14 DAY TRIAL // PayPal has now responded to the accusations that it had frozen the account of a nonprofit, Courage To Resist, raising money for US Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, the alleged source of many of WikiLeaks' recent leaks. PayPal had previously blocked the account of WikiLeaks.
PayPal has re-instituted the account, but said that the initial measure had nothing to do with the group being involved with Manning or WikiLeaks, rather it was a technical procedure due to the fact that the organization was not operating under PayPal's terms of service.
"We recently placed a temporary limitation of the Courage to Resist organization’s PayPal account as they had not complied to our stated policy requiring non profits to associate a bank account with their PayPal account," Anuj Nayar, director of communications at PayPal, said in a statement.
"Upon review, and as part of our normal business procedures, we have decided to lift the temporary restriction placed on their account because we have sufficient information to meet our statutory ‘Know Your Customer’ obligations," he said.
The Courage to Resist organization was raising funds in cooperation with the Bradley Manning Support Network. After PayPal froze its account, it came out saying that the payments company was targeting it since it was associated with Manning and, to a degree, to WikiLeaks.
Considering that PayPal froze the account of WikiLeaks previously, along with credit card companies like Visa and MasterCard, it seemed more than plausible.
However, PayPal is now saying that the account was blocked since it didn't have a bank account associated with it.
The organization went further and said that PayPal would block the account unless it allowed it "to withdraw funds from [the] organization's checking account." This is incorrect, says PayPal.
"The Courage to Resist organization claimed that their resistance to follow our policy is because PayPal sought to withdraw funds from their checking account. To be clear: PayPal cannot take such action without the authorization of an account holder, nor does it ever take such unauthorized actions," Nayar claimed.