I can’t find much on how GabPay works. Their FAQ mentions partnerships with “sponsor banks”, so I suspect it’s similar to PayPal’s “money transmitter” classification legally.

PayPal (and presumably Gab) would pool funds in interest-bearing corporate checking accounts and keep an internal ledger for all customer’s debits and credits to maintain a set of parallel books (not precisely, but close enough for this discussion) in order to provide a bank-like balance system.

This raises the confidence somewhat on the security front, as the banks have a pretty decent record on the financial security side of the house at least. Money in accounts held by the bank should be insured and subject to banking regulations, so there is at least some consumer-level recourse in the event that GabPay were to suffer a catastrophic breach or close business. GabPay still has to get their house in order, of course, but the links between your “actual” money and what happens on GabPay are much more secure than a completely from-scratch payment build.

I’ll probably set up a secondary account with a local bank and use that to back a GabPay account until I understand their business model and actual transaction flow a little more. I’ve also sent an email to their Gab’s various contact addresses to see if they’d be willing to talk a little more Technical Sausage with a former PayPalian.

I’m rooting for them but I’m not quite ready to board that train yet. Hell, I might even send in a resume.

Meanwhile, JRivers above noted GabPay. Here’s a post about it, I plan to use it, esp when there are less massive amounts of money involved.

https://news.gab.com/2022/10/gabpay-the-paypal-alternative/

No arguments from me on the denied service. There used to be a small cadre of conservative- and libertarian-leaning voices selectively speaking up for the very egregious ones, but attrition and culture shift got rid of it. Looking back, the writing was probably visible on the wall around the time of the Gun Broker policy shift away from anything remotely related to firearms.

It was a lucrative place to work for a time, but towards the end as the corporate culture shifted further and further towards “Inclusion” and the hostility towards anything outside of Twitter-based Left-Orthodoxy increased it became downright oppressive. I definitely miss the money, but the stress and paranoia have definitely decreased despite the “REDACTED” nom de plume.

In my personal view PayPal also strays in having denied service to various Deplorables for quite some many years.

The error message looks more like a technical problem than a disable to my eye; but the longer it remains down, the more likely that I’m incorrect. The increased call volume — particularly for a time-intensive process like account closure — would have been a big cause for concern during my tenure, so I suspect it’s just dramatically increased volume on a relatively low-use portion of the site.

The “sole discretion” language isn’t all that nefarious. It’s very common in policy all over the tech industry and elsewhere I suspect. In less tumultuous times, it was good legal coverage for the anti-fraud and money laundering algorithm’s denials of legitimate transactions. Companies like Google and Microsoft use it all over the place to try and avoid messy litigation in combination with arbitration clauses. The ugly part is the speech code; the rest is just legalese, in my opinion.

” … it appears that the policy continues to be in effect for other speech, according to PayPal’s official Acceptable Use Policy, last updated Sept. 20, 2021″

“You may not use the PayPal service for activities that … relate to … the promotion of hate, violence, racial or other forms of intolerance …”

Retains the wording about PayPal’s “sole discretion”

I only learned about that function after closing my account, sigh. Oh well.

An odious company. Glad I was able to do my small part to inconvenience them. The mini rant by stan just above is quite on target, in my view.

According to this article out today, Paypal has apparently disabled the function that I used to just click on and close my account, and similarly disabled another function that I clicked on to to tell them to delete all my information.

When I did this, early on, these two functions worked just fine, and I’ve received notice from Paypal that those things have been done.

Now, according the article linked below, this function is disabled, and when you try to “close your account” it’s no longer automatic, and some customers have been told they need to “talk to customer service.”

See https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/10/following-surge-online-calls-close-paypal-account-several-users-reporting-closing-issues/

It’s all the same stuff. It’s the same stuff that drives and animates the persecution of Trump in all its ugly, vile nastiness.

It’s the same viciousness that compels them to seek to disbar attorneys who work for conservative or disfavored clients.

It’s the same nastiness that compels them to censor and “fact check” on social media and Big Tech search engines. It drives the rampant dishonesty and propaganda of the legacy news media.

It’s why they steal elections. Or use the Post Office to spy on people. Or use the NSA database to go back through all our communications in the past. To spy on all of us for wrongthink.

They are using any and all weapons at hand to bludgeon those who won’t submit.