IP: more on Whose Pal Is PayPal? [note comment re single letter domaine at end]

[Dave Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

> Date: Wed, 26 Jul 2000 10:37:52 -0700
> To: farber () cis upenn edu
> From: Simon Higgs <simon () higgs com>
>
> At 07:00 AM 7/26/00 -0400, Dave Farber wrote:
>
> I've had a run-in with Pay Pal courtesy of Commission Junction, the 
> affiliate advertising company. Commission Junction provides advertisements 
> which you can put on your web pages, which pay either commission on sales 
> or click-thru's (or both). Commission Junction were sending a check to us 
> every month. The checks didn't bounce and life was happy. Then, for some 
> unexplainable reason, Commission Junction informed us that, instead of 
> sending us a check, they had deposited the amount they were going to send 
> us into Pay Pal and that we needed to create an account on Pay Pal to 
> receive the money.
>
> So, unhappy, but thinking this could maybe work (e-commerce <groan>), we 
> logged into Pay Pal - only to discover that Pay Pal would not release the 
> money to us until we had given them a credit card number. So now Pay Pal 
> owe us the money from Commission junction, and they want a credit card 
> number before they will send us the money. No thanks. They Pay Pal claimed 
> that they were using the credit card information to validate the mailing 
> address to send the check under the guise of a fraud prevention act. 
> Highly dubious. I know of no-one else who wants a credit card number just 
> to mail me a check.
>
> In the end, since Commission Junction had violated their own terms and 
> conditions by doing this, they still continue to mail us the check 
> themselves every month.
>
> And since we were *FORCED* to create the Pay Pal account by Commission 
> Junction, I expect most of the 2.4 million accounts to be long since 
> abandoned. I have no use for it.
>
> Two other things to note:
>
> 1. A fake web site (www.paypai.com) was set up to steal Pay Pal names and 
> passwords:
> http://www.msnbc.com/news/435937.asp
>
> 2. www.paypal.com, redirects you to X.COM. A single letter domain name 
> taken from the RESERVED single letter domain name pool at IANA. No one 
> wants to explain, or be accountable for, how they got the domain name. And 
> no-one at ICANN wants to make the situation equitable to all by releasing 
> the other single letter domains. But that's a whole other can of worms...