[knodi]

Why doesn't some company with a frozen account by paypal, sue the shit out paypal???

[jason_slack]

I've often wondered this too. It seems to me that more times than not Paypal freezes an account on a "whim". Almost like they are unsure if they would or wouldn't face legal ramifications later so they just freeze it to be safe. People backlash they unfreeze but at the end of the day they have suffered nothing except people being mad at them...

[brazzy]

It seems to you like that because you never hear about the many instances where Paypal freezes accounts for actually fraudulent transactions.

[jason_slack]

No, no I surely know they do freeze for valid reasons. You are right, we usually dont hear about those instances.

[dspillett]

Because they have agreed to the Ts&Cs which allow PayPal to do this under the relevant circumstances?

While they could potentially argue the circumstances are not correctly interpreted or were not legal to dictate and agree to in the first place (and therefore not enforcible), can they afford the time and legal costs to do so especially given how long Paypal (or other large organisation they are in a similar position with) can afford to let things drag on for?

[chatmasta]

Paypal enjoys many of the protections of banks (even FDIC insurance), but skirts many of the regulations. Namely, the regulation that it is illegal to withhold your customers money.

[brazzy]

Can you point out which regulation actually says that, and how it applies to things that are actually comparable to Paypal, such as a credit card merchant account?

[chatmasta]

Admittedly, my comment was made in haste. But I was fortunate enough to turn up something at least tangentially related:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expedited_Funds_Availability_Ac...

[x1798DE]

I'd love to see that happen, but I imagine if you read the Terms and Conditions they've got some clause in there that allows them to do this. I wonder if there's anything in there about the duration of the freeze, how long they have until they return the money to its original owners, and whether they have to pay any interest on the money when it's frozen.

I don't really know much about this sort of thing, but I'm guessing that Paypal must be insanely low cost compared to their competitors or something, because I can't imagine anyone deliberately choosing Paypal unless it were really cheap to do so.

[tomw1808]

And what if they have a clause in their ToC that they are allowed to kill you, are they allowed to kill you then? ...

Paypal is convenient and well known, that's all. They are in fact expensive and extremely unrecommended for anything else than personal low-frequency convenient payments imho.

just my 2 cents.