Think TRAFFIC Trolls Are Bad? How About Paypal “Trolls”?

A lot has been said about some companies who may have been present at the hotel for the TRAFFIC conference, but did not purchase a ticket for the tradeshow.  I can see why it would irk show organizers, but you have to check this out.

WePay, a competitor of Paypal dropped off a 600 pound ice block outside of the Paypal Developer’s Conference at the Moscone Center in San Francisco today. Inside the ice was the message, “Paypal freezes your accounts. Unfreeze your money.” They also have the coordinating domain name, UnfreezeYourMoney.com.

Now THAT was really cold!

More details on Techcrunch – photo from WePay stream.

Elliot Silver
Elliot Silver
About The Author: Elliot Silver is an Internet entrepreneur and publisher of DomainInvesting.com. Elliot is also the founder and President of Top Notch Domains, LLC, a company that has closed eight figures in deals. Please read the DomainInvesting.com Terms of Use page for additional information about the publisher, website comment policy, disclosures, and conflicts of interest. Reach out to Elliot: Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn

14 COMMENTS

  1. I can’t stand how eBay forces buyers and sellers to use PayPal now for everything.

    Plus, I believe PayPal is not very business friendly…..they lean hard to the customer side.

    It’s a nice system, but flawed, and should be fixed.

  2. I heard the peeps from TRAFFIC were gonna show up at Overseas’ next show dressed in Drag and carrying bags of popcorn shrimp. 🙂

    J/k

  3. Great stuff.

    Contrary to the belief of many within this insular industry, people glom onto other people’s conferences every single day of the year.

  4. Between myself and my associates we have moved over $200k through paypal over the last 3 years or so and generally we have found them to be OK.
    I remember about 2 years ago on a new project the business was generating lots of sales and exceeded the initial paypal limits very quickly. They froze the account and demanded all kinds of documentation from the business, most of which was reasonable, in terms of identification etc. I understand paypal have to abide by money laundering / anti terrorism legislation and we had no problem complying with that. *BUT*
    On of the areas they demanded documentation on was that of our suppliers. They said they required full details of our suppliers, copies of invoices for the products contained in customer orders etc. We felt we would be giving up commercial advantage by giving this information to anyone so we promptly refused, having complied fully with the rest.
    Paypal made it clear to us that our trading account would remain frozen until such time we sent what they wanted. At this point the account had several thousand $ in, and was continuing to capture payments.
    After fruitless calls to their customer services I managed to get hold of the email address of some higher up manager. I laid out our case, and told them if we didnt have our funds unfrozen we would take action to recover it.
    They left our account frozen so I began contacting all our customers, starting with the lowest amount and working up, to reverse their payment. At the same time I switched our website to a competing payment processor.
    Within the hour, a person from paypal hq was on the phone, apologising, unfroze our account and it has been fine since.
    Slap them in the wallet and make them your bitch rather than the other way round 🙂

  5. @ LindaM

    Best comment I’ve seen in months, possible the baddest ass comment in years.

    I respect that. In my many years of experience, I’ve found that the people (even your partners, new or old) who control the finances, try to play power games with your money. It’s caused many lawsuits by me, which I’ve won, but it’s a headache.

    LindaM has revealed a simple way to fight back against an arrogant but USEFUL company, and I am impressed.

    I like Paypal, and have moved $100ks of funds through them, but they do have an antiquated system (tax time, can you sort through your history based on types of transactions? nope)

    Anyway, not about me, it’s about Linda. Kudos.

  6. lol tx. Im not sure I would recommend that strategy exactly to anyone or not – we gambled the farm doing that, the fact it turned out ok was not a foregone conclusion. We could have lost our customers AND the money had paypal decided to be difficult, and being the stubborn biatch that I am it would have probably cost me lawyer fees too – I would have pursued them to ends of the earth for every last penny.
    As I was talking to the first few customers having them do chargebacks on us, it felt like walking myself to the gantry but dragging paypal along too. Im not sure it will work in every situation, the fact is they are big enough to lose customers if they want to, no single individual’s business will be enough for them to change their policies I guess we just got a sensible exec who noticed us at the time. To this day its the ONLY time Ive spoken to an american at paypal, thats when I knew the game was won!

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