“When Apple announced it was jumping into the mobile-payments universe with Apple Pay last week, many wondered how that would affect PayPal…. [which] was notable in its absence,” Mark Rogowsky writes for Forbes. “It’s clear that PayPal felt threatened. The result? A downright bizarre full-page newspaper ad suggesting — indirectly — that Apple’s payment system would be as insecure as those celebrity photos stored in iCloud. Venture capitalist Keith Rabois, who was a key member of the PayPal team back in the day, tweeted: ‘Dumbest ad campaign ever?'”
“PayPal’s biggest mistake was actually calling into question the security of mobile payments. ‘We the people / Want our money / Safer than our selfies’ is followed in relatively tiny type by ‘Paypal protecting the people economy.’ I haven’t a clue what the ‘people economy’ is, but I’m now of the opinion that PayPal believes that things in the cloud are inherently insecure and I should be afraid of trusting them,” Rogowsky writes. “That makes me nervous since PayPal has several of my credit card numbers as well as a bank account number, too. (I disconnected my primary bank account from PayPal years ago and only have a small credit-union one linked, because, well, I don’t trust PayPal.)”
“It’s not a leap to claim [Apple Pay’s] end-to-end system of masked numbers, a device you control and the need for a fingerprint represents perhaps the single-most secure method yet devised to secure payments for ordinary humans. That PayPal executives actually believe otherwise is unlikely,” Rogowsky writes. “Rabois closed with: “PayPal ad campaign: We will terrify those users into staying with us for another decade.” Of course, that’s hardly a path to success.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: PayPal knows that phished passwords – poor, too-easily-guessed passwords – from celebrity accounts have absolutely nothing to do with Apple Pay, but, obviously, PayPal thinks their customers are stupid enough to believe their lies. Is that a company you want handling your money?
Obviously, as future Apple roadkill, PayPal is scared, worried, and defensive – and rightfully so. Regardless, PayPal shouldn’t let their fear cause them to stoop to outright lies. At least die a dignified death, PayPal.
Oh, yes, we do love the smell of fear in the morning!
For references, here’s PayPal’s “We reek of Apple Pay fear” print advertisement:
Related articles:
Frightened PayPal slams Apple Pay in full-page newspaper ads – September 15, 2014
4 million phones sold, make multiple companies question their future and shit their pants…. Not a bad 24hrs for Apple.
Hopefully there an online payment option for Apple Pay
I love the online Fandroid screaming “Google Wallet was first!” and I explain yeah sure, and it also FAILED. 1st ain’t necessarily best. Fandroid have an extremely hard time accepting negatives about their crappy ecosystem and will do anything to obfuscate the issue.
4 million is 100% growth in two years (iPhone 5 had 2 million purchases in the first 24 hours).
Uh, y’all wait while I log in to my old PayPal account – AND CLOSE IT.
I have had a PayPal account since 2002 and a BillMeLater/PayPal Credit account since 2010. This tactic from them, has me irritated enough to close both accounts. PayPal is something I rarely use anymore, and I have never been fully comfortable with them having my bank account info on file. They may have just pushed me to the point of ridding them from my life.
Good luck trying to close that nightmare BillMeLater credit account, as if you could get a hold of somebody.
I never even attempted to create one, due to the horror stories surrounding it.
I pay every other method available to avoid PayPal as much as possible. They just seem to be an annoying middle man.
Yeah, I just tried that and whenever I click on the Close Account button it says ‘oops, somethings wrong, try later’. Everything else seems to work, just closing the account fails. How unfortunate. I did unlink my cards.
Yeah, same here. I get the same message. Looks like it’s purposeful. They are going down.
I stopped using eBay altogether because I didn’t want to use Paypal anymore. I’d read there were multiple States’ Attorney investigations into Paypal after tens of thousands of fraud complaints from consumers, and the facts that came out were astonishing. I’ll never use Paypal again, and until there’s an alternative for buying on eBay, I’ll never use eBay again either.
