Isn’t it ironic that when one of the fabled scummiest sites on the ‘net actually endeavors to do something nice for a change, the good deed doesn’t go unpunished?
Well, take a look at somethingawful.com. I’m sure that the five people who actually read this blog are aware of SA and their brand of humor, but if you happen to be googling by this page and have had your head under a rock since teh beginningz of teh INTARWEB, let me describe it as… no, you know what? You just gotta visit the site. It defies explanation.
Anyway, SA’s content was orignally hosted in New Orleans, and we all know what happened there. (If you don’t know, just stop reading, right now. Because I’m not going to waste my time explaining it to you.) Feeling charitable, the proprietor of SA decided to raise money for Hurricane Katrina recovery efforts via PayPal donations, and managed to raise $30,000 in a mere nine hours.
And it would probably have raised more, if it weren’t for PayPal. Because they decided that a charitable effort on somethingawful.com is just way too suspicious and therefore must be fraudulent. End result: they freeze the account’s assets. How nice.
And PayPal wonders why whenever so much as a cent lands in my account, I immediately withdraw it to my bank.
So a word to the wise: if you’re looking to gather donations for any cause, don’t use PayPal. As it stands, PayPal earns money on interest for every day that you keep an account funded, and while I have no problem with this for commercial transactions, I do take issue with it for charity-bound funds, especially charity-bound funds that they’ve intentionally tied up in red tape. Especially for a company that is not under bank regulator oversight, even though it looks, walks, smells and acts like a bank. You might instead want to consider opening a free checking account at a bank and simply accepting checks. Or, just tell people to donate to established chairities, such as the Red Cross.