on 8/25/03 9:39 AM, Tim Starling at ts4294967296@hotmail.com wrote:
You have to pay a $1.95 fee to sign up if you live outside the US. They were very sneaky about it. You click on "sign up for your FREE PayPal account", then you read the contract carefully (no mention of this behaviour), you give them all your details and your credit card number, and then they say "congratulations you have created a PayPal account", but when you try to send money, they tell you that you have a transaction limit of $0, with an extra $0 per month, and that you have to enrol for "expanded use" if you want to raise it. To do this, you pay them $1.95, then wait for your next credit card statement which contains the secret number, which you then type in.
I finally found the place where they tell you about this behaviour, hidden amongst the multitude of claims that it is free to sign up and free to send:
http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=p/gen/ua/policy_payments-outside
At this point I got rather annoyed and closed my account, with some nasty comments in the "why are you leaving us" form. Sorry Wikimedia.
-- Tim Starling
Very different from my experience. I think I was paid $10 to join. ;
Fred