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Comment by aikinai | Hacker News Reader

At least they were given the reason and a chance to respond. I'm just an infrequent, individual user and one day I got an email from Paypal that I was banned for life with my account closed and the same would happen if I tried opening any new accounts. It also banned my Zelle account for life.

Thank god I never left any money in there or it would have been stolen. And to this day I still get emails from them as if my account isn't banned, but logging in just takes me straight to the ban notice and I can't actually close it or opt-out of emails.

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If you can't unsubscribe and they're marketing emails take them to small claims in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act [0] if you're in the US. Liabilities are over $50k so you can easily max out the $10k limit in court with no representation. In this way it forces them to come to you and they will almost surely lose or settle before the court date.

[0] https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...

Unless something changed recently CAN-SPAM has no private right of action for individuals.

You’re right - individuals can’t do anything themselves:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/inbox/can-spam_and_consumer_...

Interesting. I don't remember the verbiage around the private right to action. It seems as though it would still be trivial to classify yourself as an ISP with respect to email. If you're running your own infrastructure for mail sending and receipt and that infrastructure is in receipt of the violating emails why wouldn't an individual be allowed to sue?

Seems as though CAN-SPAM has lost its teeth to protect the consumer through precedent if that's not a viable path.

Wait, if they ban you and you have a balance at the time, they just keep your money? That can't possibly be legal.

It is because it's in their T&C's. And they fought tooth and nail for years to avoid being classified as a bank so the normal bank regulations and customer protections don't apply to them.

Watch them magically reverse these policies once FedNow arrives and they actually have some competition.

They are a bank in the EU, couldn’t get around that one.

Banks can do this too if you hit the right set of circumstances/red flags.

It is typical for large corporations to have a bunch of legal fine print. This effectively allows them to do just about anything, as long as they have a "reason".

They nominally don't do just anything (like take your money), because they want people to use their service, and if they cheated everyone all the time, you'd hope that people would catch on and stop using their service.

Having said all that, dealing with illegal transactions, fraud and scammers is tough. The corporations will, honestly, make mistakes, and having enough customer service to deal with it all properly is expensive. Hence automated bans. Often there is no recourse except moving towards a lawsuit, which may be unreasonably expensive for most cases, as compared to the money that has been lost.

While I agree that dealing with fraud is tough, what they are doing is pushing this risk onto their customers.

Yup. They closed my account with money in it, with no explanation why my account has been closed and absolutely zero recourse.

I'd be curious to know what happens if you sue them in small claims court. Jurisdiction may be an issue, but if they stole from you while you were home, then I'd argue your hometown is the proper jurisdiction. Note: IANAL.

I'd guess that they'd just not show up, you'd get a judgement, and then just have to figure out how to get it paid. Or maybe they will show up, hire a local lawyer to represent them and point out the fine print in the ToS that forbids holding them accountable for any reason in any venue. And with any luck, the judge will laugh at them and give you treble damages.

I saw a post on here recently talking about how they got Paypal into court. I'll have to try and find it again.

Problem is, it's not worth whatever court costs I would probably incur. Granted, there isn't a lawyer involved in small claims, but could they judge order me pay their lawyer fees if I lose?

Maybe we could create a sort of small mutual insurance fund to pay legal expenses in such cases.

I am not smart enough to know if that is already a thing or not...

You might want to check if lawyers are even allowed in small claims. If they aren't they would have to sent a company representative, and there would be no 'lawyer fees'.

Well in Michigan (where I am located) they are not allowed. I am pretty pessimistic and just assume there are fees I don't know about

Depends on the laws in your jurisdiction. I think in a lot of cases, small claims courts put very low caps on legal fees that can be claimed. The defendant might only be able to claim a few hundred dollars at most.

The ToS has a forced arbitration clause, so a judge would never get to the merits of the case. Any disputes must be resolved through an arbitrator that Paypal gets to pick. Judges love cases with forced arbitration, because they can just issue a summary dismissal and go to lunch early.

Forced arbitration clauses should be illegal just as indentured servitude should be illegal, and for similar reasons.

They may have an arbitration clause, but even then,you would have a good chance of getting your money back if you took them to arbitration.

Yup, thx for the reminder. I had a small-ish balance sitting there and your reminder just provoked me to login, check it, and transfer it out. Can't wait for that new FedNow Service -- it should be coming soon! [0]

[0] https://www.federalreserve.gov/paymentsystems/fednow_about.h...

