Consumer complaint received 2025-08-28 00:00:00
Product: Money transfer, virtual currency, or money service — Domestic (US) money transfer
Issue: Confusing or missing disclosures — 
Company: Paypal Holdings, Inc
State: MD

Complaint narrative:
On XX/XX/year>, online game sales platforms XXXX  and XXXX struck thousands of titles each from their sales catalogues, both releasing official statements saying the action was taken in response to pressure from a multitude of online payment processors, including XXXX, XXXX, PayPal, XXXX, and XXXX. None of the processors in question released any sort of statement or update to their acceptable use policies that would justify targeting the previously acceptable titles. This represents a major abuse of power, as a small handful of private businesses have utilized their control over the flow of money that is not their own to force other, unrelated businesses to change their already-legal activities to suit their ideological aims. I say " ideological '' because the content purge has disproportionately affected titles made by members of the XXXX community, while leaving significantly more objectionable content made by and for straight audiences untouched. 

The response from the payment processors involved has been absolutely awful, impossible to read as anything other than willfully malicious. In response to a sustained, month-plus long campaign of questioning, consumer pushback, and general attempts to find out what the heck is going on, the processors have all demonstrated a consistent pattern of stonewalling, avoiding, and misdirecting any attempts at consumer communication, answering all questions with misleadingly worded boilerplate statements that do not address the concerns being raised or address anything that has actually happened. 

Some specific charges against the companies involved : * XXXX has been particularly terrible on the consumer communications front, ordering its phone operators to respond to any customer who mentions XXXX or XXXX in any communication to read off an unrelated corporate fluff message verbatim, ask the customer to instead send their concerns to an email address, then immediately and forcibly hang up. The email in question, XXXX, has not given a response to a single consumer in the month since people started contacting them. It is treated as a given by myself and everyone else aware of the issue that, if the email is monitored at all, it is set with an extensive brace of filters that ensure anyone who uses it the way XXXX is specifically asking gets excluded and never seen. 

* XXXX has been behaving similarly to XXXX, with the added component of provably leveraging itself against yet another private company : Early in XXXX, the official XXXX XXXX of XXXX XXXX  banned the word " XXXX '' in any form from its chat. I hope it goes without saying that I find it unlikely either of those companies would go out of their way to protect a completely different company from criticism if they weren't being threatened. 

* Multiple people, myself included, have heard XXXX employees, speaking in their official capacity as XXXX employees, outright say in plain English that XXXX has a policy against supporting XXXX individuals. This was quickly denied in an official statement, but that sort of consistent behavior doesn't come from nowhere. 

* Paypal has recently started freezing the accounts of specific, individual creators involved in similar fields to the affected creators, outright stealing tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars per person on the grounds of " safety ''. 

* XXXX  is among the most powerful of the companies involved in this specific field, as they are the sole primary payment processor of XXXX and could shut them down entirely with a push of the button. Possibly not coincidentally, they are also by far the hardest to contact, having shut down many customer support lines since enacting their unstated new policy and having their " official '' customer support line be totally unmanned. 

* All of the payment processors implicated in this complaint state their opposition to " adult content '' ( except that made by major companies and straight people... ) is motivated by the need to avoid " financial risk ''. However, XXXX, XXXX, PayPal, and XXXX all have specifically designed infrastructure to enable their use for cryptocurrency, the single highest-risk industry in existence. This is a clear contradiction in their policy.

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation