PayPal’s war on OpenCamp: a lesson in trust, business, and event planning

Until now, I’ve had no reason to write about Paypal. A couple of days ago, that changed. This is something every event planner should know about. Even if you are not an event planner by trade this could easily happen to you if you accept Paypal for payment on any kind of one-off event.

The OpenCamp blog posted today about how Paypal has repeatedly and continuously harassed those putting on the OpenCamp blogging/CMS conference in Dallas, TX, at the end of August.

John P. wrote this post, and states in part:

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.

The article then goes on to explain this morning’s call from “Kathleen” in the “risk department.” As if that was not ominous enough (emphasis mine):

…they view events as being “extremely risky”. She told me that they would “rather close an account than have to eat a couple hundred dollars in disputed charges”. She went on to tell me that PayPal “doesn’t make much money off events”, and the bottom line was that they just don’t care about them.

Now, keep in mind the above: John is a long-time PayPal account holder and has helped host two WordCamps (WordPress-related convention). This is not just someone who signed up for Paypal this year and decided “okay, I’m going to run an event.” And they are still willing to come out and say in effect “we think events are extremely risky and don’t make us enough money.”

I’m not sure who to blame here. I don’t blame OpenCamp, that’s for sure. The theme of this blog’s past postings predisposes me to blame PayPal. I’m sure there are less sincere, less experienced, and less scrupulous event planners out there who have been part of the problem for PayPal. However, in the grand scheme of things, that’s a pathetic excuse to declare war on all event planners that use PayPal to accept payments, particularly the ones that have more than adequately documented that they are for real.

I view PayPal’s unwarranted attack on OpenCamp as “extremely risky” myself. This is not the kind of mess that a PR department wants to be left cleaning up. Shame on you, PayPal. It’s time to do the right thing: unlock the OpenCamp PayPal account, apologize, and quit treating event planners like second-rate customers.