deskthority

Nope, documents still pending. VorTex also has not gotten back to me yet.

I feel your pain, sixty. I've had PayPal pull this kind of shit with me in the past as well. They auto-refunded some money that was sent to me, then wanted me to pay off the balance, and when I refused they froze my account. I opened up another one and even though it took them like 3 years, they finally linked the two and froze the new one as well...assmonkeys. I'm with webwit on the tactics, PayPal pulls this shit in the US as well.

As a possible means of avoiding this in the future, does anybody know what's involved in setting up an account that can process credit cards directly (like a merchant account)? At least then you're dealing with companies that aren't out seizing private citizens' funds all day and are forced to deal with the federal government. They won't pull this kind of crap without damn good evidence and most likely would never do it, instead handing over the evidence to the authorities if they feel like being proactive about it.

gimpster wrote:I feel your pain, sixty. I've had PayPal pull this kind of shit with me in the past as well. They auto-refunded some money that was sent to me, then wanted me to pay off the balance, and when I refused they froze my account. I opened up another one and even though it took them like 3 years, they finally linked the two and froze the new one as well...assmonkeys. I'm with webwit on the tactics, PayPal pulls this shit in the US as well.

As a possible means of avoiding this in the future, does anybody know what's involved in setting up an account that can process credit cards directly (like a merchant account)? At least then you're dealing with companies that aren't out seizing private citizens' funds all day and are forced to deal with the federal government. They won't pull this kind of crap without damn good evidence and most likely would never do it, instead handing over the evidence to the authorities if they feel like being proactive about it.

You need a registered business ID, or just go the normal route with people pissed at PayPal and make an untraceable account

I have all of that btw, including business registration and proper tax and import vat forms from the past keyboards. I will be very disappointed if they continue to be silent.

If they remain silent, I suggest we'll all mail them a number of times. Then post on reddit, they love to hate this kind of stuff, and we can kick start it by upvoting the post. "Paypal blocked our mechanical keyboard group buy funds! Please help us by writing them a message."

webwit wrote:If they remain silent, I suggest we'll all mail them a number of times. Then post on reddit, they love to hate this kind of stuff, and we can kick start it by upvoting the post. "Paypal blocked our mechanical keyboard group buy funds! Please help us by writing them a message."

wow, this will probably generate a giant shitstorm

It seems that geek hack group buy is blocked by US customs, deskthority group buy is blocked by paypal, and 5 of my KBT race are also blocked by Chinese customs....

attarian wrote:It seems that geek hack group buy is blocked by US customs, deskthority group buy is blocked by paypal, and 5 of my KBT race are also blocked by Chinese customs....

Well shit...

Guessing the VorTex guys are pretty irritated about it as well, seeing that all their products are getting stopped everywhere by everyone...

Vote for payment and delivery via Intercontinental missile / high altitude balloon... much less trouble that way -.-

Thion wrote:Vote for payment and delivery via Intercontinental missile / high altitude balloon... much less trouble that way -.-

I don't want my keyboard to be sailing of into space...

Thion wrote:Vote for payment and delivery via Intercontinental missile / high altitude balloon... much less trouble that way -.-

Let's hack the Zuse Z1 at the Peenemünde war museum and launch a V2 rocket!

7bit wrote:Let's hack the Zuse Z1 at the Peenemünde war museum and launch a V2 rocket!

Swede wrote: I don't want my keyboard to be sailing of into space...

Well...if it ends up landing on the moon, it could be delivererd via Reichsflugscheibe on April 4

Thion wrote: Well...if it ends up landing on the moon, it could be delivererd via Reichsflugscheibe on April 4

And will still get caught for import tax...

Thion wrote:Well...if it ends up landing on the moon, it could be delivererd via Reichsflugscheibe on April 4

Film-tip:
Iron Sky

I think that the best way for the next time is that everyone pays their order directly to the producer...

frankbartoli wrote:I think that the best way for the next time is that everyone pays their order directly to the producer...

Kinda impossible since VorTex does not deal with single customers. It would also defeat the purpose of the group buy, as VAT could no longer be bundled.

