PayPal

PayPal Canceled Mega’s Account Because of Encryption (But Really Piracy)

Mega is one of the only cloud storage services that offers end-to-end encryption, a great feature for people who value security. However, after political pressure from MPAA-affiliated goons, PayPal recently decided to stop providing payment services to Mega. What gives? This is crazy, but unfortunately, it’s not all that surprising. Mega’s long been in the…

Report: Google Might Buy An Apple Pay Rival

Apple Pay hasn’t quite been the card-busting life-changing revolution that some might’ve expected, but even so, it’s humming along quite nicely. Well enough, in fact, that an envious Google may buy up mobile payments company Softcard to provide a little competition. According to a TechCrunch report, Google is in talks to acquire the mobile payments…

The Apple Store will now let you buy stuff online with PayPal in the US and the UK. Along with the new payment option, Apple is also promoting PayPal Credit, which lets you pay for that shiny new MacBook in interest-free monthly instalments, rather than having to sell a kidney upfront. [re/code]

Pebble and PayPal Give You Another Stupid Way To Pay For Stuff

Tech companies are continuing with the long, hard struggle to rid the planet of credit cards. Today’s slightly awkward solution comes courtesy of PayPal and Pebble, who will now let you ditch your wallet, provided you own a Pebble smartwatch, have a PayPal account, and shop at stores that take PayPal. The system is a…

PayPal Will Give You a Two-Week Interest-Free Loan

PayPal’s latest service, Pay After Delivery, gives people up to 14 days to pay for the stuff they buy. This means you can get a two-week loan from PayPal to make a variety of purchases, at no extra charge from the online payment company (though the fine print notes that third parties might charge you).…

Now Etsy Has a Card Reader Too

Etsy just released a card reader. It works just like all of the other card readers out there, except it’s orange and only works with Etsy purchases. It is also sort of a brilliant thing for Etsy to do. People spend a lot of money buying Etsy products, and according to Etsy, 35 percent of…

Ebay Is Splitting PayPal Off as a Separate Company

Ebay has just announced that it’s to split PayPal off as an independent, publicly traded company in 2015. The separation—which will see PayPal spun off, tax-free, naturally—means that Ebay’s e-commerce business will be distinct from its PayPal payments unit. Devin Wenig, president of eBay Marketplaces, will become CEO of the new eBay, while American Express…

PayPal Maybe Sorta Kinda Slightly Accepting Bitcoin

PayPal has just taken its very first baby step towards allowing Bitcoin payments for goods, thanks to a partnership with payment processors BitPay, Coinbase and GoCoin. PayPal’s move isn’t a wholesale endorsement of the crypto-currency: by partnering with existing Bitcoin payment processors, PayPal doesn’t actually have to handle (or hold onto) any Bitcoin itself, which…

PayPal Just Made In-App Impulse Buying Way, Way Easier

You know how hard it is to buy anything from your smartphone. You need to look up your card details, tap them out precisely on the tiny screens and pray for the best. PayPal wants to make that process a snap. It has released One Touch, a new product that is an impulse buyer’s dream.…

Elon Musk and Peter Thiel in 2000

PayPal Chief Executive Officer Peter Thiel, left, and founder Elon Musk, right, pose with the PayPal logo at corporate headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., Oct. 20, 2000. [Associated Press] Factually is Gizmodo’s new blog of fun facts, interesting photos, and weird trivia. Join us on Twitter and Facebook.

Amazon Wallet: Gift Card Central For the Everything Store

There’s a new contender in the digital wallet arena: Amazon has launched Amazon Wallet, the e-commerce company’s would-be answer to PayPal and Google Wallet. So far, it’s an oddly lackluster offering with emphasis on gift cards. If you want to store your credit card information or shop at your pick of online merchants, stick with…

Even PayPal Tries to Get Away With Not Paying for Stock Photos

Thousands of people have probably glossed over the decorative little clock on PayPal’s Political Campaigns page without a second thought. But if you look closely, you’ll see the watermark that proves this e-commerce giant really isn’t so different from you and me—because apparently, PayPal hates paying for stock photos, too. From what we’ve been able…

Hacker Swipes PayPal President’s Credit Card Info, Goes on Shopping Spree

When you own a company specializing in online payments, the constant threat of hackers and phishing schemes is an inescapable part of the job description. So it’s hard not to experience a little schadenfreude in the fact that PayPal President David Marcus’s credit card information got swiped recently and taken on a bit of a…

How I Lost My $50,000 Twitter Username

I had a rare Twitter username, @N. Yep, just one letter. I’ve been offered as much as $50,000 for it. People have tried to steal it. Password reset instructions are a regular sight in my email inbox. As of today, I no longer control @N. I was extorted into giving it up. While eating lunch…

In advance of the holidays, PayPal is rolling out support for those pesky pre-paid gift cards from credit companies like Visa. No more wondering whether your favorite online retailer will take your card. If they take PayPal, they take the lazy gift from your aunt.

Amazon’s New Login Service Saves You From Signing Up for Accounts

Today, Amazon launched a new feature called “Login and Pay With Amazon” that allows you to use your Amazon account as both a payment method and login credentials for third-party retailers. It’s the Amazon Payments feature that’s already available combined with the third-party login service that’s already available from the likes of Facebook and Twitter.…

PayPal Beacon Is Going to Make Hands-Free Payment Way More Common

PayPal’s stuck another clever little location-aware payment option into its smartphone app, with the Beacon tool letting users pay for items without even having to sigh and pull a mobile out of a pocket. PayPal Beacon requires retailers to install a low-energy USB-powered Bluetooth LE receiver in their stores and attach it to their Point-of-Sale…

PayPal Randomly Credits Man with $92,000,000,000,000,000

PayPal just made 56-year-old Chris Reynolds a quadrillionaire. Yes, a quadrillionaire. For a little while, anyway. When Reynolds opened his monthly email account update on Friday, he was pleasantly surprised with a balance of $92,233,720,368,547,800—922,337,203,685,478 times more than the $100 or so worth of transactions he usually does per month on PayPal. And very obviously…

517 Movies I Could Have Watched Instead of Waiting on Hold With PayPal (UPDATED)

During my lunch break yesterday, I decided to do a little multitasking and give the kind folks at PayPal a call regarding an ongoing issue I was having with my account. I figured, stupidly, that a company as big as PayPal would have more than three people working the whole of their customer service wing.…

How Puritanical Tech Giants Are Stifling the Porn Industry

A generation of innovators want to change the way we have sex and consume porn, but Google, Apple, and Amazon won’t let them. “I should have been every Venture Capitalist’s wet dream,” Cindy Gallop said to me as I sat in her trendy Chelsea apartment, discussing her start-up, “Make Love Not Porn.” She’s said the…