Archived posting to the Leica Users Group, 2004/02/03

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Subject: RE: [Leica] PayPal rant
From: Tom.Henson@bakerbotts.com
Date: Tue, 3 Feb 2004 11:30:18 -0600

Regarding problems with PayPal.

I have also had a couple of times that I sold things and had the funds held
up for a few days to one week. I believe that PayPal says that a request to
withdraw money can take up to 10 business day to process (two weeks). In
fact, I found out that each transaction goes through some sort of approval
process and this is generally where any delays occur. Whether this
"approval" process is human or machine, or both I don't know.

In one case, PayPal sent me a possible fraud notice and asked that I not
ship the item that I sold. I then received a notice (email) the next day
that the transaction would be reversed as the credit card used was stolen.
Luckily, I had not shipped the item out and was not out anything expect the
seller fees on Ebay. After a couple of emails, Ebay also credited back the
seller fees. Granted, this was all before Ebay took over.

In all of the threads that I have read on this subject here is the last
couple of days, I don't believe anyone has mentioned that some of these
delays may be due to regulations and other policies related to money
laundering. That is why some people in government think that PayPal, and
other services like them, should fall under the U.S. Banking regulations.

After 9/11 it was discovered that many of these types of services were being
used to launder money and in some cases to send money to possible terrorist,
all in the guise of auction transactions.

My personal feeling is that PayPal is refusing to work with one time Credit
Cards for this reason. They have no recourse since it is not considered an
open credit card account, but a one time use card not tied to a consistent
user or billing address.

Tom Henson
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