[neotek]

We ran into a similar but much easier to identify problem with PayPal - any products we sold containing the words "Cuba" or "Havana" in their title or metadata, regardless of the context, would cause PayPal to reject the entire payment with a meaningless error and no indication of what had caused the problem.

PayPal refused to admit to us that this was the cause and insisted they couldn't shed any further light on the issue despite the fact we could trigger it 100% of the time.

In the last few weeks it's started randomly choking on the word "Pharaoh", God knows why, and God knows why it only does so about half the time, but I'm not going to bother asking PayPal about it.

[traviscj]

Fraud detection and compliance systems have a false positive rate, unfortunately. And a company confirming something like that would be tantamount to telling how to avoid the filter, which also raises their false negative rate, which is not in the company's interest, whether the party in question is a fraudster using it for their own interest or a non-fraudster that spills the beans on HN.

But yeah, it sucks that their system can't learn to give you an exception after it has been reviewed once or twice.

[superuser2]

You might be interested in the Treasury blacklist: https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/sanctions/SDN-List/...

[drewhk]

Hm, can be related to: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghaith_Pharaon

(last seen in Hungary, likely being involved with the prime minister; there was some scandal about it)