| cperciva, there are actually two common scams involving charities and paypal. The first is the risk of people donating to fake charities as you mentioned. The second is the risk of criminals using stolen credit cards to make donations to charities; in other words, testing to see if the stolen credit card information is usable. The headaches caused to charities are very painful, prolonged and costly (charge backs). There are other similar and/or related scams involving "charities" (both legitimate and fake) but I feel this is the wrong place to discuss them. The trouble the OP has with "donations" to an open source project tend to be very common with paypal and they often result in a false-positive in the paypal "fraud detection" (risk management) analysis. I know of one example where a prominent OpenBSD developer needed some fast hardware. He does full builds of the entire "ports" tree (i.e. all software ported to OpenBSD), so buying powerful (read: expenseive) hardware was really needed. One person stepped up with a donation/gift of the needed funds, and sent the payment through paypal... The first thing that happened is the donor got a call from paypal because the donation triggered a false-positive in their "fraud detection" analysis. It might seem like an annoyance, but this is actually a good thing. The next thing that happened is, the donor got a call from the credit card department of his bank, mainly because he used only a credit card with paypal. Yep, there was another false-positive alert on the fraud detection system of his bank. During these two false-positives, the paypaly account of the open source developer receiving the funds was locked. In this case, the mistaken lock was resolved very quickly due to the two separate phone calls, but it was still a pain in the ass. There is hope. The way to get around the paypal "requirement" of an open source project needing to be a vetted and registered 501(3)(c) organization in the US (or equivalent in other countries) is to have the payments classified as a "gift" rather than a "donation" in paypal parlance. |