(serious) Paypal account suspension due to "offensive" material/titles

[deutscheasphalt]

So I got home from my job and received a nice e-mail from Paypal, saying that my sales account got suspended due to articles being sold that go against their terms of service. Those are obviously pretty vague, so there's no real way of finding out what exactly is regarded as "hateful", "discriminating" or "obscene" (yes, these are the official terms being used in the TOS). The person on the phone couldn't or wasn't willing to help me at all even though I was so ready to gobble up that nice little desert made out of details as to why exactly I am being asked to remove the items in question. This individual also did not see any problem with keeping my business account suspended from sending or receiving any transactions for 3 full days "until they get back to me".
As by no chance a Paypal individual would manually review my items out of thousands of shops, I assume they either run a script by now to look for certain terminologies ("genocide", "mauthausen", "streicher",...) or someone reported the newly added LPs or others after which they started searching for more. I was even asked to remove items which descriptions only contained the "problematic" terminologies (like any releases being compared to M.O., G.O. or magazines which feature any of these projects), which further confirms to me that they are running an algorithm of some sort. 
I would advise anyone who runs an online distro to be careful when listing stuff like this and anyone who reported me to Paypal to fuck off and get a life. It is not far fetched in my opinion to assume that bigcartel and other e-commerce providers are going to start scanning transactions next.
May anyone take this as it stands and make up their own mind, but I think this is a pretty serious case of censorship. So serious that I am considering running no business whatsoever via Paypal any longer. I already hated this fucking "service" (mainly for economic reasons since buyers from the EU would rather give them free money for no service at all instead of just using bank transfer) but this is pretty much the nail in the coffin.

[Salute]

Same thing happened to me, on my personal account that has no political/NS/explicit activity. They banned me for life from their service and locked up my credit card too so that I cannot make a new account instead. I asked for a reason behind this as it was a verified account I have been using for like 15 years with no problems nor remarks about anything and they just shut it down without any before hand warning. They said I had violated their terms of use. I asked if they could specify, what exactly. They responded, no they can't. Pretty fair huh? But hey, at least all the HATE and DISCRIMINATION will be ERASED from the world by closing up Paypal accounts, eh???

[totalblack]

That is really bad, I've had problems before selling specific items, but they would just block the sales of orders including those items. I did get someone on the line who hinted at which items were problematic, I changed the names, and then it was fine. I've tried to find a way to not transmit line item information of each order in the Paypal receipt, but doesn't seem like that's possible. It looks like this is the way that things are headed, if you look at all of the BM labels with deleted accounts last year. Hopefully your account will be unlocked after the 3 days.

[deutscheasphalt]

Good(/bad?!) to know you guys had similar experiences. Changing item names was the first thing I did, hidden all problematic covers until now until this ban is over so I can retrieve all my funds and call it a day. Already set up the Stripe service to offer credit card payment - anyone has experience with this one especially buyers paying from overseas?
But I understand the whole deal, paypal is a private company, can ban anything for any reason, especially since they don't care about myself as a business partner cause my revenue is way too small for them, so better not get too used to it and then cry later.
Still wondering though whether I got reported or not, since it will be interesting to see some major industrial distros like Tesco get hit by this and how they handle it. AND it's still crazy to me how Paypal scanned the whole bigcartel page for "problematic" terms and then forced me to remove every single product containing those in order to retreive my account.

[totalblack]

I've also finished setting up Stripe (meant to ages ago but this gave me the push) but haven't had any experience. I know a friend who runs a fashion line uses it almost exclusively because the fees are much better, and haven't heard any problems from him about the service. I don't know if Tesco could get hit in the same way, since just checking back through my paypal invoices, the description of the items just says "Tesco Germany". I guess if nothing sets off any alarms, they have no reason to go investigate beyond that.

[deutscheasphalt]

You might be right. Their "ban" in this case affects items who have not been sold for a while though, only because the description contains certain words.
I also just found out the ban affects my private account as well, fun times!

