Who Killed PayPal?Radley Balko's article on PayPal ("Who Killed PayPal?," August/September) or at least the book he was reviewing, The PayPal Wars--suggests that government interference, frivolous Of minimal importance; legally worthless. A frivolous suit is one without any legal merit. In some cases, such an action might be brought in bad faith for the purpose of harrassing the defendant. lawsuits, and then the elimination of competition once eBay acquired the company are to blame for its downfall. As a former PayPal user who has dealt with the company's poor management and terrible customer service repeatedly, I--along with thousands of other former users--can attest To solemnly declare verbally or in writing that a particular document or testimony about an event is a true and accurate representation of the facts; to bear witness to. To formally certify by a signature that the signer has been present at the execution of a particular writing so as to a different explanation. In PayPal's supposed "glory days," buyers using PayPal could dispute a charge and get a refund TO REFUND. To pay back by the party who has received it, to the party who has paid it, money which ought not to have been paid. 2. On a deficiency of assets, executors and administrators cum testamento annexo, are entitled to have refunded to them legacies with basically no questions asked. After the $313,000 fine from MasterCard, the situation changed drastically dras·tic adj. 1. Severe or radical in nature; extreme: the drastic measure of amputating the entire leg; drastic social change brought about by the French Revolution. 2. . PayPal put stringent limits on disputing a charge and gave a buyer a maximum of 30 days to do so, after which all a buyer could do was make a complaint against the seller. No matter the reason for the dispute, no matter the amount of money, the money was gone after 30 days. Those policies are the reason for some of the lawsuits against PayPal, and they are still in practice today. The article does mention one class action suit brought against PayPal for "mistakenly freezing the accounts of several users for up to a week while it investigated suspicious activity." The "several users" were actually thousands of users, and it was not "up to a week," but a minimum of six to eight weeks before they would even begin to review your case. Besides myself, I have known five other people who have had their accounts frozen without warning and without a reason given. The funds were frozen for at least six months, at which time we could "ask for our money back." They would then, apparently, let us know if we could have our money. Then there is PayPal's "innovative" customer service. Those not trying to glamorize glam·or·ize also glam·our·ize tr.v. glam·or·ized, glam·or·iz·ing, glam·or·iz·es 1. To make glamorous: tried to glamorize the bathroom with expensive fixtures. 2. the company would call it terrible. Forbes just called it one of the five worst companies for customer service. The people were amazingly rude rude - [WPI] 1. Badly written or functionally poor, e.g. a program that is very difficult to use because of gratuitously poor design decisions. Opposite: cuspy. 2. Anything that manipulates a shared resource without regard for its other users in such a way as to cause a , the wait times were horrible, and nobody who worked there ever seemed to know what was going on or cared. The article also failed to mention the glitches in PayPal's transferring programs that would randomly make a customer's money vanish into thin air. PayPal would not be able to find what happened to the money and often apparently didn't care, resulting in many more "frivolous" lawsuits. As the many thousands of personal stories on sites like paypalsucks.com attest, PayPal was a poorly-run, inefficient, and corrupt business. Jon Sloan Lawrence, KS Radley Balko Radley Balko (b. April 19, 1975) is an American libertarian writer, thinker, and speaker. Employment and publications Balko is senior editor at Reason magazine. replies: Many of Jon Sloan's complaints are anecdotal anecdotal /an·ec·do·tal/ (an?ek-do´t'l) based on case histories rather than on controlled clinical trials. anecdotal adjective Unsubstantiated; occurring as single or isolated event. . Other policies he complains about, including giving a buyer 30 days to register a dispute, seem reasonable. Still others are the result of PayPal reacting to government actions against it. The company froze froze v. Past tense of freeze. froze Verb the past tense of freeze froze, frozen freeze funds, for example, in response to heat it was getting from government officials for not adequately addressing fraud (and under the threat of subjecting the company to banking regulations). Certainly, PayPal experienced growing pains grow·ing pains pl.n. Pains in the limbs and joints of children or adolescents, frequently occurring at night and often attributed to rapid growth but arising from various unrelated causes. in the early days as it tried to scale up its customer support staff to meet its growing customer base. What's undisputable is that before the eBay takeover, PayPal quickly and decisively became the top online payment service in a young market with numerous well-funded competitors. It's hard to see how that could happen if the company were as hostile to consumers as Sloan suggests. |
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