

Paypal have returned the money "stolen" from Minecraft developer Notch - citricsquid
http://twitter.com/xnotch/status/24378510692

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citricsquid
Personally I don't see why it's at all unreasonable for them to require money
to be left in the account, as long as he's allowed to withdraw that money if
he ceases operation through Paypal.

I'm not saying that Notch is scamming people, but if he _did_ withdraw
everything, never deliver the product and run off, what responsibility should
Paypal have? They'd be required to cover tens of thousands of $ in refunds.

~~~
hga
Are you sure about their refund policy for an account like this?

While you have some points, I just don't see them handling this responsibly,
with the latest detail being their unilateral new reserve policy. The
continuing major issue that all of us honest types have is that early on they
developed an attitude that too many of their customers were criminals (and
certainly plenty of them were). They succeeded in surmounting the loss
prevention problem that has felled a lot of their competitors, but this
results in a _lot_ of false positives _and_ it appears that for the
overwhelming majority of these they just don't care and will never allow them
to reestablish their business (it's pretty clear their endless requests for
documentation are just a policy to get a customer to give up and wait the 6
months to get their money back).

Also note that we're talking about about 3/4 of a million US$ accumulated in
his account from the time of the lock down to when he first reported on the
problem. Given that PayPal is a bank in Europe, I'd suspect that unlike in the
US they have been collecting interest on those funds.

~~~
citricsquid
I spend a lot of time on the Minecraft forum and there are _many_ complaints
about people having to forcefully get a refund from Paypal. Notch is a single
man handling over 5,000 new customers per day, the system sometimes fails
(minecraft.net is poorly built) and as such many people pay, wait 2 weeks and
never get access to the game, because Notch didn't get to answer their email
and the payment (while made to Notch) wasn't "caught" by his IPN backend.

The amount of refund requests I've seen is into the hundreds and if it was
overall ~1000 I wouldn't be surprised. It seems likely to me that because of
this Paypal don't want him to take out all his money and then suddenly get
hundreds more refund requests that they have to cover, because Notch went and
then they've got to make their customers happy.

Not that I think Notch would do that, but it seems reasonable for Paypal to
assume this is a possibility.

~~~
bartl
Paypal assumes too much. And _they're getting away with it._

Another recent case (just one month ago) that got a lot of attention was that
PayPal froze the account of Burning Man, for no good reason at all:
<http://boingboing.net/2010/08/11/paypal-freezes-asset.html>

They should have to do more than merely unlock the account: they ought to have
to pay compensation for the damage.

