PayPal may not explain things clearly, however if we imagine we were the risk management team in PayPal, here is the picture:
An account gets a lot of money from different funding sources (credit cards, ACH, etc.), the velocity is high, and most of the sources didn't have prior transaction records with this said account. To the RM team, they cannot tell if this is a legitimate transfer, or a massive transfer of booty by hackers.
Nevermind how famous this startup maybe, if your credit card were stolen, and PayPal shows you an HN article "well, I thought you wanted to donate to this startup X", how impress would you be? On top of that, the chance of CC customers with hefty chargeback is something that no sane business entity can take lightly.
PayPal may suck, but I don't see how a company with similar scale and footprint will do better. Doing differently very likely will mean losing so much money that it has to go out of business, or, have to partner with some foreign company that sells products of questionable quality.
An account gets a lot of money from different funding sources (credit cards, ACH, etc.), the velocity is high, and most of the sources didn't have prior transaction records with this said account. To the RM team, they cannot tell if this is a legitimate transfer, or a massive transfer of booty by hackers.
Nevermind how famous this startup maybe, if your credit card were stolen, and PayPal shows you an HN article "well, I thought you wanted to donate to this startup X", how impress would you be? On top of that, the chance of CC customers with hefty chargeback is something that no sane business entity can take lightly.
PayPal may suck, but I don't see how a company with similar scale and footprint will do better. Doing differently very likely will mean losing so much money that it has to go out of business, or, have to partner with some foreign company that sells products of questionable quality.