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elementary OS: PayPal account banned for “unusual activity”
(mastodon.social)
Hate Paypal, crappy service
Welcome to the club :P
Not surprising coming from PayPal, elementary OS should really just move away from them. Fun fact: If their PayPal account was banned that means all recent donators that sent them money through PayPal were also banned/had their accounts frozen.
I used to use PayPal maybe 15-20 years ago and used to donate to FOSS projects with it. At one point PayPal decided I was being shady and banned my account. At the time figured it was just my own problem but later on I heard from one of those FOSS projects, turned out that their own PayPal account was banned in the process due to receiving money from a banned account.
elementary OS should really just move away from them
To where?
They have and continue to accept Liberapay.
AFAIK Liberapay uses Stripe and PayPal as their payment processor.
🤷
Maybe IBAN/SWIFT
Crypto?
AFAIK, getting actual money into and more importantly, out of Crypto, to pay for things like food, not to mention picking one, is "non-trivial".
As for IBAN/SWIFT, that's like publishing your bank account details online which has a whole lot of other risks associated with it, least of which is people supplying your details to a charity of their choice.
AFAIK, getting actual money into and more importantly, out of Crypto, to pay for things like food, not to mention picking one, is “non-trivial”.
Yes, but it is achievable. Routing around financial censorship is one of the things crypto is good at, because the rest of the financial system is designed to support people being cut off from its use at the whims of payment providers and governments.
least of which is people supplying your details to a charity of their choice.
Why, don't your banks have chargebacks when a transaction wasn't authorised by the accountholder?
Charge back is only available on credit cards, debit transactions are "negotiated" between account holders.
Yes and when there wasn't any negotiations you can rollback that transaction.
They are anti crypto thankfully.
Monero.
Ideally cryptocurrencies, that's what I usually use to donate to FOSS projects nowadays.
But aside from that Liberapay and Ko-fi seem to work fine for a ton of projects.. this is assuming the project maintainers(s) are able to set up Stripe to receive the donation money afterwards.
Stripe and PayPal are both used by Liberapay as their payment processor, both of which have a track record of holding funds and blocking accounts without any due process or right of dispute.
AFAIK ko-fi uses Stripe.
Paying for food using crypto, let alone picking the "right" one seems like another dead end.
Ko-fi also uses Stripe or PayPal, it's all PayPals all the way down.
Crypto is another beast. It would be a superior choice if stable coins built on with privacy in mind, such as monero where popular. But the fact is different, there isn't a clear consensus as to what currency is for what purpose. There is also other issues, but oh well.
Wtaf
Liberapay uses Stripe and PayPal as their payment processor.
OpenCollective appears to use PayPal and Wise as their payment processor.
Wow sneaky, I had no idea
I have had Wise refuse to do transfers all of a sudden. When asked why I was told they could not tell me why. So how can I "fix" it? I would not trust them either.
At the end of the day there are not going to be many options as running these sorts of services are not cheap/easy to do.
Yeah, I've been looking for alternatives for several years now. I'm hoping that the European digital currency efforts will translate into something that will facilitate global creator income, but it's unclear how far away that is or what the reality might be.
I think OC mostly does payments with PayPal. But at least they have other options.
It's crazy how many services are just thin skin apps with PayPal in the bg
Edit: looks like librapay is also paypal. But they also offer stripe as an alternative.
But neither OC nor LP are alternatives to PayPal. I mean neither are payment processors. They're both dependent on other payment processors.
We need a real PayPal alternative, in addition to crypto
Did they end up on a US terrorism list for offering free things like filthy communists?
Offering free things TO filthy communists. Which makes them filthy by association. Everyone knows you can't let communists have any help, otherwise how would we know it doesn't work?
Just like Microsoft closing Libreoffice’s Outlook account for reasons.
My paypal account was forcibly closed for no given reason. I still don't know why.
I had my paypal account deleted back in 2011 due to the wikileaks witch hunt at that time. Paypal was withholding money going from a crowdfunding campaign to Julian Assange. In hindsight, that should've been Europe's wake-up call, but of course, who could've seen the looming cliff behind a handsome fella like Obama.
I had a PayPal account at some point for some reason. Then one day I was out with my family and my phone started getting blown up with password reset requests, then emails from PayPal saying there was suspicious activity on my account originating in India, and then I immediately removed all payment methods from my account, and shut down the account. Never again.
I shut mine down a few months ago. I hadn't used it in years, but one of my coworkers had their Paypal hacked and the process of getting them to fix it sounded horrible.
I don't understand how anyone uses PayPal.
All my old accounts were banned years ago. I tried to create replacement accounts, and they got a message that my account was deleted literally before I was able to login for the first time.
I literally was banned before I even had the ability to violate their ToS. It's just false positive nonsense
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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