While I wouldn't put it past PayPal doing something like this, it's also completely 100% possible that the guy is lying through his teeth on what was actually going on with the money in that account.

PayPal is well known for doing things like this. Frankly, if someone does any business with PayPal at this point, they deserve it.

Years ago, SA was collecting funds for the Red Cross. PayPal froze the account and told Lowtax that he either had to refund the money or donate it to the United Way (the most corrupt "charity" in the world, not surprisingly.) He ordered a refund. Of course, PayPal refunded all of the money... minus the transaction and exchange fees. I can't think of many other companies which have stolen thousands of dollars from a charity.

Imagine what a bank would be like if there were no government oversight, and you have PayPal. They're one of the worst companies in the world to deal with and their entire company stinks of genuinely terrible people. There are so many horror stories around that I am literally incapable of comprehending why anybody would voluntarily use them for anything.

Gee, that's lame. I haven't had any problems with PayPal, but there was this one time in 2007 when they called me to verify I had been using my account for some eBay stuff. So I told them "yeah that was me" and that was the end of it. Weird.

That's only because you're small fry.

FARK had trouble with them too when they were collecting donations for Tsunami/earthquake relief last year.

hey so tibby steals all of his posts from SA

Even I know that they've done this a whole bunch of times, and I tend not to pay much attention to this sort of thing.

Omg this totally isnt going to change my use of paypal at all. I'm going to need a personal screwing before I change my buying habits.

I'm pretty sure that paypal has these rules because they are required to have (and enforce) them by law. It's not really their fault; blame the people who have taken advantage of "charity" donations in the past for personal gain. This is why we can't have nice things.

While I do think the representative was an ******* who used his position of power to be as rude as he possibly could for strictly sadistic purposes just because he was in a bad mood and should most certainly be fired, and indeed the account should be unfrozen and the money either left alone or, if this really is that bad a quagmire, refunded... I also, on the other hand, see why these policies are in place, and I don't doubt that this sort of thing is investigated when it occurs, for concerns it could very well be some money laundering scheme or something.

-tl;dr: I think Paypal the corporation is right to have these kinds of policies, but the representative this story revolves around is a corrupt and sadistic individual who should be fired.

Yeah I'm with Jarl, and this doesn't strike me as insanely evil...

out of curiosity, is there a legit alternate to paypal? i would love to give my business to someone OTHER than them. i have been personally shafted by them before, as well as many other people i know.

sweet! just got a Square account... wont really do much in the way of replacing paypal, but can now take credit/debit cards on my Iphone!

I'll throw my hat in with a vote for [url]www.wepay.com[/url]