Letters

From the December 2005 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

The article does mention one class action suit brought against PayPal for "mistakenly freezing the accounts of several users for up to a week while it investigated suspicious activity." The "several users" were actually thousands of users, and it was not "up to a week," but a minimum of six to eight weeks before they would even begin to review your case.

Besides myself, I have known five other people who have had their accounts frozen without warning and without a reason given. The funds were frozen for at least six months, at which time we could "ask for our money back." They would then, apparently, let us know if we could have our money.

Then there is PayPal's "innovative" customer service. Those not trying to glamorize the company would call it terrible. Forbes just called it one of the five worst companies for customer service. The people were amazingly rude, the wait times were horrible, and nobody who worked there ever seemed to know what was going on or cared.

The article also failed to mention the glitches in PayPal's transferring programs that would randomly make a customer's money vanish into thin air. PayPal would not be able to find what happened to the money and often apparently didn't care, resulting in many more "frivolous" lawsuits.

As the many thousands of personal stories on sites like paypalsucks.com attest, PayPal was a poorly-run, inefficient, and corrupt business.

Jon Sloan
Lawrence, KS

Radley Balko replies: Many of Jon Sloan's complaints are anecdotal. Other policies he complains about, including giving a buyer 30 days to register a dispute, seem reasonable. Still others are the result of PayPal reacting to government actions against it. The company froze funds, for example, in response to heat it was getting from government officials for not adequately addressing fraud (and under the threat of subjecting the company to banking regulations).

Certainly, PayPal experienced growing pains in the early days as it tried to scale up its customer support staff to meet its growing customer base. What's undisputable is that before the eBay takeover, PayPal quickly and decisively became the top online payment service in a young market with numerous well-funded competitors. It's hard to see how that could happen if the company were as hostile to consumers as Sloan suggests.

Under the Spell of Malthus

Ronald Bailey's review of Jared Diamond's Collapse ("Under the Spell of Malthus," August/September) was excellent and raised important public policy issues. But Bailey's happy scenario for the 21st century is no more certain than Diamond's gloom and doom.

Many of the improvements Bailey discusses are one-time-only efficiency upgrades or are otherwise self-limiting. In science and technology, astounding progress marches alongside maddeningly simple but seemingly unsolvable problems. In the last 50 years, the density of data on computer disks has increased 500 million times while the energy density of batteries has increased only marginally. While we can grow more food than we do now, there is a limit somewhere out there.

Vic Arnold
Westerly, RI

CORRECTION: In "Freedom Riders" (November), Jeff Hennie, vice president for government relations at the Motorcycle Riders Foundation, was misidentified as "head" of that organization in a subsequent reference.