Isn’t this sort of behaviour criminal? (I mean the competitor submitting a fake child pornography report, not whatever PayPal did to respond to it.) And if not, surely it ought to be.
PayPal probably should have some kind of hold on your account saying "don't shut off the account until we've investigated" but that might itself be abusable (see Facebook Xcheck). If this behavior is illegal they might also have standing to sue whoever is sending the reports.
All of that requires you to have at least some amount of evidence tying the false reports to the competitor, too. Or at least enough evidence to survive a motion to dismiss so you can use discovery to get the rest of the story.
I was thinking more along the lines of “child pornography is a crime, and making a knowingly false report of a crime is a crime”.
I know it is a crime (in many jurisdictions) to make a knowingly false report of a crime to law enforcement; but PayPal aren’t law enforcement. I don’t think that should matter though - if it isn’t already a crime to make a knowingly false report of a crime to a business, then it should be
I live in the Australian state of New South Wales. I just looked up our state law on this topic. Section 314 of the Crimes Act 1900 says: “A person who makes an accusation intending a person to be the subject of an investigation of an offence, knowing that other person to be innocent of the offence, is liable to imprisonment for 7 years.” I haven’t looked at the case law or anything, but just going by the wording of the statute, it seems broad enough to potentially include false accusations made to private companies in its scope.
Of course, probably none of the parties in the case under discussion live in my jurisdiction, so its laws are irrelevant. Still, if other jurisdictions don’t have a law like this on the books, maybe they should
I can't find any case law which directly answers your question; as far as I am aware, no case has ever been prosecuted under that law for the type of scenario we are talking about (but just because it hasn't happened yet, isn't in itself a bar for it happening some day in the future). This law never says the false accusation has to be made to a law enforcement agency, even though similar laws in other jurisdictions do explicitly say that; I don't see why a court would insert that requirement when the text doesn't explicitly contain it. But of course, nobody can be certain unless some day the matter actually comes before a court to decide.
I ended up paying 15000EUR bounty to track the guy down. Found him in Germany. 15 year old kid. Had somebody talk his mother about him. Never had a problem again after that.
Nice, hope they go bankrupt.
You'll be a honeypot for every scammer, fraudster, and con artist ready to take advantage of that policy, your processing fees will be through the roof because of chargebacks, and the only people who will use your platform will be the aforementioned scammers, fraudsters, and conmen.
I'm sorry for the GP poster's situation, but there's really no way to make everyone happy, here.
They could also communicate problems more clearly and provide better support to those who are sanctioned.
It's a reasonably solveable problem.
Paypal has long had the ability to whitelist websites that are subject to this kind of harassment. If you choose not to avail yourself of these options, it's not Paypal's fault.
so like i get they could contact support again and ask about avenues but not knowing about this seems unfair?
But going through legal channels and contacting the FBI are both things you should have known about, if you were involved on the business or remedial side of this issue since that's standard operating procedure.
I used to have a competitor who would email PayPal every couple of weeks to tell them our web site had CP on it just so PayPal would instantly shut off our payment gateway while they investigated and then several days later cleared us and put us back online. It's too easy for people to make fake requests to take your business down.