PayPal and Terrorist Funding – Following the E-Money
by DT - February 28th, 2006 1:07 pm
“As used by Al Qaeda!!� That’s perhaps not the most appealing advertising slogan for a western company. But the e-commerce titan eBay might, we are told, be qualified to use it, even though it naturally wouldn’t want to.
While I was in Seattle attending the Integrated Media Association’s powerful, indispensable annual conference, National Public Radio revealed – or at least pointedly alluded to – the fact that extremist websites exist, according to US military officials, “that allow web surfers to use an online system called PayPal to finance the Jihad on credit�. As we all know, PayPal is that revolutionary, secure money-transfer invention from Silicone Valley wunderkind David Sacks, that eBay bought for $1.5 billion; it transformed the way the world pays for goods and services. But did we know that PayPal was being used by Islamist terrorists and /or their supporters?
The question intrigued me, as perhaps you can imagine, and I was excited to discover that Peter Ashley, Director of PayPal Merchant Services, was to address us conferees that very day. His current project seemed especially relevant to the questions in my mind; according to our conference program, Ashley is “responsible for building PayPal’s Micropayments business, aimed at addressing unmet merchant needs for low-cost digital content transactions�. It would have been good to hear and talk with him about transactions leading to terror.
But he didn’t show.
The conference’s organizer, the Integrated Media Association’s Executive Director Mark Fuerst told me that Ashley had decided his product wasn’t far enough advanced to be talking about it in the context of the Seattle gathering.
I wasn’t the only one disappointed. The moderator for the session where Ashley was slotted (called, acutely enough, “Following the Online Money�) was Wayne Sharpe, Director of New Media at Public Broadcasting Atlanta. He lamented to me: “I was looking forward to asking him about NPR saying his system is used to support terrorism�.
PayPal’s corporate Press Office rebutted NPR’s claim, telling me: “PayPal does not tolerate the use of its sites for any illegal activity. We have multi-tiered safeguards. To use our sites you have to attach proof of a financial instrument that you use off-line, like a bona fide bank account. On top of that we have a Comprehensive Compliance department checking on even the faintest possibility of illegality going on, like money-laundering�.
And just for good measure they also stressed there was no connection between the NPR report being aired and their executive’s non-appearance on a public platform.
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