Over the last few days, we first received a request to provide additional information regarding suspicious activity, which we completed, followed by information that our account had been deactivated.
We were not given specific reasons for this situation, only that "we found unusual operations on this account that we cannot support." We are unsure which unusual operations this statement refers to. An analysis of deposits over the last few months shows a significant increase in the number of donations transferred to us in very small amounts (on the order of 1-2 PLN). From December to the end of February, it can be seen that such payments were made from time to time, but they were in the order of an average of 2 payments per day. From February 13th, we observed an increase in the number of payments to about 18 per day. We also determined that many payments came from the same email addresses (in a record case, as many as 20 payments).
Due to the lack of information provided to us by PayPal, we do not know if these payments were additionally reported by the donors as suspicious.
We noticed that most of the emails from which multiple payments are made did not make any payments through PayPal before February 2024. They are also not listed among those subscribed to our newsletter. Payments from them are also not present on the Przelewy24 service (which offers PayPal as one of the payment methods).
Currently, Otwarte Klatki does not promote PayPal as one of the main methods of making donations. There is no mention of it on the website, nor do we inform about it in social media posts. There are two ways to make a payment through PayPal - using Przelewy24, or by sending a donation directly from the PayPal site by entering the email address used by us.
The email addresses from which the aforementioned payments were made seem suspicious to us. The vast majority of them are created according to the pattern name.surname<number>[at]interia[dot]pl - there is no variation in the order of the name and surname, the portal in which the mailbox is created, etc. We suspect that these may be fake emails used to register fake accounts on the PayPal service.
The scenario we suspect is that a person or group of people who do not agree with our mission organized a campaign of mass donating small amounts from fake accounts in order to raise suspicions on the part of PayPal and deprive us of access to the service. This is speculation as we don't have any proof.
At this point, we do not know:
- whether our suspicions about the nature of the suspicious transactions are true
- in what specific way we are violating PayPal's rules
- how we could have protected ourselves from the situation that occurred
- what we can do to restore the operation of our account
- what does PayPal do to prevent other users from getting their accounts deactivated unrightfully
So far PayPal hasn't given us any meaningful answers.
We are disappointed to lose access to PayPal this way, after around 11 years of being their customers.
