Over the years, I've heard of people having issues with Paypal randomly freezing funds, mostly related to eBay. I never paid that much attention because I never knew anyone personally that happened to. Well, it's different now. Some good people trying to do a good thing are feeling the random Paypal wrath:

Over the past several weeks we’ve had 3-4 random calls from various people at PayPal, all of whom only identify themselves by their first name, none of whom have direct phone numbers or email addresses, and all of whom are asking the exact same questions over and over…

• What is this OpenCamp thing?
• How many people will be coming?
• Why are you doing this?

Every time I go through the same speech with them. They are aware that we held WordCamp the past two years and have verified the previous registrations those years. They are aware that I personally have had a PayPal account for many years with them, and that I even have the Woopra account through them with far more volume than OpenCamp will ever have.

But despite the long term and multi-account relationship we enjoy, they’ve gone so far as to force me to send them copies of my drivers license and social security card to some strange physical address, and even run a personal credit check to allow us to keep accepting payments for OpenCamp.

OpenCamp is running all registrations through EventBrite and then into Paypal. It's an easy way to put on a conference, right? As a Big Design organizer my hackles are up. After reading this, I was on the phone immediately to co-organizer Brian Sullivan and he is with other organizers at lunch. We can take our Big Design business elsewhere. In the meantime, I encourage you to complain to Paypal if you registered for OpenCamp.

The irony of all of this is that OpenCamp needs access to the money to have a successful conference. By freezing their account, Paypal is creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. Paypal has successfully put the conference at more risk. Go read the whole article and pay attention to the information they are asking from OpenCamp. This moronic behavior cannot be justified.

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