Today I woke up in the morning and found this email from Paypal:
Hello Yogesh Sarkar,
Your payment of xx.x has been sent back to the sender of the payment.
We reversed this payment because we have stopped allowing personal payments to be sent to or from India.
If this was a payment for a purchase of goods or services, and not a personal payment, then you may contact the buyer and have him or her resend the payment as follows: (a) click the Send Money tab, (b) select “Goods,” and (c) provide a shipping address.
If this payment was a personal payment such as a gift, then we have requested that the sender find another payment method until we restore personal payments to and from India.
We are trying to resolve this issue as quickly as possible and we’re sorry for any inconvenience.
Thank you,
PayPal
This despite the fact that I own a Premier Verified account with Paypal for past several years and have done numerous transactions, without even a single one of them going bad/sour. Add to this, the payment which was reversed, came in from a well-known and large US based advertisement network, which I am guessing owns a business account with Paypal!
Still Paypal felt that this payment should be reversed as it is probably fraud transaction, because I am an Indian and from the looks of their new policy, all Indians are fraudsters.
If this isn’t textbook racial/regional profiling/discrimination, then i don’t know what is.
And this is not like this thing is only happening to me, this is happening to all the Indian businesses, who are using paypal for transactions, here is a 360 post long thread on Digital Point, over the recent racist behavior of Paypal!
I know one thing for certain, if paypal does not promptly apologizes for this racial behavior and makes certain that this does not happens ever again, I will never again do business with Paypal or any Merchant/Website/Business which solely uses Paypal as the payment portal and will take my business to a company, which respects it for what it is, without any racial/regional prejudices.
3 Comments
I would not be quick to conclude it as a biased/racist behaviour. But there are two things that bother me.
(1) Paypal has not come out to give an official stand or let its users understand the circumstances in which they have taken this decision. I would not even want to rule out the hand of GoI here. Just thinking of all possible suspects.
(2) They can’t play with their users’ money. If they want to bring in such rule, they have to give an advance notice of sufficient duration – say two to three months and then apply the rule. They have no right to reverse a transaction from the past. It is like a bank waking up one morning and declaring that they will eat away all your money accumulated in last one year. It almost amounts to fraud.
Arun, I do not think this has anything to do with Government of India, because so far they are only saying that they are barring personal transfers i.e. transfers on which they do not make any money. Had GOI had anything to do with this, it would have meant all the transfers.
As for the racism tag, well this is only happening to Indian Paypal users. Had they implemented the same thing universally, I wouldn’t have had any issue, however this is only for Indian users and that to me is a clear sign of prejudice against only Indian users.
After all it is not like that it is only Indian users who abuse this feature to save transaction fee and even if it is the case, they can simply go ahead and remove that feature or levy charges, however going in to my account and taking back the money I had received earlier in the month, well it just shows how much they value my business and I am really thankful that only a small and insignificant percentage of my earnings are routed through them, I cannot even imagine the plight of numerous freelance writers and designers, who earn their bread and butter through it!
pay pal must be clearly race motivated. we are in a country which has everything. wireless internet, online banking, golden visa cards,official legal bank account with corresponding bank in new york and routing number, digital signed id cards and passports, company registration, verified premium paypal account for some days and the 1.95 $ from credit card are gone.
All shipments from here are done via Fed Ex or UPS traceable with airway bill. and so on.
paypal suspended the account without any transaction done.
We wanted to sell african arts with paypal payment from all east african region. As a legal company we are registered here.
We had not listed any article or tried to sell or offer anything. Paypal suspended the account. On request they told us: WE DONT LIKE YOUR BUSINESS. I said what? you dont know my business! They said anyway whatever we dont like it. Look for another payment processor.
I asked them why. U dont know what we are selling it will be pictures and other arts. They said if you would be south african ok. but from Kigali. No way whatever! It means because we are Rwandans thats awful.
Is there anything to do against this. Is this not clearly racism.Is this not a case for International court against paypal. Should i go to the my president to report this matter. It can course international response. Because Rwandans shouldnt be disgraced like this. All technical possibilities are here.
This is just Paypal telling me i am shit because i am from Rwanda.
In their policies i dont see Rwandans blocked.