VorTex got back to me today, they are preparing customer and company documents in English now.

Hi Leif

Please wait a moment
I will prepare a document to you
But need to be translated into English

Nothing new apart form that. Current documents still "Status: Investigating"

How long have i not been here O_O

Wished I hadn't bought 3 graphing calcs
Would've bought one otherwise, and that paypal thing that sux D:
Thats why some people dislike paypal, they immediately freeze your account if you receive a little high sum of money..

Well have a nice day, and i see your forum got popular

Any updates?

Still waiting on the VorTex docs, don't think anything will move without them.

PS: If this drags on for an extended period of time (say another 14 days), we should probably start looking into the worst-case scenario and you should all start writing angry customer mails to PayPal. If it comes down to this I will release the PayPal ticket ID as well as more information. Doing this right now would break their TOS, so I want to do this as a last resort when they do not accept any of the viable solutions.

I have read deep and deeper into their TOS and it seems that attarian is right. In the worst case scenario the money is unlocked after 6 months. PayPal claims that I am also able to send refunds while the account is locked, but the refund button is actually disabled, so I will look into that further too if it comes down to it.

I hope everthing get fixed for u guys...

We should open "paypal topic" since they are fucking up everyone those days, they just frozen my account 10 min ago also...

And the only transactions i made in the past days was:
PChome transaction for 2 cm quickfire and payment to ASCAII for the keycaps...

Damn, im rly pissed of those paypal dudes

I like paypal. They are on the ass of this lameass 98.7% Ebay seller and it looks like I'm getting my broken glass picture frame RMA'd.

In their TOS the money is released 6 month after the last 60 days period following a payment. ( i'll not read their TOS again but at least that's what i remember).

Something good would be that alipay extend his business outside china. ( we can pay with alipay on godaddy.com and some other website).

I've heard about ESCROW method. has anyone tried?

By the way the PURE is coming soon ~~

I haven't used escrow, but this seems an interesting service:
http://auctionchex.com/
Also does IBAN payments if you don't have IBAN. IBAN FTW!

Problem with IBAN is that is not optimized for micropayments at all. Yesterday I was going to receive a payment of €17,00 for the Belkin ADB adapter I sold here. The buyer now reported that the bank transfer costs for that from the UK to Germany are £30,00 alone - So more than double of what the item costs.

I don't think that's IBAN but lame UK banks.

webwit wrote:I don't think that's IBAN but lame UK banks.

Yeah, IBAN/SEPA shouldn't cost more than a regular domestic transfer (at least according to the info that have been published about it) so that buyer must have chosen something else by mistake...

It mostly depend of the bank... if they want to charge you or not...

attarian wrote:It mostly depend of the bank... if they want to charge you or not...

I seriously doubt that this is legal since the whole point of SEPA is to enable transnational transfer/payments in EUR within the EU (and some other countries) at the cost of domestic transfers. The EU commision passed a respective act for that as I have just read: REGULATION (EC) No 924/2009

Indeed a European bank transfer is supposed to cost exactly the same as a domestic transfer, but some banks have been quite creative in finding ways to charge their customers.

This was the case for example some time ago with some French banks.
For computerized processing of the transaction, you just need the BIC/SWIFT and the IBAN codes of the beneficiary's bank account. So if you happened to fill in the form with more than just that (for example address of the bank or of the beneficiary), they claimed this involved human processing of the transaction = fees.

kbdfr wrote:This was the case for example some time ago with some French banks.
For computerized processing of the transaction, you just need the BIC/SWIFT and the IBAN codes of the beneficiary's bank account. So if you happened to fill in the form with more than just that (for example address of the bank or of the beneficiary), they claimed this involved human processing of the transaction = fees.

Well, it seems in that specific case it also depends on the type of account one has. In general banks offer beside the regular accounts low cost online/computer only accounts which have a low(er) monthly fee but require one to do banking via bank' terminals or computers only. With such low cost accounts "human involvement" is always extra charged.

But hey, it's no secret that banks just want to rip people off. ^_~