April Winchell of Regretsy.com started a secret santa fundraiser for 200 families who are currently in circumstances that have left them just scraping by and unable to provide even the simplest of joys for their kids during this holiday season.
The members of regretsy not only met the donation goal, they surpassed it by several thousand dollars in mere hours, making it so April would not only be able to make the gift drive happen, she would be able to give a small monetary donation to each family that they could use for bills, groceries, etc.
Unfortunately, PayPal decided to freeze April’s account and hold the rest of her funds due to their claim that the “donate” button is for non-profit use only, despite it not saying anywhere that it was a non-profit only button.
While a good majority of the donations were already processed, PayPal is requiring April to manually refund the remaining donations, all while PayPal takes a chunk of each as a transaction fee. April unable to give the monetary donation to the individual families as well due to this.
Sign on change.org to tell paypal to unfreeze April’s account.
Flood PayPal’s facebook page with lovely messages.
Spread this everywhere. Twitter, facebook, news stations, everything.
Reblog this!
I know I have precisely one follower, but it’s worth a shot that this will get on people’s dashboard via tags and it will continue to spread. Paypal is ruining Christmas for 200 families and their children and the hard efforts of a community of people. That isn’t what the holiday spirit is about.
Not totally political but we’re big fans of Regretsy around here. Spread the word and sign the petition.
-Joe
I caught this on Regretsy last night, it’s a fucking nightmare.
eBay owns PayPal, so don’t forget their Facebook page, their CS contact page, and don’t forget to alert the PR people at eBay and PayPal of your displeasure. At the very least the people behind those email addresses realize how damaging it can be to have a bunch of people on the internet angry over something like this.
PayPal has resolved this particular situation, but frankly? It’s not the first time—ephemere over DW has had her account frozen because so many people were sending money in support, and I’m sure there have been other times when PayPal decided “hey this person is receiving way too much money for it to possibly be a non-profit so we’ll just freeze this account based our judgemental opinion on what counts as non-profit money”.