Abe Burmeister confirms Andy’s report of Paypal freezing BitPass’s account… Doesn’t surprise me at all considering Paypal’s past history.
10/14: received in email update from Patrick Breitenbach, Paypal employee (posted up b/c he left the same statement as a comment on Andy’s original post):
I’m a PayPal employee and wanted to update readers on the status of the PayPal/BitPass relationship. Over the weekend BitPass’ PayPal account was suspended pending assurances that BitPass and PayPal were in compliance with the US Patriot Act given the nature of the respective companies’ services. PayPal did not intend to disrupt payment processing and we are reviewing our procedures to ensure that this situation doesn’t happen in the future. PayPal has been in direct contact with BitPass on the matter and BitPass’ account was fully restored this morning. Contrary to speculation, this incident had nothing at all to do with competitive issues and in fact PayPal supports companies such as BitPass, Cybersource and Xoom that are building complementary services.