Paypal banned me without warning. I pushed the issue about not getting a warning. They finally told me that since I was coaching people to not say "raffle" when paying and I used the word P@yP@l in my post that I was banned without warning.
FYI
Ray
Like I said when you talk to Paypal reps you rarely get the same answer twice concerning what they do when someone is caught using them for raffle payments.
Personally IF I were going to run raffles and use PP then I would have many many many layers of insulation between my raffle offers and the payments on paypal. Actually no matter how you do it all it takes is a PP rep to jump in your raffles to get the account.
I think I might restrict participants to ONLY be those with 100 posts or more. Or maybe figure out another product to sell like an E-book or something, or in your case a video. So you sell a digital copy of a video and each purchase comes with a chance to win a door prize. I don't know that any of that would really stop PP from banning you if they decided that it was all just a cover for running raffles.
PP is truly an 800lb gorilla in this sector. NO ONE comes close to them for ease of use on the internet in person to person payments from what I can see. And even if some other company were to have a similar system then that company also wouldn't allow raffle payments because raffles are illegal without a license just about everywhere.
For sure I'd want to have disposable accounts just for raffles because I wouldn't want to lose my main account.
With a little google searching you can find some guides on how to get paypal accounts that are supposedly protected somehow from getting frozen.
I have to say that I have always had pretty a pretty good relationship with Paypal and have had the same account for ten years. I have sort of figured out how to talk to them and the few issues I have ever had were resolved pretty quickly. BUT it's really scary to me to have a lot of money tied up in a PP account that can be frozen at any time.
The biggest thing you need to remember about PP is that their business is driven by algorithms and programming. They have a lot of employees but those employees are not spending their time physically looking for rule breakers. The computers are doing that. They algorithms are set up to hit on certain keywords and patterns that indicate activity that is against PP's TOS and whatever looks like fraud. Then depending on the the situation maybe a human will look at it.
Just like google has pretty much every permutation of the english language in it's databases by now I'd guess that PP has every possible way to write "raffle" and related euphemisms. So it really would take some effort and diligence to stay ahead of them on this.
Personally I see nothing wrong with running raffles. Especially inside of a tight community. But if you're going to use PP then you are dancing on the knife's edge.