If you can't opt out of their emails, report them as spam. Because that's what it is.

I reported all my Paypal emails as spam the day I created an account to get something on eBay. Tragically, GMail didn't listen.

All? Like, you reported the account confirmation as spam?

They started sending me advertising shit the same day, so I reported them all because I considered them to be spammers at that point.

I presume PayPal has enough pull to be manually whitelisted by gmail.

I don’t think PayPal has any influence over Zelle which is run by a consortium of US banks and competes with PayPal.

> And to this day I still get emails from them as if my account isn't banned

Marketing people please take note of this. It is particularly galling to be continually pestered to buy things from a company that has refused to do business with you. An Intuit company tried to sell me a home mortgage, and I applied, only to be refused because my home was manufactured off-site. OK, I moved on. But they continued to plaster me with offers for that same product almost daily for years, and now my relationship with all Intuit products is as distant as I can manage.

Ten years ago:

  Amazon: Sell your textbooks!
  Me: Ok

Now:

  Amazon: Sell your stuff!
  Amazon: You are banned from selling due to inactivity.
  Amazon: Sell your stuff!

What’s the link between PayPal and Zelle? And what does it mean for a Zelle account to be banned for life?

None. There is no link between Paypal and Zelle.

They link is the person, and as Cthuhlu_ points out, maybe something like a common password?

> And what does it mean for a Zelle account to be banned for life?

Considering that Zelle is focused on traditional bank-to-bank transfers, probably something pretty sketchy to be banned.

I think he means Venmo, which is a PayPal product. Zelle is a consortium of banks.

Is it possible your account was compromised and they closed it after someone abused it? I mean I don't know about you, but my password security wasn't exactly up to standards when I opened up my paypal account...

If you are in Europe file a GDPR complaint with your right to have your data deleted.

If they fail, you get paid the fine (not the state)

> If they fail, you get paid the fine (not the state)

Source for this?

It's a lie, there is no provision whatsoever for people getting paid in GDPR.

Companies are allowed to keep data necessary for their other statutory obligations, like taxes or KYC. Otherwise it'd be a get out of jail free card for fraudsters and sanction evaders.

Sure, but the op suggestion to delete the account should mean deleting any email marketing permissions, which are not necessary for KYC or taxes.

Yes, but they're only allowed to use the data for the (legitimate) purpose it was retained. If you ask them not to retain/use it for marketing purposes, they can still retain it for statutory purposes but they can then only use it for that (not for sending you advertising emails etc.)

You are right, I misread the gp, my bad.

Do you have any evidence that this process actually works, or are you just parotting what we have been told over the last 5 years?

In my experience, there is actually quite a barrier to this, meaning most situations where you see a GDPR violation are not easy to escalate.

Report those emails as malicious.

Yeah mess with your email provider by sending false reports, I'm sure they'll appreciate that (sometimes I wonder if spam is such a big issue in part because users report anything they don't want in their inbox, like a newsletter they previously signed up for, as spam or similar)

Either you're at a small ISP and paypal doesn't care about a handful of customers that need to dig an email out of the spam folder, or you're at a large one and it won't have an effect because nobody else is reporting it

This doesn't hurt paypal but might annoy a small email hoster that might have to clean up your mess.

People use Paypal because they can't get around it. If you want to hurt them, help reduce their market share. Complain to the support of the service where you needed paypal, asking for better payment options (cite articles like this or whatever). That's what I do anyway, and doubly so when I know the owner. That they need to also offer paypal to get more customers, sure that's their risk (I make sure they're aware of it), but at least offer legit payment options as well

They aren't false.

Regardless, the main point (that it'll not affect paypal a jot while inconveniencing someone else) is still valid.

>sometimes I wonder if spam is such a big issue in part because users report anything they don't want in their inbox

Spam is by definition email users don't want in their inbox.

"spam (n): irrelevant or inappropriate messages sent on the internet to a large number of recipients."

No. Spam is by definition unsolicited email (often commercial in nature) from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with.

If you've used a service, even briefly, and willingly given them your email address, and then later get emails from them, that's not spam. Yes, it is super annoying that they automatically sign up your address for marketing, but there is a way to unsubscribe.

If I sign up for a service but don't explicitly opt in to getting their newsletter, any marketing emails I get are spam, and flagged accordingly. The whole idea that I've implicitly opted in without being asked is nonsense.

That's something to take up with your representative, because that's legal unfortunately (specifically: marketing similar products based on past purchases, and in my experience, the consumer market authority takes that definition rather broadly).

