Interesting Links for 04-03-2017

[andrewducker]

Labour membership falls by 26,000 in six months (tags: labour europe ) How Uber Used Secret Greyball Tool to Deceive Authorities Worldwide (tags: driving business secrets ) Sick DPD couriers face £150 charge if unable to find cover (tags: sick pay OhForFucksSake transport uk ) "You May Want to Marry My Husband" (tags: death cancer life

Comments

[skington]

What I don't understand is PayPal's angle here. OK, I understand that it would prefer to list all the charities ever, rather than just the charities that had signed up. And I appreciate that it wants more people to have money in their PayPal account, so they're more likely to buy stuff online with PayPal. (I assume PayPal makes most of its money through merchant fees.) But why not bother to reach out to charities that had received donations? Or does it also take a cut whenever charities withdraw money?

[steer]

But why not bother to reach out to charities that had received donations?

They do. If you follow up the pay pal procedure is to spend six months attempting to contact the charity in order to try to get them to sign up and receive the donation.

Paypal then say at this point they give up and "may" reassign the funds to some other charity.

In the case given the six months hadn't timed out so it's at the moment a story about a charity not being together enough to sign up for pay pal.

I don't particularly understand pay pal's angle here either though. Obviously it is in their interest for the transaction to go through as they take a cut (albeit a reduced cut because it is for charity). But I can't imagine it is that much because all but the absolutely least together charities would have managed to sort out a pay pal account within six months.

[andrewducker]

I think that a lot of charities don't want a direct relationship with Paypal, and resent Paypal nominally collecting money for them without asking first, which certainly seems at least mildly fraudulent to me (particularly as you can see that it confuses people who assume that the charity already knew about it).

And if I got an email saying "Hello Charity, this is Paypal, please sign up to be transferred cash that we collected for you without asking!" then I'd be tempted to click "Delete" without checking that I wasn't being scammed.

[steer]

*shrug* It doesn't seem fraudulent to me but clearly the charities are confused by it. But my experience of small charities is that they are terribly easily confused.

[andrewducker]

If I see an advert saying "We're collecting money for Edinburgh Cat and Dogs home*" - then I expect them to have already spoken to Edinburgh Cat and Dogs home, and to make sure that the money goes there.

The asterisk at the end usually signifies something minor, it shouldn't signify "But we've never cleared it with them, and if they don't sign up to use our service then we'll give the money to whichever charity we fancy".

[steer]

"If I see an advert saying "We're collecting money for Edinburgh Cat and Dogs home*" - then I expect them to have already spoken to Edinburgh Cat and Dogs home, and to make sure that the money goes there. Yes, but my understanding is that this is not how it's working (and if it was working like that I agree it would be misleading). The article does mislead you to make it seem like it is because that's a more interesting story. According to PayPal's FAQ the charity needs to be enrolled to appear on their list of charities so none of the charities in the article would have appeared on a list made by paypal. Presumably the person in question used a mechanism to write in the name of a non-enrolled charity. Similar to the way you can try to paypal money to someone who doesn't have an account (which is a fairly common way for someone to end up with a paypal account

[andrewducker]

Yup, you're completely correct. The FAQ says "You’ll need to enrol your charity with PayPal Giving Fund for it to appear in eBay’s list of charities."

Sorry, I took the article at face value, and assumed that Paypal was adding charities from a register.

[steer]

Well, it is only the conversation with you that prompted me to try to clarify for myself what was happening so thank you. :-)