I use paypal so that it acts as one of the two direct debits needed on a bank account I have. I keep £10 in there to cover the other direct debit, pay in my wages, then immediately transfer them to my main account, and in doing that I got £100 for “switching” and I earn £5 a month “interest” for basically doing nothing. I tend to only use them on the odd occasion I order something from a site on a one off basis. I figure my details are more secure in one place than in multiple ones, even if PayPal isn’t any more secure individually.
Paypal must think their customers are fools to make their lies so transparent. Their defeat is assured because Paypal has no courage or honor.
Just deleted my paypal credit cards. How many Apple fans are doing that today?
I was going to, but it seems that they closed my account due to inactivity. No love lost here. 😀
Whew, ok, first time I logged onto that place since I created the account 9 years ago! I think, think, I closed the account. It wasn’t so easy to find how to close it.
Bring on Apple Pay! I’m getting my very first iPhone just because of Apple Pay!!
Can you recommend a web page with instructions on how to close the account? I don’t think I’ve used PayPal in the last decade.
The add should read . . . “almost securely buy anything . . . “
PayPal We will protect your money by stealing it and keeping it in our bank.
Again, for folks who missed it:
eBay goes down for 10th time this year amid Internet blackouts
Today’s site downtime marks the tenth time that the website has been unavailable to users this year, and is the largest outage so far. Some users have also reported problems accessing PayPal, which is owned by the online auction giant, although it appeared to be up at the time of writing.
IOW: Clean your own house PayPal before FUDing that someone else’s is dirty. 😛
Love it and use it as a reminder about Paypal BS ad!
Love that they added the slack-jawed douchebag at the bottom. Because the photo in no way reinforces their message. It’s like an afterthought – “let’s add a `typical` Paypal user at the bottom!”
The selfie leaks and the ensuing iCloud FUD appeared right before Apple’s Apple Pay announcement. Since PayPal had probably been asked to join Apple Pay, one way or another, they knew about Apple’s aims before the announcement. So there’s a good chance that they start the FUD, so they can now get some attention for their campaign. Braindead as that campaign is, this seems possible.
“leaks” was meant to be in quotes !!
Could it be perhaps that eBay had something to do maybe with commissioning of the actual leak? The timing does seem awfully too convenient. The whole thing somehow seems planned.
I just closed my account and reminded them that someone had hacked into my brother’s account and stole $500. They did absolutely nothing to help him. He filed a police report but they couldn’t do much without PayPal’s help.
Here are the email addressed I used to to tell them that I trust Apple with my credit card information more than I trust them. I hope at least one of them is valid.
sthompson@paypal.com, scott@paypal.com, jdonahoe@ebay.com, john.donahoe@ebay.com, john@ebay.com
The email addresses bounced back. Damn it.
PayPal freezes account and hold millions if not 10’s of millions of $$$$$$ from the rightful owners. After 6 months PP will then release the funds. They are Judge, Jury & Executioner when it comes to others money that they want to freeze. Apple Pay is by your own hand (finger print) and that is that!!!
Thats for sure. There are forums dedicated to paypal deciding to freeze accounts because it “seems suspicious activity” or you may be linked to someone in their minds that did something wrong so now they decide to get rid of your account.
Your lucky if they only hold it 6 months. Paypal claims to protect from fraud but all they do is fraud people themselves.
Today’s wonderful news from eBay, who run PayPal:
eBay redirect attack puts buyers’ credentials at risk
EBay has been compromised so that people who clicked on some of its links were automatically diverted to a site designed to steal their credentials.
The spoof site had been set up to look like the online marketplace’s welcome page.
The US firm was alerted to the hack on Wednesday night but removed the listings only after a follow-up call from the BBC more than 12 hours later.
One security expert said he was surprised by the length of time taken.
“EBay is a large company and it should have a 24/7 response team to deal with this – and this case is unambiguously bad,” said Dr Steven Murdoch from University College London’s Information Security Research Group.
Gee thanks eBay. Real alert to blatant security attacks against your customers, aren’t you. /s
It involved the attackers placing malicious Javascript code within product listing pages. This code in turn automatically redirected affected users through a series of other websites, so that they ended up at the page asking for their eBay log-in and password.
So maybe STFU eBay and pay attention to YOUR OWN security FAILures. (Un-fscking-believable). 😛