Well, well, well, www.likechapaa.com was down for 10+ hours today! What do we have to say about this? Here at “Chapaa HQ” it has been a day like no other and we are all exhausted and quite relieved that the whole mess has been solved now.
So, what was the problem? PayPal was the problem. We’re Africans, Kenyans and so we, you know, live in Kenya. That means that all our transactions originate and revolve around our country. Unfortunately, PayPal took one of our payments (for web hosting) and declared that it must be fraudulent because it was made by a person accessing PayPal from … Kenya. Guilty until proven innocent.
We love how secure PayPal is but come on this is crazy. Is every African person in the world a suspected criminal? Are all transactions made in Africa suspect? We have no further comments on this, just a deep dissatisfaction with PayPal. PayPal, your blanket policies leave a lot to be desired.
To everyone who tried to access Like Chapaa today, we apologise for the inconveniences. Thank you for trying to read our stuff. We’d like to let you know that we are profitable, and we can (and do) pay our bills on time! We aren’t going anywhere anytime soon!
Kelvin, that must have been hard on you after all the free marketing you’ve been doing for pay-pal in Kenya.
Does it mean paypay has the power to suspend my domain if they suspect a transaction is fraudaulant?
They can only do that if you made a payment trough PayPal. Otherwise you are safe.
What i don’t get is is paypal that powerful to compel your web host to suspend your account?
Just because you use they payment system
Well, the system is designed to provide security to people spending money on the web. Since I pay from my PayPal account into the web host’s, PayPal can trace the money since it is still in their systems. To protect me, they can refund the money back to me.
That’s what they did here, only I had not asked them to do so. It is unclear who they were trying to protect…