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skington March 4 2017, 15:05:18 UTC
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?

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steer March 5 2017, 00:13:22 UTC
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.

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andrewducker March 5 2017, 13:32:47 UTC
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.

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steer March 5 2017, 15:44:31 UTC
*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.

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benicek March 4 2017, 22:38:27 UTC

Yea I was one of those Labour leavers.

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seraphicwing March 6 2017, 01:22:11 UTC

PayPal's always needed to step their game up in general. This isn't helping. :(

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