There have been many times when I have recommended that my clients use PayPal for credit card processing. They are simple to set up with no upfront fees.
Unfortunately they also have a long history of freezing peoples accounts for minor infractions or even unfounded accusations. Usually the problems can be resolved, but in the meantime your money is frozen. Not good if you are a small business on a tight budget. For that reason I always advise removing the money from PayPal as soon as possible and as often as possible.
Today PayPal froze the defense fund for Bradley Manning, the accused leaker behind the Wikileaks circus even though the person with the PayPal account has never had any problems with them before. No matter how you feel about Mr Manning’s guilt or innocence this is not acceptable.
What? PayPal doesn’t believe in a fair trial?
Pressured by the government?
I, for one, will do my best from now on to find, use and recommend alternatives to PayPal and I’m sure new ones will be sprouting up all over the place due to this fiasco.
Update: as of 6:30 PayPal has unfrozen the account. They claim that the tremendous amount of bad publicity this has generated had nothing to do with their decision. (Yeah, I believe them)
My friend Sheri Powell ran a promotion yesterday that I can’t remember anyone else doing before.
“On this day in 1792, President George Washington signed the Postal Service Act, thereby creating the U.S. Post Office. In honor of this historic day, shipping is free at Pretzel Crazy on all orders placed today!”
I have written before how I love making up a good holiday for promotion. Looking for a good opportunity to connect yourself to an event that my go viral. I’m sorry I didn’t get this up sooner, but I have marked my calendar to let everyone know about it next year.
They’re only indexing streams. No different than Google
One of the site is legal in Spain (been through their courts)
This is civil. Why is the gov shilling for the media companies?
No due process. As unAmerican as it gets
As far as I can tell none of these sites are down and are still running under non-US controlled domains (http://www.rojadirecta.ws/) So it’s mostly a big show on our governments part, but still very scary for any website owner when they can come and take your domain name without any warning or cause.
