Awful

PayPal has frozen the account of SomethingAwful founder, Rich “Lowtax” Kyanka, and the 22,000 USD it contained is probably being spent on whores and ale by over-weight eBay and PayPal executives right about now. The money was originally raised through the temporary SA website (the real one is currently down as SA’s collocation hosting is located in New Orleans) as donations for Katrina victims. As SA is down, Lowtax is unable to make use of his own merchant account to accept credit card payments directly and thus resorts to using PayPal. But about 8 hours into the donation drive, PayPal froze his account with no explanations and, knowing PayPal customer support, has not responded, probably because everyone in customer support is off to partying with the money.

Frankly, PayPal is getting out of hand. Because of their monopoly nature, they don’t give a crap about customer opinion, since eBay users are practically forced to use PayPal whether they like it or not. They stick ridiculous clauses into their user agreement which allow them to freeze funds for vague security reasons (i.e. they needed some money for weed). The American government needs to pass some stricter laws to regulate online payment and escrow services.

I can’t wait for Google to announce their payment service.