There's a second category of unwanted email where unsubscribing has as only effect that you'll get more spam because now they know that your email address is actively being read. The sender is a hacked server or a botnet, and no business is identifiable as sender. This type of illegal activity is what spam filters are designed to combat. You're not helping the designers by marking other email as spam: it muddles the data, causes legit senders trouble (like me, I don't have a newsletter but spam filters are so aggressive that personal messages sent from my server still regularly ends up in spam), and makes everyone's life harder.

> That's something to take up with your representative, because that's legal unfortunately

Or you culd report it as spam in your email client. Because legal or not, it's still spam.

> Spam is by definition unsolicited email (often commercial in nature) from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with.

Can you provide a reference to that definition?

I have checked on merriam-webster, oxfordreference.com, oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com, and wikipedia. None of them include the "from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with" clause. Or even anything which could be read that way.

> Yes, it is super annoying that they automatically sign up your address for marketing

Yes, super annoying. And also spam. If I didn't ask for it it is spam. If they trick you to "agree" to it (for example by having a checkbox where checking the box means you don't want to receive emails) without you realising, that is still spam.

> there is a way to unsubscribe

Sometimes. Doesn't make it any less spammy.

> None of them include the "from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with" clause.

Spam is illegal, but I'm pretty sure none of the mentioned sources make the law about what is and isn't allowed to be sent. Maybe you can find the actual definition in the laws that apply in your jurisdiction.

The laws regarding spam are not the definition of "spam". Rather, the laws describe a subset of spam that can be clearly and definitively identified as "spam". It does not include cases that are just barely within a grey area, but which any reasonable person would label as "spam".

The law follows the existing understanding of what constitutes spam, just as it does for "murder", "theft", and a myriad of other cases. The law does not define these terms, only how they will be applied within the context of the legal system.

Whether I have a relationship with a business or not, if they send me emails that I didn't ask for and don't want, they're unsolicited.

That's, like, the definition of "unsolicited". In the dictionary and everything.

Doesn't matter if there's an unsubscribe link either. It's still fucking spam.

When you unsubscribe, what happens?

Do they now mark your address as "still active and being read" and send it more messages because it's now more valuable?

Or will you stop getting email from them?

That's the difference between things you should be marking as spam and things that annoy you but are legal and you'll just need to press unsubscribe on (and be careful with whom you give your data to). Write to your representative if you want the law changed on what's legal.

You can also complain to the market authority if an identifiable party sends you unsolicited commercial email outside of the law. If they're not identifiable then it's never legal, and that's what you should classify as spam because spam filters are meant to catch this. A legit business can be held accountable and has an interest in remaining in business, but real spammers aren't so simple to trace down and stop so that's what these filters are meant to do.

I get plenty of junk mail in the post. The fact that it's legal doesn't stop it being junk mail. Yes, I could take the time to write to a politician to complain about junk mail, or I could just chuck it in the trash and get on with my day.

Ditto spam. Yes, some of the spam I receive might be within the law. That doesn't stop it being spam though. I could also take the time to write to a politician to try and change the law on what spam is legal and what isn't... or I could just mark it as the spam it is and get on with my day.

What kind of junk mail? Where you gave your physical address to a third party and now they're sending you crap, but they're a legit business that you can tell to stop doing that and then you stop receiving junk mail, or do you mean they got your physical address from data leaks and the sender tries to scam you into resetting your password, sell you illegitimate drugs, etc.? You're talking as though both kinds, legal and illegal spam, are the same thing.

> Yes, I could take the time to write to a politician to complain about junk mail, or I could just chuck it in the trash and get on with my day.

What you're suggesting is messing with a spam filter designed to handle illegitimate email to get confused enough to also filter out legitimate emails based on a guess as to whether or not you might want it. You're not "just chunking it in the trash and getting on with your day" but actively harming the system instead.

> What you're suggesting is messing with a spam filter designed to handle illegitimate email

No, I'm teaching my spam filter about which emails I consider spam, so it knows to automatically filter them out in future. Which is exactly what I want my spam filter to do. That's its job. That's why I installed it.

> You're [...] actively harming the system instead.

Lol.

I'd say the vast number of irrelevant commercial bullshit people get in their email harms the system more. It is spam. If I order a pair of pants from the Gap and they start sending me two or three emails a day, that is spam. If those marketing emails got marked as spam by all providers by default, the world would be better off.

