Whether or not the TOS can be said to be legally nullified (not being a lawyer, I have no idea) canceling or suspending someone's account without telling them some kind of reason they can do something about is absolutely unethical.

It is also very common.

It is very common because it is not benefial for the company to clarify reasons. It includes many risks.

They can be proved to be incorrect, for exmpale if they refer into their own ToS, which is public information and binding. And then some legal expert says that this is not how it goes and it ends up into court, because customer sees risks being lower.

If they made a mistake or there was a software failure, it is bad PR.

If they ban someone for some specific reason but not someone else, there will be drama.

It is very beneficial to just say nothing.

Somewhere between occasionally and almost always, depending on the reason.

In most cases, you will not be given details if fraud is suspected. The reason being that companies don't want to tell fraudsters how they got caught.

It definitely sucks for the merchant companies ending up on the pointy end of the TOS. But you also need to consider the payment company side of things. They face a relentless tide of fraud and shady merchants. If they are too transparent about exactly how they detect a problem, that makes it much easier for the criminals, scam artists, and dodgy merchants to get around TOS enforcement.

The real culprits here are the people trying to violate the TOS, plus everybody's desire for cheap services and easy onboarding. The historical alternative was very expensive setup (e.g., spend a few years building a relationship with your local bank branch manager and establishing a financial track record). Making it easy to get started means that most problems will show up down the road, and the lower merchant costs means less money to pay for smart people to carefully untangle the truly dodgy from accounts that just look that way.

> If they are too transparent about exactly how they detect a problem, that makes it much easier for the criminals, scam artists, and dodgy merchants to get around TOS enforcement.

I get that, but I don't see how actually telling people what term of service was violated gives too much leverage to the bad guys.

Neither do I, but I wouldn't expect to see it without really understanding the bad actors and what they're up to. So this could be their best effort. Or it could be that they're just going with a blanket "say nothing" policy because it's too hard to create a more nuanced policy that the CSRs can apply consistently. Or it could just be laziness and a lack of customer focus. It's impossible to say from the outside.

Never. In 20+ years of using Internet I have never been banned unduly from any service.

I have seen way to many stories about people claiming to have been banned for no reasons from services (online video games are a popular one) before it is revealed the ban was 100% legitimate, to take any new story like this at face value.

I was banned by PayPal once because I didn't sign up with an SSN or EIN and proceeded to make enough to trigger a review because they couldn't file a proper 1099-K on me. This was an oversight on my part and I offered to correct the situation by submitting any documentation they needed -- photo ID, SSN, prior year tax returns to PROVE that I was paying tax on the revenue coming from PayPal, the new LLC and EIN I had for that company's activity. They refused to update my account, told me to start over with a new account, and then similarly ban-hammered me again (probably because I started an account after getting banned even though it's what they told me to do!).

I made a mistake out of inexperience, was refused the chance to correct that mistake, and all of my PayPal accounts -- including my PERSONAL account that I had had for years -- were banned because they were started by a person (me) who had an account frozen or banned. Is that a legitimate enough story?

But at least you knew why you got banned!

Only the first time. They never told me why my other accounts -- which were following all of the rules -- were frozen.

guilt by association

No, not legitimate at all.

PayPal had banned me because I was under 18 when I opened my account, they then allowed me to open a new one (right after this one got suspended) and it has been working fine without any issue since then (10 years+).

Stop doing shady stuff.

> Stop doing shady stuff.

If PayPal requires an SSN or EIN, why do they even allow you to create an account without one?

Because it doesn't require one. You can see the holes in OP's story. First he starts saying that he can give them an ID or his SSN and then all of a sudden it becomes a company account?

The guy can't keep his story straight for 3 lines on HackerNews, he is obviously doing stuff that he shouldn't and using his PayPal in a sketchy manner.

Maybe there is a market for insurance to initiate a "Wrongful ToS Ban Lawsuit." I take no right/wrong position on the below gentleman but note that he did bring a lawsuit against Twitter for being banned and his account reinstatement coincides with a settlement of the suit. Right now the payment facilitators only have loss of an account in terms of incentive to reduce false positives in detecting fraud.

One year ago this month, Twitter permanently suspended a 340,000-follower account for “repeated violations of our COVID-19 misinformation rules.” The owner of that account, the former New York Times reporter and vaccine skeptic Alex Berenson, responded with a lawsuit demanding reinstatement. . . .

. . . Earlier this summer, Twitter put Berenson’s account back online, noting that “the parties have come to a mutually acceptable resolution.” Berenson wasted little time in calling out mainstream media for failing to cover the “pathbreaking settlement” that led to his return. . . .

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/08/alex-...