Home Diaspora Becomes PayPal’s Latest Victim

Diaspora Becomes PayPal’s Latest Victim

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. A project or person decides to ask for donations or in some other way to raise money via PayPal. A few days go by, things look great and then – suddenly – PayPal freezes the account. Sound familiar? It’s happened once again with the Diaspora Project.

We wrote about Diaspora looking to raise funds a bit ago. Sadly, they chose PayPal. Yesterday the project reported that PayPal had frozen its account after raising about $45,000. The good news is that they’ve got a new system up and running but not before PayPal froze the current donation for 180 days.

As the Diaspora post points out, this is nothing new.

I suppose somewhere there’s a counter-example of a group using PayPal to raise significant funds without a glitch. But there are simply too many instances of PayPal arbitrarily freezing accounts for anyone to seriously consider it a viable option. Bottom line: If you need to fund something, find a way – any way – to raise funds other than using PayPal. It should be obvious by now, but I guess it bears repeating.

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