By
Tolu Ajiboye
April 23rd, 2024
A former PayPal executive has posted a letter on Twitter of Bank of America closing down his account. The ironic ban was not lost on his followers, however, who criticize PayPal for its own censorship practices.
An ex Paypal official complained that Bank of America has notified him of shutting down his account soon without any explanation given. Actually, the bank did say it “carefully reviewed his banking relationship”, whatever that supposed to mean. Former Paypal’s CFO Roleof Botha said he was utterly surprised when he saw the notification about closing down his account. And, not just that, Bank of America was so kind so it gave Botha 30 days to “take his money and run”.
After being a customer of @BankofAmerica for 20 years, I received this notice today that they decided to fire me as their customer! With absolutely no explanation…. pic.twitter.com/IJu3peiIWX
— Roelof Botha (@roelofbotha) November 18, 2019
Botha says that he was a loyal customer of Bank of America for more than 20 years and that he really “cannot believe what might have had happened”.
Be it as it may, this letter is just one in a growing pile of banned accounts where banks were allowed to just like that, cut off the customers of their services, without giving any recourse for an eventual appeal.
Read Out The Small Print
And it’s true what all the lawyers in the world are saying: read the small print in any contract. Because, if Botha (and probably each one of us in some time in our lives) did read the small letters, he would see neatly written:
“…your Deposit Account Agreement allows either you or us to close your account at any time, this decision is final and won’t be reconsidered.”
Botha said he hadn’t been a PayPal employee for almost 20 years. However, he is obviously very proud of his former title because, if you look at his Twitter bio, there it stands proudly and loudly:
“@Sequoia partner @PayPal CFO before. Working with entrepreneurs from idea to IPO and beyond: @Eventbrite @Evernote @Instagram @MongoDB @Square @Unity3D @YouTube”
As you can see, he may be saying he was the CFO “before” but it doesn’t say “before” after Square name does it?
Maybe exactly these kind of little things caused a humongous backfire at Botha just after he posted “poor me” tweet.
And this is exactly what your company @PayPal did to me after ~10 years. With absolutely no explanation… #Bitcoin
— Pete 🦀⚡️⚛️ (💙,🧡) (@_ntropian) November 18, 2019
But, let’s be real, PayPal indeed has pretty bad reputation both concerning its customer service and its censorship habits as well. Several times there were reports from some users about company bringing their small businesses almost to bankruptcy.
Resistant Money Like Bitcoin Is Growing Louder
And there were reports of Paypal closing its businesses in certain countries basically only for political reasons or maybe – more intimate ones. Just last week it broke up all the contracts it had with PornHub, the world’s largest pornographic site.
However, as we already mentioned, maybe Botha’s connections with Paypal wasn’t the main reason BoA decided to remove his account. In his Twitter he clearly says he is cooperating with Sequoia Capital, the company very much integrated in blockchain and crypto space. And, as it’s already known, some of biggest US banks as BoA and JPMorgan are blocking all cryptocurrency transactions and closing down accounts.
Justin Sun, the CEO of Tron also commented Botha’s situation saying he too was a victim of censorship. However, the tweet seems to be removed but it clearly said that:
“Me too…I have been a customer of Bank of America for 8 years and get fired as well.”
Of course, this ban came directly into the arms of those who want to promote Bitcoin and other cryptos by saying stuff like:
“Welcome to the club! We have jackets, #bitcoin accepted”, “Bitcoin fixes this”.
Bitcoin may be still censorship-resistant asset but it hasn’t been adapted in everyday life for now. So, we’ll just have to wait.
IBM, BoA Collaboration
This month began with Bank of America announcement that it will be collaborating with IBM in using the platform built on IBM’s public cloud. The bank is said to host main apps and much of support for all necessities needed together with privacy and safety expectations for its 66 million banking customers.
The financial services-ready public cloud has, as per report, been designed in order to enable customers more easily “address the requirements of financial services institutions for regulatory compliance, security, and resiliency.” This should, they said from both companies, help financial institutions operate with technology vendors who have met the platform’s requirements.