A guy on hotcopper this morning reckons that Paypal has blocked him from sending a donation to a crowd who were promoting the 'yes' vote on this issue.
"fter reading Grant William's latest 'Things that make you go Hmmm' I contributed a donation to the Swiss cause who are wanting the SNB to hold 20% of their reserves as gold (to pay for promotion of their campaign against the embedded hierarchy that are openly opposed to it - politicians, SNB and banking sector). Payment was made via PayPal. Today I received a refund with this message:
Note from merchant
Thank you for your kind donation. As you may have heard PayPal has blocked our donations account without warning and our only option is to refund the money. A more detailed explanation and an alternative will be sent by mail. Matterhorn Asset Management."
From the Matterhorn site.
https://goldswitzerland.com/swiss-gold-initiative-2014/
"On Wednesday, October 29, we have received an unexpected simple template notification from PayPal that they can no longer receive donations on behalf of Matterhorn Asset Management AG; that they do not take these decisions lightly and that their decision is final which includes any future regular business. Their formal reasons:
we are not a registered charity in Switzerland
our product is a risk
Under Swiss law we are totally in compliance with our effort to raise funds in support of the goldinitiative. In fact under Swiss law we are not required to be a registered charity to raise funds for any kind of political challenge and PayPal is aware of this.
Since their decision which included limiting all rights to our account, which exception of login, we have asked PayPal 3 questions:
what will happen with the donated funds sitting in our account?
what is PayPal's perception of risk in our product?
why would PayPal, at their own discretion, apply a different law than the law of Switzerland in this case?
Matterhorn Asset Management have received a large number of reactions on this issue and we shall report on this page what progress is being made if any.
Matterhorn Asset Management is a FINMA regulated company and we could and would not accept suspect amounts through the PayPal transfer option whilst any larger donations could only come from a footprint bank account.
During the past two weeks we have received donations from various parts of the world and many from the United States of America. All donated amounts received were typical and averaged in the range of 50 to 100 CHF."
Sounds like garbage to me, I've donated to plenty of crowds that were not 'registered charities'.