[Wikipedia-l] Re: PayPal is set up

[Tim Starling]

"Jimmy Wales" <jwales at bomis.com> wrote in
message news:20030822075641.P23554 at joey.bomis.com...
> Delirium wrote:
> > I was unable to find any more information by logging in either.
>
>
http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_help-ext&eloc=0&loc=281&source_pag
e=_home&flow=
>
> This page explains things for 'non-U.S. accounts'.  It seems that
> there are no fees to send money from a non-U.S. account.  There's
> little explanation that I can find of how to get money *into* PayPal.

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