cbs5.com – Bomb Explodes At eBay PayPal HQ In SJ On Halloween — A lot of people hate PayPal, and this is the result. The fact is this company is not perceived as a “good neighbor” in any business sense. Luckily nobody was hurt. This is not a good thing, but I suspect it will continue.
Investigators determined the blast was deliberately set and believe an explosive device was placed outside an exit at the building that leads to the company’s first floor network operations center.
“It’s definitely not an accident,” San Jose police Sgt. Nick Muyo said. “Everything else there is accounted for. This was not any kind of accident or malfunction.”
Related links, a selection of PayPal hate sites:
No-PayPal
PayPal Sucks
PayPal Horror Stories
WhyPayPal Sucks
PayPal Warning
Consumers Against Pay Pal Policies
SuePayPal.org
The list goes on. It makes you wonder exactly how this company manages to stay in business.
I believe in boycotts, and I think that it’s great that consumers can use the web to voice their complaints. That being said, any negative words from a relatively few individuals about a large scale operation, I have to take with a grain of salt. Paypal has millions of customers. If a signficant percentage – even 1% might equal tens of thousands – has a problem similar to those in the links, then it might be worth paying attention. Othewise, I’ve never had a bad experience and I’ve been using PayPal for years to pay for auctions, accept payments, and to make transactions for several organizations all to one account.
I’ve been forced to wait a couple of times for a big payment, but I’ve never had any serious problems with PayPal.
Count me in as a Pay Pal hater — the service THEORETICALLY should be good to use overseas but the goofballs at PayPal regularly lock me out of my service — for no reason they can explain — and you pretty much have to fly back to America to get it unlocked.
Pay Pal sucks.
There was no immediate word on the contents of the device, but officials told CBS 5 Tuesday night that the debris left behind was not radiological.
This is what I call Ralph Melish reporting, which has sadly become the norm. You remember the Monty Python skit, Ralph Melish goes through his day, and one thing after another doesn’t happen to him.
Report the news, and quit telling people it wasn’t a terrorist attack every time someone farts.
They can stay in business by providing a very convenient service which is highly attractive compared to any alternatives and thus they can successfully charge excessive transaction fees.
It’s great for them when things go well.
The problem is that when transactions don’t go smoothly… when customer service is needed, you soon realize that all those fees aren’t funding actual customer service.
Having a fair amount of experience with military discussions — and definitions — of what is really “terrorist” and what are legitimate military targets — the first thing that jumps out at me is that the creep who committed this crime didn’t give a shit about the ordinary human beings who worked inside the building.
There were a few dozen people at risk of injury or death in the attack. They aren’t the people who own PayPal. They don’t set policy. They just work in the bloody building. That’s enough reason for me to condemn the fool who did this!
Trick.
I have been saying this is a genuine problem for many years now.
I remember a few years before 9/11 walking into a datacenter near Boston (I was a potential client at the center) and looking around… Some very serious names in the industry all around me. Not just minor web site stuff, but actual hard-core high value information. I turned to the guy walking me through and said “…this is where I would set off the charge…” He looked at me confused and I said, if I wanted to bring down the banks, the telecoms, search engines, insurance companies, stock trading platforms, etc… I would estimate at least $500M in data going through it daily. He said he never thought of it… (I’m sure it’s on the top of their list now)
I said to him, my company doesn’t have enemies, but I would bet that there are plenty of them out there for your other clients. It’s just a matter of time before someone figures it out and I can’t afford that risk to be caught in the cross-fire.
So I ended up going to their much smaller datacenter with only a handful of clients.
I think datacenters are way too easy to make a lot of bad stuff happen. Datacenters aren’t infalible… they’re just on the top of the list.
8. It also depends on where the data center is. I once visited one in the Netherlands and it had a barbed-wired fence and an armed guard.
The only reason that PayPal is still in business is that eBay has made it very difficult for sellers to do business on their site without using PayPal. Sure, you can tell your buyers to use money orders, but face it, most people want the convenience of paying with credit or debit cards. PayPal is the only real option that eBay gives you, and they underhandedly penalize the seller if they choose not to accept PayPal. Certainly policies have changed over the last year or so that have really made it difficult, that’s why you are starting to see a lot of sellers leaving eBay. Trouble is there’s not many places to go to yet that can compete with eBay.
PayPal has been very bad. Too bad they weren’t bought by Google. That would have cleaned their delinquent attic.
My own experience is that they are glad to collect money in your behalf, but are absolutely … and possibly criminally … reluctant to help you solve any problems, errors or missing commas in the way you set up your account and steer your money to the correct place.
It almost takes a court order to get them to solve simple, silly issues. Their customer unfriendlyness is huge. eBay should be ashamed to own them without revising the core PayPal policies.
Angry as I am with them, any action that has a whiff of a chance of harming people over this is far more criminal.
10 Too bad they weren’t bought by Google. That would have cleaned their delinquent attic.
And when Google came out with their competing system – Checkout – Ebay refused to accept it…
http://news.com.com/2061-10812_3-6091240.html
I had an “issue” with PayPal about five years ago. I couldn’t get it fixed and they didn’t have anyone to talk to about it. Life has gone on without my using them. I couldn’t give a rat’s butt what they have done good or bad in the meantime, I won’t use them.
Paypal stays in business because they offer a unique service and no one has done it better, period. I’ve been a satisfied Paypal user since 1998 and in 8 years I’ve had no problems to report. If you don’t like the service, simply don’t use it… it makes me wonder why people are pushed to the extremes to the point of bombing a company when it’s actually their choice to use them.
PS: I’m getting an error trying to post comments.
bet it turns out to be a disgruntled former employee or disgruntled wannabe employee who didn’t have the balls to go in with a gun and get himself killed.