PayPal VS. Torrents – The well-known online payment service, PayPal, seems to have declared a “war” on torrents – one of the most well-known technologies for distributing “pirated” material on the Internet …
As reported in a publication by the specialized website Torrentfreak, which deals with news from the world of torrents and piracy, Andrew Sampson, the software developer behind the torrent search engine "Strike", used his personal PayPal account for a short period of time to receive donations from those who wished to support him and his project, as there are no ads on the page.
Although he downloaded it, a month later, Pay Pal informed him that using his PayPal account for such purposes was in violation of the service's operating rules, so his account was "frozen".
As reported in the publication, it is not clear why there was a month-long delay, however Sampson estimates that it was his public profile that brought about these results, as someone at the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) noticed that he was receiving donations via PayPal for some of his other projects and therefore found his account email.
In any case, he told Torrentfreak that he regularly receives donations from users to his other open source projects, and has only received $200 from Strike users - a small fraction of the $2,500 in the account he "froze.".
"This money was earned from legitimate freelance work, and was to be used specifically for my car, so the case is a mess," he said.
Torrentfreak notes that it will take 180 days to get his money back from PayPal, but that the biggest blow will be that his other projects will be affected. He also accepts Bitcoins, but they are clearly less convenient as a means of payment than Pay Pal.
Source: planet-greece.blogspot
