"You can raise money to help your sick cat, for example, but not poor people."
April Winchell of Regretsy.com started a secret santa fundraiser for 200 families who are currently in circumstances that have left them just scraping by and unable to provide even the simplest of joys for their kids during this holiday season.
The members of regretsy not only met the donation goal, they surpassed it by several thousand dollars in mere hours, making it so April would not only be able to make the gift drive happen, she would be able to give a small monetary donation to each family that they could use for bills, groceries, etc.
Unfortunately, PayPal decided to freeze April’s account and hold the rest of her funds due to their claim that the “donate” button is for non-profit use only, despite it not saying anywhere that it was a non-profit only button.
While a good majority of the donations were already processed, PayPal is requiring April to manually refund the remaining donations, all while PayPal takes a chunk of each as a transaction fee. April unable to give the monetary donation to the individual families as well due to this.
Sign on change.org to tell paypal to unfreeze April’s account.
Flood PayPal’s facebook page with lovely messages.
Spread this everywhere. Twitter, facebook, news stations, everything.
Reblog this!
I know I have precisely one follower, but it’s worth a shot that this will get on people’s dashboard via tags and it will continue to spread. Paypal is ruining Christmas for 200 families and their children and the hard efforts of a community of people. That isn’t what the holiday spirit is about.
Not totally political but we’re big fans of Regretsy around here. Spread the word and sign the petition.
-Joe
I caught this on Regretsy last night, it’s a fucking nightmare.
eBay owns PayPal, so don’t forget their Facebook page, their CS contact page, and don’t forget to alert the PR people at eBay and PayPal of your displeasure. At the very least the people behind those email addresses realize how damaging it can be to have a bunch of people on the internet angry over something like this.
It’s a messed-up situation and I could well believe that PayPal isn’t communicating it well, but I believe the issue here is that she’s acting as a charity while not being (licensed/accredited/non-profit’d as) one… obviously her intentions are good and she’s on the up-and up, but they don’t know that.
It’s not that they have a thing against poor people or for sick cats, it’s that they’re on the look-out for large scale fraud, and large scale fraud involves fake charities more often than fake cats. This is why pretty much any corporation that does business involving charity operations only does it through tightly controlled channels… saying “I’m not actually operating a charity, I’m just being charitable.” doesn’t exactly encourage them.
As an example: you can take donations to support your art. Once it’s in your pocket you can give some of my money to cancer research because, hey, your my money, but you can’t say that that you’re giving $1 of every donation to cancer research as your personal pledge, because suddenly you’re using that cause to put money in your pocket and nobody’s verifying what’s done with it.
If I did that and I turned out to be an opportunistic asshole, it’s not just me that people will lose trust in, it’s the whole system. This means I have hurt PayPal and I have hurt the cause of cancer research and I have hurt charitable internet giving and e-commerce in general. So PayPal wouldn’t let me say it in the first place.
I’d have to jump through hoops to establish that yes, I am a charity, before I could act like one.
This is not to discourage anyone from contacting PayPal or sending whatever support they can through whatever means to April. Just saying, PayPal’s position is not as heartless as it first appears. Even the telling her “No, you can’t do that, either.” on the “selling gifts”… there’s a communication problem here, yes, but it’s the same way they’d have to treat it if you swore you absolutely weren’t running an international lottery but that one randomly selected purchaser of one of your individually numbered slips of paper would get 50% of the proceeds of your numbered slips of paper store.
(Also, the best way to run a donation drive, if you’re not an accredited charity? Find out where people can donate directly to one and direct them there.)
PayPal have actually clarified that Regretsy *were not* doing anything wrong or against PayPal’s policies.
http://www.regretsy.com/2011/12/06/sooner-or-later-youll-pay-pal/
“I was initially told that all of this was triggered by my incorrect use of the Paypal donation button. “Only a registered nonprofit can use the donation button,”they told me, and that’s what I told you.
Except that turns out to be false.
Anyone can use a donation button. For anything. That’s why you see them on blogs, raising money for bandwidth or medical bills, or even beer money.
According to the Paypal executive who called me today, “The information you were given about using the donation button was definitely incorrect, and at the end of the day, it was an error in judgment on the agent’s part.””
