat their customers.

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Don't worry.

You won't have that money after they've implemented the inactivity fee last year: https://www.paypal.com/be/smarthelp/article/what-is-the-inac...

Wow. Notably receiving money does not make the account active.

Notifications to inactive accounts begins 15 November 2021 and advise simple actions to take before 15 December 2021 to avoid the fee:

- Log-in to your account; or

- Shop wherever PayPal is accepted; or

- Send money to friends & family, or vendors for goods & services; or

- Withdraw money from your account; or

- Donate to a charity with your account

I chose the option to close my account.

I chose the option of making a bot that logs in every 150ms.

I think everyone should do this. It is the best way to keep your money safe

Did you publish your code?

PayPal will limit your account soon enough for security concerns. I would highly recommend not doing what you are proposing

This is true, a long long time ago I linked my Paypal account with Yodlee just to view balances (it would poll my balances at automatic intervals) and PayPal limited my account for "unauthorized third-party activity" or something to that effect.

Now that account aggregators like Mint/Yodlee are more common, I'm sure they worked out a deal with Paypal. But automated login activity is still scrutinized.

Would the inactivity clock keep running while you are locked out?

This happened 10+ years ago and I don't think there was an activity fee back then.

But the account limitation was removed fairly quickly. Basically I got an automated or template message telling me to change my password and keep it secure. Shortly after I changed my password, the limitation was removed.

> It is the best way to keep your money safe

The best way to keep your money safe is to keep it somewhere else.

We’ve closed your account due to suspicious activity please drink one activation can.

Joking aside, don’t you want your PayPal matched with 2fa? If so. How do you handle that with scripting?

2FA is essentially a time encoded using a secret known to you. It's an alternative to using a private key, it's just lest confusing to non technical people.

You basically can read the QR code, get the secret and use it to programmatically generate the token every time you need it.

The phrase here is TOTP,

And for those with 2FA over email, some more automation is necessary.

2FA over SMS requires even more effort

Good to know. I just transferred out my PayPal balance.

Inactivity fee is such a disgusting practice. It doesn't cost them anything to keep the account.

It's an attempt to legalize theft.

This. Skype has been doing the same for years.

With Skype credit that is deactivated, you can easily reactivate it again. I've done that.

Envato does the same thing; so does Freelancer.

That's not strictly true. It doesn't cost them _much_ but holding and tracking other people's money has a cost.

That said, I think the better answer is to send it to the state as unclaimed property.

Presumably it costs more to keep the money and process login attempts. Since logging in is enough to keep the account at zero fees, this seems like a money grab.

Is there really a marginal cost to holding more money? Presumably they can buy treasury bonds and earn some interest off the holdings. In terms of data storage, is it really more expensive to store a positive number vs. zero?

I suppose that compliance might cost something. I don’t know what KYC laws they have to comply with, but that is the kind of stuff that needs actual humans in the loop

> holding and tracking other people's money has a cost.

When you have as many users as PayPal does, in aggregate those non-zero balances are a mountain of money to play with. It's not a cost, it's opportunity for profit.

Holding other peoples money has a profit, not a cost. That float is valuable.

It’s called zero marginal costs for a reason, dude.

> Accounts with zero balance won’t be impacted and this charge won’t result in any negative balance.

How gracious.

Yeah, very nice of them.

How ironic.

When I was canceling my paypal account a few years ago, paypal prompted me: It's free to have a paypal account, so if you don't want to use it, just leave it.

It's hard for me to imagine when someone opens his old PayPal account and finds out that he was charged 10 €. (not even in US dollars)

For over a decade I've heard tons of stories about PayPal freezing accounts for questionable reasons. I've heard of events that were cancelled because the organizers suddenly couldn't access the money people paid to the event, and PayPal wouldn't release the money until they could prove they'd organized the event for which people paid, for which the organizers of course needed that money.

I will never ever use PayPal. Everything I've heard about them makes them sound like an extremely unreliable payment provider.They're not an organization you should trust with your money.

They even created this website, back in the old days:

https://paypalsucks.org/

Worth mentioning in this context is this page:

http://paypalsucks.org/paypal-frozen-accounts.shtml

> leanpub disburses payments using paypal

generally speaking, is it more complicated for these kinds of payments to be done via wire/swift/etc versus paypal?

Wire transfers have borderline predatory fees unless you're moving thousands of dollars, and there's still the issue of "oh you entered one of the numbers incorrectly, hopefully they give you your money back!"

This is a distinctively US feature. SEPA transfers cost (next to) nothing, and the IBAN has a checksum, so entering a single digit wrong will get the transaction rejected.

It's not a US feature, the US has ACH.

I wonder how Wise (formerly TransferWise) accomplishes this.

They seem to be able to send money to bank accounts anywhere for extremely reasonable prices.

They have bank accounts everywhere. They just avoid transferring money between them in the first place. As long as an even amount of money is going in each direction, they won’t have to.

Only if flow gets too out of whack but that means their rates are too one-sided.

That’s the forex business in a nutshell. They don’t convert money, they just exchange it.

Try shopping banks. My wires are free in most cases and I am not a big customer or anything.

I've used Zelle and it was easy. My bank is suggesting them (they have first class support), but I have no idea if they are otherwise better/worse than paypal. Most of the time if I owe money it is either credit card or I used my bank's bill pay (which sends a physical check if they don't have an electronic arrangement)

I did a wire transfer once, $15 in fees, but since the amount was from a house sale (to get from the bank where the money was deposited to my mortgage bank - they couldn't do this direct which was annoying). I wouldn't do it for normal things, but with that much money involved I don't blame the banks for some friction and the cost wasn't much. Hopefully I never do one again, and also I hope I'm an oddity for even doing it at all.

Zelle is window dressing on top of ACH.

Which is exactly what I want, most of the time — I want to write a check, but without the hassle of paper, or the recipient having to explicitly deposit it.

Paypal is window dressing on top of ACH.

With increased provisions for those banks to push liability for fraud further away from themselves and towards consumers...

Zelle is instant for banks on the Zelle network. ACH isn’t.

They frozen my account at Christmas. How do I get in Involved with this

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