Paypal steals over $20,000 of relief money for victims of Hurricane Katrina
Some of you may be familiar with the website "Something Awful". It's a comedy site, and I sometimes post links to things that they've done that are amusing. Well let me tell you a little story...
Something Awful's servers are located in New orleans. Consequently, when the hurricane hit, the website came under threat of being taken out, fairly permanently. There's a fantastic blog here on livejournal posted by one of the people working in the data centre that hosted Something Awful's servers and I urge anyone to go and read it because it's fascinating. The lengths those guys went to just to keep a few websites online was/is truly staggering. At the time of writing I think they're still there, battling the elements and trying to keep communication links up. Those guys are a bunch of heroes, but that's another story.
"Something Awful" did go down for a couple of days when the backup generators running the data centre and local oc3 links started running out of fuel and the bandwith situation became fairly critical. However, when Something Awful came back up on a limited service, the owner posted the details of a paypal account for users to donate money to, which was then to be transferred to the Red Cross.
Staggeringly, they raised over 20,000 dollars in under 7 hours. However, once the account hit the 20,000 dollar mark Paypal shut it down, saying they had recieved complaints concerning buyers related to that account, and that the account would be frozen until the owner could provide explanation for the complaints.
There was then a prefab form to be filled in where the owner could pick from a list of complaints and answer them.
Except there were no complaints.
Because there were no buyers.
Because the account was full of DONATIONS for CHARITY.
So the owner was left staring at a form which he had no way of filling in, and no other options for sorting out the problem either (no phone number, no email address, nothing).
So far, Paypal has done nothing about this.
I urge you to tell as many people about this as possible. Hopefully, that way, it'll make the news.
Here's a couple of links so that you can read more about it for yourself
http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=1000064490&tstart=0&mod=1125817341718
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=f5914a31a0386191c74f00593e2d4b3a&threadid=1660350&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
And the guy working in the data centre's blog is here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/
Something Awful's servers are located in New orleans. Consequently, when the hurricane hit, the website came under threat of being taken out, fairly permanently. There's a fantastic blog here on livejournal posted by one of the people working in the data centre that hosted Something Awful's servers and I urge anyone to go and read it because it's fascinating. The lengths those guys went to just to keep a few websites online was/is truly staggering. At the time of writing I think they're still there, battling the elements and trying to keep communication links up. Those guys are a bunch of heroes, but that's another story.
"Something Awful" did go down for a couple of days when the backup generators running the data centre and local oc3 links started running out of fuel and the bandwith situation became fairly critical. However, when Something Awful came back up on a limited service, the owner posted the details of a paypal account for users to donate money to, which was then to be transferred to the Red Cross.
Staggeringly, they raised over 20,000 dollars in under 7 hours. However, once the account hit the 20,000 dollar mark Paypal shut it down, saying they had recieved complaints concerning buyers related to that account, and that the account would be frozen until the owner could provide explanation for the complaints.
There was then a prefab form to be filled in where the owner could pick from a list of complaints and answer them.
Except there were no complaints.
Because there were no buyers.
Because the account was full of DONATIONS for CHARITY.
So the owner was left staring at a form which he had no way of filling in, and no other options for sorting out the problem either (no phone number, no email address, nothing).
So far, Paypal has done nothing about this.
I urge you to tell as many people about this as possible. Hopefully, that way, it'll make the news.
Here's a couple of links so that you can read more about it for yourself
http://forums.ebay.com/db2/thread.jspa?threadID=1000064490&tstart=0&mod=1125817341718
http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?s=f5914a31a0386191c74f00593e2d4b3a&threadid=1660350&perpage=40&pagenumber=1
And the guy working in the data centre's blog is here:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/interdictor/