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Comment by TorKlingberg | Hacker News Reader

Does PayPal even allow selling things like WoW accounts? Otherwise you don't really have a right to complain.

I am no fan of Paypal. That said, I've sold 6 figures worth of virtual MMO goods on Paypal over last 15 years. There have been a few fraud cases, but with proper security precautions they have been few. Then again I mostly dealt with EQ not WoW.

Paypal did freeze my account some time around 2003, it took major faxing to get it to unfreeze.

Paypal is more convenient/safer for casual buyers than most other payment options starting from CC ending with Bitcoin(I use/own BTC). I don't mind paying with Paypal for some small item from China but would be hesitant to use a CC.

At least that is the perception that Paypal has worked hard to cultivate.

PayPal isn't a merchant platform -- it's a payment service so yes you can accept personal payments, it might not be covered by seller protection if that's what you mean. That's no excuse for terrible security policies though. I mean literally every buyer had a stolen account!

How were you determining the accounts were stolen?

Also, as much as we would love to say companies are responsible for the security of our accounts, losing credentials is also a user issue.

> How were you determining the accounts were stolen?

About 3-5 days after each payment was confirmed Paypal would reverse it due to it being unauthorized. More so the payment would show up as confirmed/valid initially, at no point during the process did Paypal make you aware of the possibility of the payment being reversed nor to help you confirm/validate that it was in fact authorized by the account holder.

> Also, as much as we would love to say companies are responsible for the security of our accounts, losing credentials is also a user issue.

Of course it's a user issue at a certain scale, but when it's that prevalent I am inclined to say that company is primarily at fault.

It was just a WoW account, so not a big deal for me, but I'd really hate to be a merchant or someone otherwise relying on Paypal day-to-day, that sounds absolutely horrible.

I guess not, but you'd just describe the goods as "Virtual goods".

In theory, they shouldn't. Its not allowed by Blizzard, and if memory serves, Blizzard considers it a breach of EULA and takes the account down as a whole. PayPal was supposed to be cracking down when this was rampant, because essentially its an illegal product.

Though really, paying for crap is different than selling it. More of an eBay domain problem than PayPal. Two totally different businesses.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but breaking the EULA does NOT make an action illegal. It puts you in breach with an agreement you had with Blizzard, so they could terminate your account. But that doesn't make it a law. Blizzard may have some means to enforce the "contract" in civil court, though.

The difficulty comes in when the only use of the account, which would consist of the username and password, would be to log into Blizzard's servers, and since the account has been sold, it would be doing so in violation of the EULA and thus accessing their servers and circumventing a login without protection. This can possibly be a federal crime (there are a few cases tried as such, though it is rare).

So while the item being sold isn't illegal, it is pretty close to have no legal uses.

That said, I rather paypal (or any other business) not be the arbiter of law.

There are two types of laws, criminal and civil. Illegal means against the law.

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