Originally posted by Edwin
While it's worrying/a shame/an outrage [delete as appropriate] that people have issues with Paypal, the comparisons to deals gone rotten here on these Forums is totally irrelevant.
Paypal processes millions upon millions of transactions a month. In fact according to this article they process over 115,000,000 transactions per year.
Now imagine that just 1 in every 100,000 transactions produces a problem of some kind. That would be 1,150 "horror stories" a year, yet their system would still be 99.999% reliable.
So to compare them with some scammer who rips somebody off for $35 (or whatever) over a couple of domains after one or two transactions is just laughable.
Hey Edwin. You raise several interesting points.
First, ANY fraud or bad business practice is relevant and worthy of comparison to DNF transactions. Perhaps you did not understand the comparison. I've seen people at DNF rant and rave about one personal transaction for 20 or 30 dollars gone bad, but there are allegedly many Paypal customers who have lost THOUSANDS, but Paypal still gets a vote of confidence? The seeming indifference to this pain and suffering was the point.
Secondly, yes Paypal DOES do a lot of transactions, and inevitably some of them will go bad. The difference is HOW THEY DEAL WITH IT! Anytime my bank (a little institution you may have heard of, Bank of America) has made an error, they ALWAYS correct it. Usually immediately. Paypal apparently ignores it's cheated customers for months, and in some cases forever. Do you approve of this practice, or excuse it just because of their volume of transactions?
Every institution calling itself a bank is strictly regulated. Paypal is NOT strictly regulated, and has strongly fought off federal regulation and designation as a bank. Why? MAYBE it's because then they would HAVE to deal with their many, many customers who have had their money basically stolen by Paypal's total lack of response to and compassion for their own customers.
I'm sorry, I do think the comparision is not only valid, but important for DNF'ers, since so many use Paypal. Call it fraud, call it cheating, or dress it up as "slipping throught the corporate cracks", the net result is the same- MANY people have lost MUCH MONEY!