Hello kantorkel and Tor ops, To put a little meat on the bone of this situation, I did not receive an email from PayPal--I was informed that I was banned when I tried to make a payment for VPS hosting. During the week before this ban, I had sent funds to both Flokinet for an exit relay in Finland and to ITLDC.com for VPS hosting in Poland--both exit relays. I used the PayPal support email to ask for the reason I was banned and to ask for re-instatement. I have heard nothing back.
I had surmised that someone was monitoring payments to off-shore hosting companies and maybe they assumed I was supporting a news agency--I don't know really. If that is the case, why haven't the hosting sites been banned as well? The message in my PayPal account referred to a violation of the user agreement. Here is the full text of the message: -We're unable to continue offering our services -Thank you for using PayPal as your payment partner. -Unfortunately, we are unable to continue offering our services -to you at this time due to the nature of your business and/or -activity in your account and the risk it poses to PayPal. This -decision can't be overturned. -If you owe refunds to any of your buyers, you can use the money -in your PayPal account to refund them. -Money in your PayPal account will be held for 180 days. After -180 days, we'll email you information on how to withdraw your -money. The only transactions on this account over the past 3-months were VPS lease payments off-shore. I looked up the user agreement to determine where I had violated the rules and found only a single reference to operating servers: -Service Requiring Pre-Approval: -Providing file sharing services or access to newsgroups; or -selling alcoholic beverages, non-cigarette tobacco products, --e-cigarettes or prescription drugs/devices. I have a zoom meeting with two attorneys from EFF.org on March 18. Stay tuned....and maybe ban PayPal. --potlatch Sent with ProtonMail Secure Email. ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ On Thursday, March 11, 2021 12:06 AM, Matthias Marx <kantor...@hamburg.freifunk.net> wrote: > Hi Potlatch, > > would you mind sharing PayPal's email / full message with me? > > Regards from Hamburg > kantorkel > > Am 3/11/21 um 12:42 AM schrieb potlatch: > > > Today I received a message from PayPal that paying for Tor relay server > > leases was a direct violation of my usage agreement. I have been paying > > off-shore VPS hosts for my Tor server leases with PayPal for at least ten > > years. Very interesting that they act now. > > They specifically state the ban was for: > > Providing file sharing services or access to newsgroups; or selling > > alcoholic beverages, non-cigarette tobacco products, e-cigarettes or > > prescription drugs/devices. > > They further state that the ban is permanent and not reversible. > > I liked using PayPal because it was a safe way to pay and didn't expose my > > credit card information. Before PayPal I used a prepaid card which I will > > probably go back too. > > --Potlatch > > Sent with ProtonMail https://protonmail.com Secure Email. > > > > tor-relays mailing list > > tor-relays@lists.torproject.org > > https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays _______________________________________________ tor-relays mailing list tor-relays@lists.torproject.org https://lists.torproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tor-relays
