The temporary site wrote: Well, after breaking the $20,000 donation mark, Paypal decided to shut down the donation account. No warning, no customer support, no chance to fix anything. Why? Here's their reason!
I AM NOT SELLING A SINGLE THING. What part of "donation" is difficult to understand? I even selected "donation" on Paypal's site when generating a link for this website.
They are asking me to provide a shipping number FOR ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. How they hell am I supposed to comply with this? What do they want? Oh, well you see, here's proof I shipped NOTHING via NO COMPANY to NO ADDRESS. Is this good enough? I can't even enter a fictional shipping number for the fictional item that never shipped to the fictional customer because THERE IS NOTHING THERE TO CLICK. I press the "continue" button and it says:
Well WHAT THE HELL DO YOU EXPECT? How can I dispute something WHICH DOESN'T EXIST?
I have no idea what will happen to all the donations you guys contributed. All I know is Paypal has locked me out of the account. I'm going to try to straighten things out with them, but I think everybody here is awfully familiar with Paypal's (lack of) service.
You try to do something good for people and look what happens.
I guess the nice ladies and gents at Paypal are now using your funds for Project: Paypal Takes Your Money. Sorry your donations can't go to help those in need. Hey Paypal, why don't you head on down to New Orleans and tell people who lost everything that, well, some folks donated TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS to you, but hey, you ain't getting it because we don't feel like it.
That's fine. You idiots don't want me to run a charity drive? Fine, that's your decision. But it's not me you're hurting; it's the thousands of goddamn people with no homes, no money, and no hope fleeing a burning, flooded wasteland they used to call "home." I wasn't going to take a single cent of the donations, unlike Paypal, who decides that when people send money to help victims survive a national disaster, their company should still make over 2.35% of everything sent in. I doubt the CEOs of eBay and Paypal give a crap about this crappy little website and our insignificant drive to help out people in a time of crisis, but this drive meant a lot to me, and once again Paypal has completely screwed over another customer bringing in plenty of money in their ridiculous "transaction fees."
If this is some thing where Paypal is dubious of [the site], fearful I'll take all the money and buy a luxurious $22,000 house in Beverly Hills, fine, you morons at Paypal can take every cent from my account and manually donate it yourself to the Red Cross. The only reason, and I repeat ONLY reason I used your service, was because I needed a way to get peoples' shipping addresses so I could send them free merchandise for donating.
Oh my god, what suspicious activity! Since all our servers are down, I couldn't use our credit card payment system to do it myself, so I had to rely on your lousy company. I guess I learned my lesson here, eh?
Paypal has completely walled themselves off from customer complaints. Oh, you want to dispute something? Fill out these forms and click "SUBMIT" and have no clue who or what is going to read your message.
You guys want to close my account? Fine, close it. I'm done dealing with you. I loathe your wretched, vile, disgusting, bloated waste of a company with every last fibre of my body. You're a grotesque, swollen parasite whose existence hinges solely on the lack of competition. You can close my account and shut me out, but you'd better take every single cent people donated and send it directly to the Red Cross.
Folks from around the world trusted you with their money, and you'd better make sure it gets to where it was going, and I'm not talking about your wallets.
I fully expect you refund each and every single person who donated thinking they'd be helping, not padding your wallets. I'd advise any and every one of you using Paypal to stop, but I'll just let their service speak for itself. If you want to support a company who acts like this, then that's your decision.
I'm pissed off and I can't stop writing. You guys were donating nearly $3,500 AN HOUR before Paypal locked the account. Let me repeat that again: $3,500 AN HOUR. You guys were exceedingly awesome. You were going above and beyond being gratuitous. It was amazing, I was wearing socks and they were blown off so hard that they slammed into my sock drawer and all the other socks flew out. Now it's like everything collided head-on with a brick wall, and it's all smoldering mess.
It's bad enough I'm losing money and customers every single minute of every single hour I have no business. All of that is very crappy. But this charity drive, having Paypal step in and shut it down... that just makes me beyond angry. I can't stop writing about this crap, and I'm afraid I'll be here venting my fury at this despicable corporation until my wife saws off my arms. I'm going to stop right now, because I'm just repeating myself at this point.
Here's all I want: you people at Paypal send every single dollar donated to the Red Cross. Then you give me these peoples' mailing addresses so I can reward them for donating by sending them free merchandise, which I pay for out of my own pockets. That's all I ever wanted to do, and I'm sorry you won't allow this.
... now, I've heard some pretty nasty things about what PayPal will do with money that they have confiscated from suspended/locked accounts. Ranging from not issuing refunds to those who gave money to the locked account, to spending it themselves on their own uses. This link was also posted on another forum I frequent -- http://www.nopaypal.com/ -- which I haven't been able to go into reading deeply just yet, but apparently has user and former employee accounts of their practices to confirm certain negative things heard.
Anyway, I'm not trying to use this as a soapbox. I actually just want to get a discussion on this going, and see what everyone thinks of PayPal's actions concerning this.
Personally, I was shocked and amazed at how a community the likes of SomethingAwful could raise that much money in such little time. And I'm just ... left speechless at PayPal's actions. I don't know what to think about them, honestly.
