Unfortunately, PayPal permanently locked our GrapheneOS Foundation account today. No reason has been provided for the account being locked. All we’ve done is accept donations. We added our bank account information yesterday in order to begin withdrawing money and it was locked.
GrapheneOS Foundation is a non-profit organization incorporated federally in Canada. PayPal required us to provide both proof of identity and address for each director along with other documents, etc. to have our account approved. We received CA$3,950.75 of donations through it.
We accept cryptocurrency donations to the GrapheneOS Foundation, but PayPal was currently the only way to donate to it via credit card:
GrapheneOS as a project accepts credit card donations with 0% fees for donations from individuals via GitHub Sponsors.
We can try to set up GitHub Sponsors for the GrapheneOS Foundation. It takes a long time to go through the KYC process for a non-profit organization since they require it for each director and more beyond that. This is why these things are taking so long for us to set up.
GitHub Sponsors still has 0% fees for donations from individuals compared to 30 cents + 2.9% + 1% for international PayPal donations along with their 3%/4% currency conversion fee. Stripe is only slightly cheaper than PayPal: 0.8% international fee and 2% for currency conversion.
We believe our account was shut down because we accept cryptocurrency donations including via Monero. PayPal partially locked our account and demanded proof for source and purpose of each transaction. We provided a link to https://grapheneos.org/donate. Our account was then force closed.
Haven’t used PayPal since they locked Notch out of his account in 2009 when Minecraft started blowing up. Can’t remember how much money they took from him, but it was a LOT.
I have heard of a lot of people unfairly banned from PayPal. This sort of thing shouldn’t be legal.
ToS protects them! You agreed to it when you signed up. Also, even if you could fight it and win, unless they are holding millions of dollars, you’re going to spend it all on legal fees anyway.
It’s insane to store any money in PayPal. If you must use it, use it as a payment method only. That way you’re not exposing your credit or debit directly to websites. That’s it.
I should let you know, I’m not a project member. I post directly from grapheneOS sources as they typed. The group is listed as [Unofficial]. I defend the project as a fan.
Though, I truly don’t think any finical institution should be able to do what they did to GrapheneOS… To me, them using PayPal, helps users who only have PayPal.
Since GrapheneOS isn’t breaking the law they should be allowed on PayPal for sake of the community
I’d also like to ask you to not refer to actions taken as “insane”. That’s rude. There’s more polite and kinder ways to show disagreement.