PayPal terminated my account because I use a VPN
What did you expect? VPN is a favorite tool for all sorts of frauds.
If your true IP is obscured by a VPN this is just a red flag for PayPal or any other payment processor. Especially if you happen to share the same IP as someone committing actual fraud - which is very much likely if you are using public proxies. Very few legitimate customers pay over VPN.
Do not use VPNs if you do not want to be flagged or blocked.
EDIT1: In response the comments, no I am not sarcastic at all. The number of legitimate VPN users (among general Internet population, not HN) is miniscule and does not justify the financial risks involved. If you are using VPN you are seen as hiding something and flagging/blocking you from sensitive transactions is an obvious response.
EDIT2: I am talking about public VPNs that can be anonymously abused by anyone - where you'd be likely sharing IPs with criminals. By all indications that's what OP was using if he wanted to hide himself. If you use VPN from work or coffeeshop you'll be identified by some innocuous-looking residential / corporate IPs.
HN is running like clockwork, I see. Soon, we'll have another post about how the Apple App Store policies screwed someone else over, complete with the usual hand-wringing and justifications from believers.
Why do people still use PayPal? This stuff is not news.
https://www.paypal-community.com/t5/Account-limits-and-verif...
TLDR: It's against the legal agreement to access PayPal that way.
Connecting to a payment service through an anonymizing VPN service (or your own VPN running on some server in a data center) is like walking into a bank in a ski mask. You look like the criminals, and you're likely sharing IP space with them. If you were just VPN'ing to your home or office network, I doubt that would ever arouse any suspicion.
Telling: Type "PayPal VPN" into Google and what you get are VPN services advertising how they help you sign up for PayPal when you're normally forbidden, with FAQ pages like "why is my PayPal account now terminated".
FWIW, PayPal's CEO was on HN 6 months ago, promised substantial change, and then promptly disappeared.
I'm extremely skeptical. Nowhere in PayPal's terms of use does it mention restricting use of a VPN. The only similar restriction I can find is against using an anonymizing proxy which seems like a reasonable restriction.
However I'll take the author at his word for a moment. Judging from the content on the author's blog, I think it's fair to assume he lives in Europe (where PayPal is regulated as a bank). Where does his VPN reside? It's certainly possible that it resides in a region that is regulated differently. One could look at this situation similarly to how YouTube, Hulu, Netflix, BBC, etc, block by region; not because they want to but because they have to. In the case of the mentioned sites, because of licensing terms, and in PayPal's case, because of financial regulations.
This is somewhat a flawed argument on Paypal's part. If a user chooses to obscure their connection via a VPN for security purposes but has supplied the appropriate identification needs to Paypal, what is the problem here?
Paypal like any other big corporation has lost touch with its customer base. Its been that way for a long time now, someone needs to come in and beat Paypal in its own territory. Payment providers like Square are still the small time, they're not in countries like Australia or New Zealand or any other first world country that needs some Paypal competition.
Paypal is crap! It's a wakeup call for you to move on to another payment service. They froze my account 4 months ago with over $1k in it. Reason? Because I had a donation button on my site, and my site wasn't a registered non-profit organization. Well no shit, it's a hobby/fan site and I need a way to pay for my servers and such. Not to mention, I did pay taxes on those so call "donation". Sorry for the rant but just move on; you can't win against their stellar dispute department.
Would your bank let you walk in and withdraw $10,000 from your own account with a ski mask or panty hose over your head? Even if you knew your account number and password?
Probably not.
It's like the gun control argument. A microscopic percentage of everyone who has ever purchased an assault weapon has ever committed a violent act. Regardless, the argument is that the potential harm makes banning necessary.
Is it possible that they are using a VPN service (as opposed to self hosted) and other users of said VPN service have committed fraud and they just drew a bad card in the IP pool pot luck?
undefined
sigh
PayPal is (still) not evil. It charges too much, and does some shitty things, like all companies.
It's ridiculous to jump to conclusions based off a blog post that doesn't even post a copy (redacted if necessary) of the allegedly offending communication.
I am never shocked when people posts these paypal accounts being banned. Stuff like this happens all the time. What did you really expect?
Check out Bitcoin, currency for grownups.
I think the dwolla.com interface is nice and have good (but limited) experiences with them.
The real WTF here is that people still use PayPal.