[CannibalRitual]

This sucks big time!! Why do they even care what someone sells, no-one really associates "questionable products" to the service. Isn't it different to like posting tits on Facebook. Well I guess it's probably really just a matter of time until other payment services follow suit as soon as they'll get little bigger. Then everyone will end up sending cash in letter, which is also a dead end as they're likely kill paper money at some point too.

[Salute]

This sucks big time!! Why do they even care what someone sells, no-one really associates "questionable products" to the service. Isn't it different to like posting tits on Facebook. Well I guess it's probably really just a matter of time until other payment services follow suit as soon as they'll get little bigger. Then everyone will end up sending cash in letter, which is also a dead end as they're likely kill paper money at some point too.

Would think that the jews of Paypal would appreciate any money flowing to them without moral questioning but times are like this, liberal PC shit ad nauseam.

[deutscheasphalt]

I personally don't think this has anything to do with being jewish but honestly, what's the chain of argument here? Will someone approach paypal and be like "WHAT?! YoU aUtHoRiZeD a TrAnSaCtIoN for a STREICHER rEcOrrrrD? HOW DARE YOU?!"? Like who would hold them accountable for something like this? The whole ridiculousness of it leads me to believe that I got reported by some asspained troll.
If paypal doesn't want to authorize ambiguous offensive shit via their platform then that's fine but in that case I can't use their service any longer since I'm not gonna comply to their standards of censorship. I find selling fucking 'magic' planetary crystals offensive, okay?! Do I get to report that now too?
What's crazy to me is that they didn't just cancel certain transactions, but they blocked both my business and private paypal activity until an individual physically sees all the items from their arbitrary list they sent me removed from my shop site. All of this just shows me that I have become way too dependent on this bullshit company so there's no way I'm gonna run payments through them again.

[monster ripper]

I had the same issue last year.  chances are it wasn't anybody reporting you, they use an automated system and it probably found something that raised a red flag.  Paypal customer support for the most part is useless.  Getting it fixed is really just a question of getting somebody on the phone who can be bothered to do there job.  Took me a half dozen times at least, but as soon as I got somebody competent on the phone, they had somebody review the case and my account was restored. 

[Salute]

I seriously doubt too that it would be because someone reported your activity. From what I heard for example the German Black Metal label "W.T.C. Productions" got banned from Paypal because selling Nargaroth's "Black Metal ist krieg" shirt in their shop. How's that for laughs eh?

[deutscheasphalt]

chances are it wasn't anybody reporting you, they use an automated system and it probably found something that raised a red flag.

I seriously doubt too that it would be because someone reported your activity.

Even more reasons for me to refrain from using paypal. It's just too unpredictable. They could potentially deem any future item as "offensive" or "obscene" for any reason and get the whole account banned again - no thank you. And no way I'm gonna censor names or covers. Both Discogs and bigcartel are providing credit card payment systems so I'm good I think.

[Salute]

chances are it wasn't anybody reporting you, they use an automated system and it probably found something that raised a red flag.

I seriously doubt too that it would be because someone reported your activity.

Even more reasons for me to refrain from using paypal. It's just too unpredictable. They could potentially deem any future item as "offensive" or "obscene" for any reason and get the whole account banned again - no thank you. And no way I'm gonna censor names or covers. Both Discogs and bigcartel are providing credit card payment systems so I'm good I think.

Good for you. Indeed, things are proceeding to a very unstable situation. And what is worst, you could lose your funds in Paypal if they lock it up and you have to make a REQUEST to get them. This is what happened to some labels I heard and we are talking about 4 figure sums...

[deutscheasphalt]

Yeah all my funds on there are already frozen cause the account is locked till I remove "noise receptor issue" from my shop because G.O. is featured in there...

[XXX]

I find selling fucking 'magic' planetary crystals offensive, okay?! Do I get to report that now too?

not too far from the truth

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/etsy-wont-let-witches-sell-spells-180955631