Paypal steals over $20,000 of relief money for victims of Hurricane Katrina

[dreamwarder]

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...

Comments

[dreamwarder]

An automated response line is not my idea of "contact details" when you're talking about over $20,000. It is clearly not helpful to have no mechanism in place to deal with an outside-context problem. Lowtax clearly couldn't get through to a real person. In the end, *they* had to get in touch with *him*, and they only did that when mainstream news sources started picking up the story.

And when they were instructed to return the money to the people who had donated, Paypal still took fees for currency conversion, despite the fact that no actual currency had changed hands. I call that stealing money from charity.

I echo lowtax's sentiment of "how can these people not be regulated by banking laws??".

Todays SA frontpage has the story in great detail.

[lamuella]

to clarify why SA used paypal in this case:

The only reason they used PayPal was so that Lowtax could send free gifts to those who donated, because PayPal has the option of sending an address. Few other online money transfer systems do the same.

[lamuella]

$40 was from me

[dreamwarder]

:)