You may very well be right about Paypal aggreeing to drop the fee if their pet charity clearing house was used. If true, I still find that inexcusable, or at least, extremely myopic, behavior given the very unusual circumstances. I’m willing to listen to any new info that comes up, but as for right now, Paypal is looking like an ogre.
I agree that Lowtax may have handled it in a naive way, but PayPal also had the chance to fix things once he was finally able to get ahold of them. Over the years, I’ve come to see Lowtax as a crotchety old man in a young man’s body, but he has always seemed to have acted honestly.
I look forward to reading PayPal’s no doubt forthcoming press release. They may change my mind, but for now, I’ve canceled my account and don’t plan on setting up another.
No, my understanding is that it went something like this:
PayPal: We’ve heard you’re doing something shady. We’re not giving you this money in your account.
SomethingAwful: (#%! Fine - I don't want it. Just please make sure you give it to Red Cross, if you're not going to give it to me, since I was just going to give it to them anyway. That way you know nothing shady's going on.
PP: We can't do that. We only donate to United Way.
SA: &*(#! Fine, give it to them, but tell them it’s for the hurricane vicitms.
SAgoons: %$#@! United Way suxxorz!
SA: &^(? Really? OK, PayPal, never mind. Give everyone their money back, dammit!
PP: OK.
It’s important to note that SomethingAwful has been effectively offline during this whole disaster (their datacenter is in NO). It just came up on another host today, but Lowtax was directly and personally losing money on this and still trying to contribute. He claims to have personally donated $3,000 and will be splitting profits on some future sales to the relief effort.
It was a bit naive for him to think this was going to work smoothly, but PayPal’s complete inability to work with him in a timely matter should be embarassing in the extreme. United Way? United fucking Way?? Way to go, champs.
Some people question why he wanted to put the money into his own account, rather than just link to the Red Cross… it’s already been covered above why he did this. But something else to remember is that the promise of “free somethingawful merchandise” probably accounted for the extremely rapid rate of donations. People like to donate, but they like to donate more when someone’s making it worth their while. (I’ll leave the moral and ethical considerations of that phenomenon to GD, but it’s true. It’s why public TV promises gifts to members, and charity auctions make more money than plain donation funds.)
And it’s completely believable that people reported him for scamming, he has a lot of people out to get him personally. He’s allegedly been getting threats against his 2 month old daughter during all this, and considering some of the crazies banned from SA I’m not at all surprised.
I lurk there from time to time (Batman’s Shameful Secret (their comics forum) can be hilarious) and will occasionaly look at the banned forum to see why people are suspended and/or banned. You think the Mods here are strict! This guy will ban you if you look at him wrong.
Yeah, but banning isn’t a permanent thing. You have to keep in mind that “bans” are a really smart way of implementing a “bullshit” tax. SA membership is 10 bucks for life, and if you’re a reasonably intelligent poster who doesn’t break the rules and piss off any mods, that’s all you’ll ever pay.
If you want to troll, annoy, and be otherwise obnoxious, you get banned and have to pay another 10 bucks to get back in. I look at it as a way to keep the boards cheap for intelligent people, and pay for bandwidth on the backs of the idiots.
Permabans are reserved for the truly bad (child porn, etc) and people who have been banned so much that it’s not worth the money they pay to keep them. All in all I think it’s a system that has worked fantastically, considering the popularity of the forums.
This entire fracas caused me to cancel my paypal account in disgust. Apparantly dozens of other goons are as well; I wonder if paypal will even notice.
I doubt it. At most, a few hundred will cancel. Most SA members will keep their accounts, I wager, because 90% of eBay transactions seem to be Paypal only, and my guess is that many SA members use eBay.
Wait-couldn’t people complain to PayPal that they’re pulling a “bait and switch”-that they were promised their donations would go to the Red Cross, not United Fucking Way?
Careful, this kind of talk will get you another visit from the United Way Squad.
You have made your voluntarily contribution this year, haven’t you? Your supervisor should have the form in his office, stapled to your annual performance evaluation.
I’ve already received my e-mail shakedown, the follow-up e-mail shakedown, the e-mail warning (“Only 21% of you have donated with only 2 weeks left…it is clear that you don’t understand the ‘importance’ of ‘making a difference’…”) the “vaguely threatening hardcopy letter”, and the “personal visit” from a person who makes about a half-mil a year to tell me “You’re GOING to donate to United Way this year, AREN’T YOU?”
I long for the day when when a court prohibits employers from their intimidation tactics for UW fund drives.
And before anyone thinks I’m stingy, I donated $1000 for a breast cancer walk this year. Fuck the UW fundraisers for accusing me of not making a difference.
PayPal lost a class action lawsuit for just this kind of behavior (I don’t remember what the total amount was; my check was something like $13,) so I’m really surprised they haven’t at least tried to pretend to have changed.
That’s a lot of crap, though. They don’t just “look out” for fraud. They automatically lock accounts, ask for an impossible action to unlock it (a USPS tracking number for a non-shipped item, ie the receipt of a charitable donation), and eventually close the account for “inactivity” (caused by them locking it) and TAKE THE MONEY THEMSELVES. The only reason this didn’t happen to SA was because they are one of the more popular sites on the web and enough people were able to pressure Paypal into abandoning their theft-based business plan for one instance.
There are, without question, hundreds of similar charity accounts on Paypal for the hurricane and other cases that will end up in Paypal’s coffers because their owners do not have sixty thousand loyal fans to help get the right thing done.
I hope you were able to find a viable cross-border money transfer method.[/hijack]