I've written a fair bit of positive stuff about PayPal over the last few years, and was intriguted by two headlines today.
One, "PayPal reported me to the FBI".
Two, "PayPal up charges to customers ... and don't tell them".
The first is blogger Ghetto Webmaster, who posted an image of PayPal's logo to illustrate how phishing works in January 2008.
Mid July 2009, he receives an email from PayPal via his ISP, threatening legal action for the misuse of the PayPal logo in a potential phishing scam and violating their trademarks. Oh yes, and they also told the FBI about it, just in case.
Ghetto Webmaster responded by asking his ISP to "please tell eBay/PayPal Inc to p**s off" and by writing a new blog entry about it, copied to PayPal via email with the message "congrats on making your company look like a bunch
of retards".
Very constructive.
What he didn't expect is that the blogging community would show who the retard was, when Mr. Webmaster received this message: "I’m an email scammer and thanks to you hosting that image, now I can
send out as many phishing emails as I want. All I have to do is link
that image to my phishing site and plenty of morons will click it."
Kerching!
Oh yes, and as we're talking about ringing up money for nothing, the other big headline of the day (with almost 3,000 diggs already) is that PayPal have started charging customers for goods or services a fee of 2.9% plus 30 cents per transaction for payments that used to be free.
This is big news because they didn't bother to tell their customers they were doing this.
PayPal’s PR manager, Charlotte Hill, said: “We didn’t want to make a huge formal communication out of this pricing
change, because we weren’t really adding any fees, and we were hoping
it would be a more useful experience for people.”
What was Ghetto Webmaster saying about retards?
P.S.
I
got an email from PayPal in response to this post, saying that they had changed
the way they charged for the service in the UK a year ago and sent an
email to all PayPal UK customers saying as much. Was it this experience
that caused them not tell their US customers I wonder?
Chris M Skinner
Chris Skinner is best known as an independent commentator on the financial markets through his blog, TheFinanser.com, as author of the bestselling book Digital Bank, and Chair of the European networking forum the Financial Services Club. He has been voted one of the most influential people in banking by The Financial Brand (as well as one of the best blogs), a FinTech Titan (Next Bank), one of the Fintech Leaders you need to follow (City AM, Deluxe and Jax Finance), as well as one of the Top 40 most influential people in financial technology by the Wall Street Journal's Financial News. To learn more click here...
