This is now the millionth time that there are news that PayPal can and will do this and that there is almost 0 legal action you can take.
Why oh why on Earth do you still keep money stored there? I understand using it for transactions, sometimes it is the only way but there is no need to keep the money on it, or is there?
At this point, sorry, your own fault for trusting PayPal.
Another friendly reminder that PayPal is not a bank. They don’t carry FDIC insurance. They aren’t regulated like a bank and you agree that they can do fuck all to your money at any time for any reason or no reason.
In other words,
STOP USING PAYPAL!
PayPal can and will steal your money because fuck you, that’s why, and you’re left with basically zero recourse.
That’s why I deleted my PayPal account last year. Fuck them
Yep, same, I did some competitions with a friend, they sent me my half of the winnings via PayPal, his account is hacked and the hacker for some reason tries to claim back all the winnings. Even though the hacker only got access once and my friend was in constant contact with PayPal, they still dragged it out for months and months, every week sending me warning about my account being in debt despite the fact my friend had already told them about the hack and proven his identity.
It’s funny that a hacker with a random IP and no verification can fuck my life up for 6+ months with a single click, but my friend with all is documents and login history can’t convince PayPal they need to stop trying to take ~£60k off me.
As soon as it was finally sorted I deleted my PayPal.
Use crypto wherever you can.
Are there more legal protections for crypto payment processors than traditional payment processors? My understanding is that there’s less regulation in the crypto space these days.
Cryptocurrencies themselves are automated, self sustaining systems - no regulation applies at that level at all. In reality crypto “payment processors” provide services of instant exchange to regular currencies, and aren’t even mandatory (but they’re very convenient).
So regulation applies, but only to optional middleman that perform conversion and send regular currency to the merchant
So when dealing with volume purchases via a secondary store front (as established in the article) doesn’t need any kind of intercession from Steam or another processor to deal with any and all purchases? It’s all completely autonomous with no intervention needed by anyone at all?
As long as merchant doesn’t need to convert from crypto to regular currency, no third party is involved in the transaction, it’s a direct P2P system - in other words - perfect digital cash
So you just need to say “I give this person .001 bitcoin” and they magically get it? That’s wild to me.
Yes, simply put, that’s how it works. You should read the whitepaper: https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf
The first sentence:
A purely peer-to-peer version of electronic cash would allow online payments to be sent directly from one party to another without going through a financial institution
Well, you take their address, sign a message with your private key saying .001 bitcoin goes there and propagate it over the network. But in very simple terms yep, bitcoins magically land on their address. Whole thing sustains itself on economic incentives and cryptography, without any central authority
Bitcoin and Monero fixes this!
Oh boy, less accountability!
All transactions are public and verifiable. How is that less accountability?
And what recourse do you have?
The same as paypal, but you’ll have more freedom & responsibility, since You ARE the bank now
More than using Paypal, obviously. Depending on the amount, you can take them to small claims court, or get lawyers involved for larger sums. The great thing is that they cannot claim you didn’t pay, and you have proof of services rendered, or products purchased. And if you don’t trust the merchant, don’t buy from them.
LOL. You’ve done this, I presume?
Yes, in fact I use the Lightning Network almost daily.
Why ?
Because the problem isn’t with the currency itself, it’s with the intermediaries necessary for large scale mercantile interactions like selling games on an independent storefront.
Just because you use crypto doesn’t mean someone who holds that crypto in trust for you can’t just not give it to you if they don’t feel like it. And as there is less regulation covering that currency, you have less recourse in getting it back from them.
I can’t speak to all the positives and negatives of crypto, but I can say it is not in any way a cure-all that you can just inject into capitalism to fix everything.
As far as I know both of them are also payment processor, not only currencies.
Why would I use a third-party to store or process my Bitcoin payment? That’s the whole point you’re not forced to use a trusted third-party to store or pay. I don’t, never did.
As a swiss citizen I can tell you that there is way enough regulation covering that currency, in fact it is regulated as foreign currency (currency of cyberspace hehe). I don’t know how it is outside but also looks heavily regulated in EU and probably is in America.
I know, I’m not that stupid :D It was for the meme cuz this is the internet.
The main issue is that regular payment processors don’t do what they are suppose to do (process payment and nothing else), they freeze account for no reasons (GrapheneOS, flipper-zero, etc…) censor payment because they don’t like an industry (closed an entire plateform (UTip) because of one adult content creator), industries that already are regulated by law. Holding users funds longer than needed, or censoring for political opinion etc.
In this regard Bitcoin is neutral : You have the money, it’s a valid transaction. You pay enough fees your transaction will be confirmed sooner. Who you are, how you get this money and why you are sending it is none of the payment processor business.
Friendly reminder for people with SEPA capability that https://bezahlbrudi.jetzt/ exists. Don’t use PayPal. Just use your bank. (Doesn’t help with shops, but at least for that pizza night where John paid for everyone and now wants your share for the big pepperoni)
As much as I believe PayPal would do this (they have closed accounts without warning and stolen all pending funds many times in the past, which is why it’s commonly recommended to avoid them if you’re making decent money), the only source for this article is a Reddit thread that doesn’t name the game or company.
There’s a decent chance this is just someone’s creative writing exercise using the current scandal to get attention.
It is probably real, since PayPal clearly states that you need pre-approval to accept payments from mature content.
https://www.paypal.com/us/legalhub/paypal/acceptableuse-full
This is Financial violence. Seriously GNU-Taler, Any fucking time now
Correcting the bad headline: The funds were not sold on Steam. They were earned from game sales on Steam.
PayPal is a scam
we need a non-american alternatives.
We have Bitcoin and Monero ;)
Unreal
engine
I don’t think they sell Unreal on Steam
