PayPal will stop allowing personal payments in Singapore on February 20. It said in an email to members that this was due to “regulatory instructions”.
People will still be able to make commercial payments for goods and services with their accounts, such as at online merchants, or receive funds, but we can expect that fund transfers between personal accounts will be halted.
They’re not clear on exactly what sort of fund transfers will be stopped, but this seems in line with what happened in other countries. According to reports, PayPal Japan’s personal account holders stopped being able to receive or send money to individuals in 2010, and now have to pay a business fee for transactions. The same year, users in Taiwan and Brazil reported that they stopped being able to send personal payments.
PayPal’s wording seems to suggest that users will still be able to receive payments from “sales and trading”, so this shouldn’t hurt individuals selling on eBay (which owns PayPal). However, many of the smaller blogshops in the region are run by individuals, and those transfers are to personal accounts. Blogging platform, LiveJournal, has said it has a global pool of over 50,000 blogshops. It said that the transaction volume of Singapore blogshops was $80 million in that year alone.
Update: PayPal responded to say that personal payments such as cash gifts or living allowances won’t be allowed. Underlying goods and services will be permitted, and this extends to commercial payments made and received by Singapore users covering personal, “premier” or business accounts. Users can also still receive funds from PayPal users outside of Singapore, and that is dependent on whether personal payments are allowed in the sender’s country. Blogshops, you can rest easy.
PayPal is an online payments and money transfer service that allows you to send money via email, phone, text message or Skype. They offer products to both individuals and businesses alike, including online vendors, auction sites and corporate users. PayPal connects effortlessly to bank accounts and credit cards. PayPal Mobile is one of PayPal’s newest products. It allows you to send payments by text message or by using PayPal’s mobile browser. PayPal created the Gausebeck-Levchin test, which is an implementation...
Founded in 1995 in San Jose, CA, eBay connects millions of buyers and sellers globally in the world’s largest online marketplace, utilizing PayPal to ensure secure transactions. The company also operates specialized marketplaces such as StubHub, the world’s largest ticket marketplace, and eBay Classifieds sites, which together have a presence in more than 1,000 cities around the world. eBay items can be sold either via a silent auction, in which users input the maximum price they are willing to...
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