Same with physical mail, which also explicitly just has an option for "bulk mail", which is even worse. If I could opt out of receiving mail from the USPS entirely, I would. (Although I consider them to be the most reliable service for sending and receiving packages.)

If an email address is provided for not-marketing purposes, and is used for sending marketing emails, that’s spam.

For example, I went to a mechanic, and provided my email address as a way to contact me. I started getting marketing emails from Sirius XM, despite never having interacted with them. Therefore, marked as spam. If Sirius doesn’t want their emails to be marked as spam, they shouldn’t be sending out spam.

Edit: Or, in the case of Walgreens, their "Unsubscribe" link reported that there was no subscription at the email address to which they had just sent an email. For that one, I did give a reply to let them know of the issue, and got no response. When the next one arrived from Walgreens a week later, that was reported as spam.

I'm fairly sure that according to even the old (by internet standards) American CAN-SPAM act, if you cannot easily unsubscribe then it is illegal.

I might however have misremembered something so please if someone knows, feel free to fill in.

You're quite right. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAN-SPAM_Act_of_2003#Unsubscri...

I think in the Netherlands (or EU?) it has to also be one-click. It can't first give you a survey or ask you to enter your data again or other hurdles. It's quite strict in that way, but then quite loose in the way that businesses are allowed to send you unsolicited commercial (e)mail if you previously purchased something and they want to market a related product to you. Win some, lose some. I can see the point, though, that you might be genuinely interested in their new fancy better improved heat camera if you previously bought a heat camera of theirs, and the message still has to have that one-click unsubscribe link. I'm willing to accept this compromise even if I am usually not interested in those offers.

What has to die is the type of spam where you have no idea who the sender is or how they got your data. That's what spam filters are designed to filter out, since you cannot filter that by normal/legal means. It's much harder to try and make a spam filter read your mind on whether email from a legitimate business is something you're interested in reading (you may or may not care for that order confirmation, newsletter that you may or may not have signed up for, etc.).

But I've learned today (from the subthread above) that having the general public make this distinction and correctly train spam filters (such as email, but presumably also on reddit and such) together is a lost cause. We'll have spam forever, yay.

> It's much harder to try and make a spam filter read your mind on whether email from a legitimate business is something you're interested in reading (you may or may not care for that order confirmation, newsletter that you may or may not have signed up for, etc.).

Hence, the "Report Spam" button.

No don’t be silly, if you use that button you’re actually breaking the whole system.

You’re just supposed to sit there and take the unsolicited non-spam from everyone around you and never touch that button ever, or dare call something that doesn’t fit one person’s ridiculously narrow definition of “spam” that.

And if you don’t like it, your inly course of action is obviously talking to your representatives to change the legal definition of spam. Anything else is breaking the system.

/s, for those wondering.

Did you miss where the original person is unable to unsubscribe because they were banned? In this specific scenario, it is absolutely spam, otherwise known as Unsolicited Commercial E-mail (and by virtue of them being banned, these specific mails are by definition unsolicited).

> No. Spam is by definition unsolicited email (often commercial in nature) from someone you never have had any sort of (business) relationship with.

The name "spam" comes from an old Monty Python skit about hearing the same thing over and over and getting sick of it, so this definition doesn't really respect the history of the term. The name spam started as a Usenet moniker some time after some lawyers started trying to get people to pay to enter the free green card lottery run by the US government.

This definition almost sounds like you're gesturing at "UCE" (unsolicited commercial email) which some people started trying to push as a definition for spam back in the day.

> Yes, it is super annoying that they automatically sign up your address for marketing, but there is a way to unsubscribe.

I mean, you're responding in a thread where they mentioned that's impossible to reach that page because they're banned and ignoring that people long ago found that unsubscribe was being abused to confirm (and then sell) verified emails to other spammers.

Some of us do crazy things to let us use unique emails per service, so we can find out who is selling our info.

There's a difference between messages nobody wants and messages that you don't want.

We've got problems with messages sent to literally millions of people: viagra spam, phishing scams, banking malware, you name it.

There isn't a problem with messages that you don't want to see in your inbox anymore but that are from a legit business where you can unsubscribe. Trying to unsubscribe from real spam just confirms that the email address is active and the message has been read, and now you'll just get more spam and your email address is more valuable. That's very distinct from a legitimate sender.

