Paypal.

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Purogamer said:
I never understood people's problem with paypal. What do you guys think is unsafe about it?
They act like a bank. They serve as a bank. They handle money like a bank. They have no regulation, oversight, or accountability of a bank. There have been numerous cases where people have had their entire accounts, with all the money, permanently locked out never to see it again. Check out paypalsucks.com for some plesure reading.

There was a Hurricane Katrina relief fund set up by SomethingAwful.com that raised over $20,000 in a day from that site's visitors. Paypal locked the account and prohibited any money being withdrawn for a donation. When SA.com tried to just get Paypal to donate it directly to the ARC, they refused and said it could only go to United Way.

I'm not saying that Paypal is inheriently bad, I'm just saying that it's a lot more risky then say a credit card transaction with a merchant because you must give up a lot of your rights and protections that a credit card use can give you.

Tying a personal bank account to Paypal also is, imho, unwise. I have a bank account in one of my toddler's names that has essentially no balance. I tied my very rarely used paypal account to that one so that they have no access to my regular savings and checking accounts.
 
Banks are no better. Three weeks ago my wife made a deposit into my SatelliteGuys account.

Their computers were down, so the teller wrote my wife a handwritten reciept.

The money is not in my account yet. :(

I have called the bank numerous times and they see that the money is not there they also see that the deposit was made but for some reason it was not processed correctly by the system.

They also show their totals and see that there is exactly the amount of my deposit in their overage report.

I have called every day for a week, and they keep saying they are seeking approval from corporate to put the money in my account where it belongs. :(
 
Purogamer said:
I never understood people's problem with paypal. What do you guys think is unsafe about it?

Did you see unsafe in my question? I was just being curious. I didn't mean to start a debate on the subject.
 
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Scott Greczkowski said:
Banks are no better. Three weeks ago my wife made a deposit into my SatelliteGuys account.

Their computers were down, so the teller wrote my wife a handwritten reciept.

The money is not in my account yet. :(
Banks are indeed better as they have regulation. Either can "lose" your money and take considerable effort to get it back. However only one is insured and you are guaranteed to at least get it back (presuming your under the insured limit).
 
In the case of something awful, it was a lot of money very quickly when people were running katrina scams. I think paypal was in the right to suspend it and take a look, but they should have realized it was ok and let it go. They're not innocent but they got a bit of a bad rap for that from SA. When you go from having very mild activity, to suddenly having 20k worth of transactions going on from hundreds of people in a very short time, that SHOULD send up a red flag to anyone and paypal did the right thing to investigate.
 
cdru said:
Banks are indeed better as they have regulation. Either can "lose" your money and take considerable effort to get it back. However only one is insured and you are guaranteed to at least get it back (presuming your under the insured limit).
You better read up on just what FDIC insurance means, because you're sadly mistaken.
 
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