Comment by viraptor
2 months ago
> If enough of these horror stories are publicized, people will learn to never buy/redeem Apple gift cards
You'd think so. Yet, the stories of PayPal locking up payouts to surprised people keep coming every year - and people still use them.
This is a problem with modern life in general. Computing and the internet have exploded the complexity of society. Regular people have so much on their plate as it is (school, work, family, mortgage, etc) that they simply cannot keep up with all of the privacy and security risks of a digital life. They also can't keep up with the complexity of politics and civic life, but that's another discussion entirely!
> You'd think so. Yet, the stories of PayPal locking up payouts to surprised people keep coming every year - and people still use them.
At least in Europe, PayPal is a regulated bank which means you can hand the case over to the authorities and they can and will help you out.
They aren’t regulated as a bank in the US, where they have a much lighter-touch type of licensing.
Do the bank regulators in Europe typically help effectively when PayPal freezes an account?
Yes they do. Someone got banned for Cuba sanctions [1], others I don't know the context [2], and for others media attention is enough [3].
[1] https://www.onlinehaendler-news.de/recht/urteile-entscheidun...
[2] https://www.sbs-legal.de/blog/update-sbs-legal-erwirkt-zwei-...
[3] https://www.test.de/Leserfall-Wenn-Paypal-ein-Kundenkonto-ei...
‘Member States shall ensure that, in the cases referred to in paragraph 4 …, after taking its decision, the credit institution immediately informs the consumer of the refusal and of the specific reason for that refusal, in writing and free of charge, unless such disclosure would be contrary to objectives of national security, public policy or Directive [2005/60]. […]’ https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...
I think tech people who read a lot of news headlines have a hard time grasping the scale of these services.
Commenters here talk about PayPal account closures as if everyone who uses the service will eventually lose their money. Now we're talking about gift cards as if everyone using gift cards will have their account locked.
These stories, while frustrating and sad, are rare occurrences. The majority of people who use these services will not have any experience like these stories you read.
To be honest, I think the average person is probably better at estimating their risk of using these services than a lot of these HN commenters.
It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle.
It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.
> It's the "would you eat from a jar of M&M's where one is cyanide? well what if there are X x 1000 M&M's?" principle.
This captures the Hacker News style misjudgment of risk very well.
First, none of these issues are equivalent to eating cyanide in any way, shape, or form. The extreme melodrama of upgrading "someone's PayPal account was erroneously locked" to literally being poisoned to death is emblematic of the misjudgment of risk going on.
Second, eating M&Ms is a silly analogy because it's so easy to dismiss. Obviously nobody needs to eat a couple M&Ms, but someone who is running a business needs a way to collect money if they want to get paid. Using a mainstream service keeps your overall conversion rate higher and prevents losing customers who don't want to sign up for something new.
Third, the level of risk is not X in 1000. These cases you hear about in headlines are more like 1 in 10,000 or 1 in 100,000. This is what I referred to by Hacker News frequently misjudging the scale of these services because they only see these negative stories posted.
Finally, this is the key point that everyone misses when they say "Just don't use any Apple products" and other dismissive comments:
> It's easier to just eat something else, and not from the jar, than take an unnecessary risk, even if that risk is unlikely.
It's very obviously not easier to build a life where you avoid anything that might have a small risk. Building your entire life around not taking very unlikely risks is irrational. I know it brings some people comfort to feel like they've avoided some risk they saw in headlines, but claiming that nothing is given up or that it's easier to choose an alternative is blatantly false.
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I thought I'd buy Cory Doctrow's Enshittification ebook direct from his website. Surprised to be redirected to Paypal with no other option.
I remember when Cory would let you download any of his books for free and even said you were allowed to email him and call him a sucker for doing this.
He still does offer them for free as far as I know. Perhaps not his most recent ones.
Doctorow has enshittified himself.
in the end, enshitification comes for us all
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That's so much not a fitting comparison.
The most money I have ever had on my PayPal account was 100 bucks from a reversed transaction (like, double booking of a hotel room or wrong item sent), otherwise it's just a gateway. It would be annoying if my PayPal account was locked, because I use it a lot to order pizza online and a few small purchases. I could just use my credit card or something else but it's more clicks. And I know a lot of people who do it like this. The only thing lost is convenience. No past purchases, no digital identities.
Maybe you meant the merchants who really amass thousands but I suppose they are a small minority of active users.
There are a good number of freelancers of various sorts that get paid via PayPal and only occasionally pull that money to their bank accounts to avoid the fixed fee, or even prefer to spend much of it straight from PayPal to avoid the percent fee. People also use it to send money between family members in different countries because it's often cheaper than an international wire.
It's quite easy to build up a few hundred or thousand USD worth. It feels just enough like a bank account that you think you're safe. Then...well, the internet is full of PayPal horror stories, I won't bore you with my own.
> and only occasionally pull that money to their bank accounts to avoid the fixed fee
You have a fee for transferring from PayPal to your bank account?
It’s always been free for me, as long as I don’t opt for the instant transfer option.
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That you don't keep a PayPal balance and i don't buy Apple gift cards is irrelevant to the people that do keep a PayPal balance and do use Apple gift cards
I wish there are more comments like this on HN - well done :)
the number of people commenting like “well I don’t do/use/…” is mind-boggling
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"It hurts whenever I hit myself"
"But you don't have to hit yourself"
"tHaT yOu DoN't hIt YoUrSeLF iS IrReLeVaNt To ThE pEoPlE tHaT dO"
I think the point was that PayPal and Apple are different since PayPal is easy to mitigate, and Apple not so much.
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For every purchase you make as a gateway there's a vendor account on the other end receiving that money and required to do accounting with it (like issuing refunds) which requires keeping a balance. These are the people having big problems when their account gets locked and their funds are no longer available. The blow back does potentially effect you if you return an item and then the vendor can't issue the refund because the account is locked.