[Coco] Me, too, also, ...

[Dennis Bathory-Kitsz]

At 05:28 PM 2/25/04 -0800, Ray Watts wrote:
>When I got stung, either they, or Yahoo auction had 
>security which was pourous enough to easily allow 
>someone in.  That was factual information given to 
>me by Visa.  What they would not tell me was which 
>company it was.

I would guess it was not PayPal. They've almost been the model for Internet
security over the years. They may be hard to get along with, but they are
also subject to the nightmarish world of changing regulations that I sure
wouldn't want to deal with. Still, most of the evidence about PayPal's
issues is anecdotal, and could probably be traced to bad merchants (it's
incredibly easy to set up a merchant account with a secure certificate) and
lax users who don't check for their security status when on line.

Of course, now that PayPal is owned by the even-harder-to-get-along-with
eBay, there may be some porosity, as you call it, perhaps enough to cause
issues at the eBay end. No evidence for it yet, though. And still, despite
staggering growth, even eBay's done a good job at security. Plus they have
had for some time used an escrow system to avoid these issues, and if you
have any reluctance at eBay, use escrowed payments.

I've been a PayPal user since July 2000 and en eBay user since September
1997 -- back when it was called AuctionWeb. I have a PayPal debit card,
too, and they pay market rates for money you leave in your PayPal account.
I've not yet had a problem with either eBay or PayPal -- and we even used
PayPal to raise almost $20,000 for our Ought-One Festival in 2001.

Dennis