There's a clear distinction and I'm wondering if we'd have an easier time filtering out the actually bad stuff if people that think like you didn't muddle the data by marking normal email traffic as spam

As they describe, they literally cannot unsubscribe though, so from that perspective marking it as spam is totally legit

I see your overall argument, however this dilemma is ultimately caused by PayPal's ruthless/unpredictable ban policy

Yes, this is a special situation with no real good options because paypal is behaving like its usual dickish self. I still don't think that it harms paypal or helps anyone to mark their email as spam. Best would be to create a rule to drop their incoming messages.

Or use GDPR or some other legal option if you have time to spare and want to cost them some time=money in dealing with your request.

> or helps anyone to mark their email as spam.

If it keeps the undesired email from landing in this person's inbox, it certainly sounds like it's helping to me.

Training a spam filter is not the same as creating a do-not-deliver rule for a given sender. Unless you manage to convince the filter that paypal is the same as a viagra scammer (good luck with that), you'd still get those messages from paypal.

Maybe some providers also denylist the sender-receiver pair when you click spam to combat this problem nowadays; back when I used public email services this was rarely the case. Nowadays I use a different system altogether so I don't know if this might now be common.

Either way, this is not what the spam button is for, but from this subthread I see that enough people on HN already don't understand how these systems work (and education is hard: people don't even read relevant oneliners pushed in their face at a relevant time, such as error messages), so I guess there's no hope for the general public altogether. I didn't know this is an entirely lost cause and is making me rethink about reporting spam on platforms like reddit. I guess they get so many false positives that I'm wasting my time reporting anything as spam ever.

Most of my email is on my own server, but in my experience (with gmail, etc.) marking a sender as spam will keep them out of my inbox going forward. I would personally filter the email, but for those who don't understand that process, marking as spam can be effective as well.

I mean, I agree that there are varying levels of legitimacy, but that's kind of baked into the system at this point and it doesn't help that plenty of spammers don't have legitimate unsubscribe buttons and sell your email to a chain of ever less legitimate players.

> There's a clear distinction and I'm wondering if we'd have an easier time filtering out the actually bad stuff if people that think like you didn't muddle the data by marking normal email traffic as spam

Something tells me that you missed most of the history of dealing with spam, because people used to be naive about this back in the day and spammers exploited the hell out of them by using unsubscribe to confirm that the email was live and similar tricks.

Unwanted is unwanted. It really does vary by person, that much is true, but even your viagra spam is wanted by some people. But the people sending it are very often also doing a lot of shady stuff like running botnets, so the technical measures to stop that look very different from, say, looking up the SPF record for Paypal:

https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=spf%3apaypal.com...

So the short answer is no, people not wanting to get spammed by Paypal isn't likely to get you more viagra ads from botnets. Maybe, just maybe, it could create some small headache for Sendgrid (who is in Paypal's SPF, but is no small player), but I doubt it.

That aside, I think a few of them frequent HN and they can answer that one for themselves if they want to.

I mean, I'd report it as spam rather than as 'malicious' so I disagree with the GP on that part, but...

> sometimes I wonder if spam is such a big issue in part because users report anything they don't want in their inbox, like a newsletter they previously signed up for, as spam or similar

It's been a problem ever since some green card lottery lawyers decided to spam Usenet and then moved on to using botnets and whatnot while people fought back with DKIM and SPF and such, so I doubt it.

> This doesn't hurt paypal but might annoy a small email hoster that might have to clean up your mess.

It's not clear to me why Paypal would be routing emails through a small email host and most people are using the few big webmail providers at this point.

> If you want to hurt them

I don't think people want to hurt Paypal, they just want to turn off the damn marketing campaign when they're literally banned from the service. Personally, I just set up filters to dump all the junk like the constant emails from Amazon so that I don't have to deal with it.

Horribly applied logic. While mistakes will happen, PayPal for individuals and businesses are apples and oranges because that’s how the banks work. This is a business account. This comment adds nothing to the convo. Little Snitch is amazing btw

> Thank god I never left any money in there or it would have been stolen.

That's not true. They banned my account when I was below 18 because it's forbidden to have an account for minors, but there was absolutely no problem retrieving the $1000+ that I had.

Even if the account is banned they let you link a bank account and withdraw.

I know several people who got stuck in an endless loop of Paypal processes and couldn't withdraw their money. It is a terrible service.

It took years of litigations for my coworked to fetch his $30k from PayPal. The reason they banned was irrelevant.

Can you name the legal firm he used?

Our own legal dept took care of it.

had same experience

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