You know how you get those "PayPal" phishing messages saying there are problems with your account? Well, sometimes they are actually legitimate messages from PayPal. It turns out I deleted a legitimate one last night. I just happened to log in to my TwistyPuzzles.com PayPal account today and was surprised when I was notified about a problem. If I hadn't done that, they tell me my account would have been closed permanently by Friday.

The problem is that they believe my account was used in ways that violate their Acceptable Use Policy. They told me it's related to some of the "raffle" threads (one example, another example) on the forum. PayPal seems to think I have something to do with these raffles and/or the attempts to avoid PayPal fees and/or the PayPal name calling that goes on in one of those threads. Their position against the behaviour in the threads is understandable, but I have sent them an e-mail asking them to reconsider their viewpoint that I am responsible and that closing my account is an apropriate consequence.

Accepting raffle payments through PayPal is against their policy (see point #6), so it should be against our rules to allow that to happen here. If it's legal to hold raffles (is it?!), you can still do it here... but using PayPal to send or receive raffle payments is in violation of the contract a user agrees to when using PayPal.

I realize now we have nothing in the forum rules that says "don't use the forum to break the law" but I guess we should. That's a decent catch-all.

I'll keep you up to date as this unfolds.

Sandy

I know the feeling!! I actually was running a raffle though!

Wow, just the 'legal' question looks like a hornet's nest. Take a look at the Raffle Laws topics at Rafflefaq.com.

Rafflefaq isn't necessarily the most authoritative source, but legality is obviously a thorny issue that varies from state-to-state and province-to-province. I suggest the Forum should play it safe and forbid any raffle that entails any sort of payment or fee.

Thanks, Taylor. Please don't feel bad or beat yourself up over this. It seems to have been an honest mistake on your part. You (and others) violated PayPal's usage policies, but we had no rule against that at the time, and it turns out that's not exactly why my account was targeted anyhow.

My account was targeted because I was deemed to be the recipient of money collected from a raffle. Taylor did send me money (a donation for the hard drive recovery expenses I was incurring at the time), and the donation did include the note "Money raised from the Half Truncated Cube Raffle". It's not hard to see how PayPal interpreted that as Taylor paying me "my share" of the raffle earnings, or whatever. This is sort of like punishing all the stores in which a bank robber has spent his stolen money, but whatever. (Forgive me for comparing you to a bank robber, Taylor, but I just love the juicy dramatic comparison!)

My account is back in good standing because I signed a pre-fabricated affidavit in which I admitted violating their policy and declared that I wouldn't do it again. I feel like I lied since I'm not sure I violated the letter or the spirit of the policy. The only realistic thing I could have done was to refuse the donation because of the note that accompanied it. I can't remember anymore if I even noticed the note. I told them that signing an affidavit saying I understood that I violated the usage policy would be like lying, but they chose not to respond to that part.

This wonderful experience has made it clear that it would be a good idea to separate my personal PayPal usage from my business PayPal usage. So that's something else to look into.

Sandy

I do like the idea of raffles for charitable causes. When I donate to such a cause, I have no expectation of winning or anything, I just consider it to be a donation. I don't know if this would be considered outside the spirit of the paypal rules or not, but if the person who donates something for the charity raffle (or at least doesn't profit from it) I don't have a problem with it. Perhaps we could just word the paypal payment to just mention "donation" and nothing to do with raffle.
I undertsand this could still be in violation and understand if you still wouldn't want to have more of these.

That said, Paypal is just covering their butts due to the numerous and varying laws from country to country and even within country's territories.
Sandy, I'm sure Paypal made you sign that just to cover their butts regardless of the circumstances.

-d