
Uruguayan artist blacklisted by PayPal because her name contains “iran” - jsheard
https://twitter.com/TirandoaVioleta/status/1300483152167735296
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jariel
PayPal is possibly the worst offender of the 'new world order' where you can
only ever speak to an algorithm.

Totally arbitrary polices, they say 'they need this' then it doesn't work,
they need more, or it takes 3 weeks, but they can't tell you how long.

We need a new bit of regulation for the new era which requires companies to
provide clarity on all operational aspects and timelines etc..

~~~
diego_moita
How do you evaluate PayPal's competition? In particular, what is anyone's
experience with Stripe.

I am trying to implement payments on my site. I tried PayPal but found Stripe
to be easier to deal with.

~~~
jariel
As a 'payment processor' they are somewhat different because Stripe is more
for business, PayPal for individuals and small business.

PayPal is considerably more 'interventionist' with sales, and they seek to
protect buyers etc so it can be a huge problem sometimes.

Stripe is more of a classical processor.

Of course Stripe does not offer a user oriented alternative to the PayPal
product.

PayPal has many undocumented processes which make it very challenging to deal
with.

~~~
owowow
My experience with PayPal was they would at least let you appeal when a limit
was hit or you were flagged by their system.

Stripe meanwhile bricked my account after misidentifying the category of
business we were in, and refused to provide anything more than a form email
when I reached out with documentation as to our SIC code and business
practices.

We switched to a FirstData reseller ultimately and pay $0.05 per transaction
plus 0.2% over interchange now, its the least I have ever paid for card
processing and the money is in my account next day. Stripe used to take a week
to process payouts, often longer for bank account payments.

~~~
petargyurov
I am surprised to hear that about Stripe. I have never had anything but a
great experience dealing with their customer support.

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renewiltord
But "Iran" is also a substring of a fairly common Anglophone name: Miranda.
Miranda is a pretty common name according to the US Census so they've got to
be hitting a lot of people, unless their implementation is like:
"word.contains(stopword) and not accidental_stops.contains(word)" which is
just hilarious.

Haha, I'd love to hear from the engineer who wrote the feature.

~~~
neuralRiot
“Iran” i also “they will go” or something similar in spanish.

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stevefan1999
This is nothing but a reincarnation of the Scunthorpe problem. Except this
time a nation was considered a swear word due to imperialism

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem)

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harry8
There need to be real consequences for this kind of nonsense for people.

Liberal estimate of missed earnings multiplied by 10 paid to the victim. Some
fininte number of offences before the CEO spends a fortnight in jail.
Computers are not and should not be a shield for taking full responsibility.

~~~
renewiltord
Perhaps if we shot everyone who wrote a bug there would no longer be any bugs.

~~~
Barrin92
there's very harsh punishments for physicians or say biomedical or military
researchers or engineers who fail to do their due diligence yet we still have
those.

I think it says enough about the industry that there's so many people who are
dead afraid of rigorous quality standards.

~~~
renewiltord
The magic here is that software engineers are some of the best engineers. We
kill barely anyone in comparison to other engineers. We don't need standards
because even without them, we don't kill anyone at anywhere near a few orders
of magnitude near those other fields.

~~~
Barrin92
I don't know if this is sarcasm but that might be because most engineers don't
build anything more exciting than SaaS dashboards and it's pretty difficult to
kill someone with an angular component.

Given the amount of software outages on this planet, if software engineers
were building planes they'd collectively fall out of the sky once per week

~~~
renewiltord
Ah but that's how you know we're good. If you can't do it right, don't do it.
And we know when we can't do it right. Sadly aeronautics and structural
engineering haven't caught up to the level of ethics that software has. They
build bridges that fall down and planes that crash. But I know I would crash a
plane or break a bridge, so I don't make them. Much more ethical to not go
around killing people like those guys.

Killing people just because you want to build something "more exciting".
Enough to make one's gorge rise.

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barbegal
The transaction was definitely declined but it seems unlikely that this was
solely due to the username containing the sub-string "iran". The Bandcamp
support engineer only speculated that this could be the cause. The user
reports that they are able to use the Paypal account normally and they only
get this error when attempting to pay Bandcamp however this may just be some
special rules that Paypal implements when making payments to US companies from
foreign accounts (it appears this user is in Uruguay).

~~~
aaomidi
Nah these companies definitely block transactions based on these.

How do I know? I'm Iranian and have experienced the wildest blocking systems.

I was playing around with timezone once and set my timezone to tehran. My
credit card company blocked my account and I couldn't get it back until i
faxed a notarized form.

