May 19, 2010 by sharky
Well-established public torrent sites have gone through a shitstorm in recent times - Mininova went legit, Isohunt & PirateBay are continuously under attack yet are still limping along. This is moot; as long are there are public trackers: new sites will gleefully rise to the task to fill the gap whenever a torrent indexer disappears - you can’t stop BitTorrent. But this article isn’t so much about the public sites. It’s about PayPal - and private trackers - and how donations intertwine with their survival.
By and large, public trackers don’t use PayPal or a donation button to generate revenue; they employ advertising companies (such as adperium.com & foxnetworks.com). Often these are shady organizations that are highly unlikely to delete your ad campaign based solely on what site(s) you choose to run it on. And even if they do - there are countless other advert replacements. Not so with online payment sites; there are only a handful of reputable services. PayPal is just one method of receiving & paying online, but it is by far the most popular & widely accepted. Rarely will you see a donate button link to a moneybookers account.
While public torrent sites are under attack from MAFIAA, private trackers have an unlikely new enemy - PayPal. FTN was just the first in a new wave of cases involving trackers that had their PP accounts frozen due to accepting donations.
FTN
On April 28th, FTN announced that their PayPal account was either frozen or suspended. The issue has since been resolved as FTN set up an entirely new PP account.
Hey guys,
I’m really not sure how to go about this, but I’m going to try my best. As you might have noticed, we took down the donation page about a week or so ago. Truth is, we’ve lost access to the paypal account and haven’t been able to get another functioning account working due to PayPal policy and whatnot. I won’t go into details, but basically we have no way to pay our bills, even if we had the funds to do so.
As you can probably see where I’m going with this.. FTN will be going down tomorrow. It’s not easy for me to be saying this, and I know a lot of you are going to be unhappy with the news, but there’s really not a whole lot we can do at this point. We’ve had an amazing 4 years, but I’m sure we can all agree that nothing lasts forever.
It’s truly been a pleasure providing this site for you guys, and I believe I speak for all staff when I say that you guys have made this place more than just a hobby for us. I’m not sure what the future holds for the torrent scene, but I’m proud to know that we were able to contribute.
Take care guys, and thanks again for everything.
BTN
On May 7th, BTN also ran into PayPal troubles. It would appear that they had temporarily resolved this by switching the primary account type, as opposed to setting up an entirely new account. Then, just 3 days later, their account was frozen again.
Like the almighty FTN, we too have had some paypal issues lately. Paypal doesn’t like us accepting "donations" without being a non-profit org, so we’ve had to take the paypal fee hit and accept payments, but due to an overlooked "donation" link on the ircd site page our latest account has been frozen again. We are working to correct any failures and are 100% sure we will. As it stands paypal has taken all our donations again and bills are due soon. We hate to ask, but anyone who can help and wants to help, please do. We will do what we can as well!
But as of now we dont have an account and wont for a couple of days so if a BTN server goes down you know why, but if it comes to it staff will chip in and try to atleast cover the site server costs.
Sorry guys but we’ll try our best!
BTN Sysops
It’s unfortunate that BTN edited out member’s comments surrounding this announcement in their forums. It would have been interesting to read what members were suggesting as to possible workarounds for the PP problems. Whatever was mentioned, it likely didn’t work out so well. As of today, May 19th, BTN still does not have a donation link available.
GFT
On May 12th, GFT came forward with a similar announcement in regards to their PayPal woes. Interestingly, this notice sheds some light as to why their PP troubles began in the first place.
I am sorry to say but we have some bad news. I hope it did not have to come to this, but it has to for the survival of GFT. As you all might know, many sites are having problems with Paypal. We are also having the same problem. As you all may or may not know, we ban traders on sight even if they are donors, so many traders end up putting a dispute in Paypal. To avoid problems, we refund them. But due to an overwhelming amount of disputes even if we refund them, it caught Paypal’s eyes, and they are doing their "investigation" and restricted the account which who knows how long it will last.
On top of that we have had very few donations these past few months, and have barely been able to stay alive. But this Paypal issue has added more problems…
Realistically, PayPal isn’t headhunting private trackers in particular, and they’ll leave you alone as long as you don’t have too many chargebacks or disputes. There’s an informative post on BlackHatWorld that indicates a portion of the problem, and some alternative solutions.
Demonoid
Demonoid’s Donate page has been down since at least May 3rd or earlier, according the forum thread below.
Donations
For those wondering, we are not able to receive donations at the moment.
When we are, link to accept donations will reapear. There is no estimated time at the moment.
Thank you very much for all your support
Demonoid might have temporarily lost their donation option - certainly this is a serious financial blow to this enormously popular tracker - but they didn’t lose their "advertisement" deal.
As it stands, PayPal’s involvement into private trackers’ donation income has not become a widespread practice. It is marginalized to just a few trackers that so happened to raise unwanted attention to themselves, likely being chargebacks/disputes as the most probable reason. However, it’s not all that unfathomable to believe that PayPal could indeed proactively chase down any & all accounts associated to private trackers (donations) if they desired (or were directed by law) to do so. Some trackers make this easier than others - just take a look at BitMe.TV’s donation page on PayPal.com - it’s really not all that hard to guess which site it points to:
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