Just a heads-up to DD and anyone else who might be using PayPal for their charity auctions: A few weeks ago when Katrina first hit, another forum I am a member of set up a PayPal account and asked its members to contribute. Since the site has one of the top 10 largest membership rosters online, a lot of money was raised in a very short period of time (30 thousand bucks in less than eight hours). Without even checking with the account owner, PayPal shut the account down and froze the money, saying they had "received reports of fraudulent behavior." They continued by saying that they would not unfreeze the account until the account owner supplied them with shipping numbers for the purchases made through the account (which of course were nonexistent since nothing was being sold).
PayPal also was going to skim their usual service fees off the top of the money that was going to charity, regardless of the fact that it was being done for people in need. I guess PayPal really needed to buy that XM Satellite Radio for the people who are never there for customer service calls.
I don't know how you guys are handling the actual charity donations, what you're using for payment methods, etc., but I just wanted to alert you to the fact that even though it's being done for a good purpose, PayPal is, as always, out for itself.
Oh, and the account was eventually unfrozen and all money was refunded to the individual donors' accounts (who went on to donate directly to the American Red Cross instead of using PayPal as an intermediary), but only because the situation was reported from one side of the internet to the other and PayPal wanted to avoid a PR nightmare that resulted from them taking charity money for their own operations.
Here's a link to the story before it was resolvedA blog opinion on the affairAnd here's another link
