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Comment by designium | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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

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.

Did you publish your code?

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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

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

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)

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