PayPal to start cutting off payments to VPN services

PayPal is already known for its stance against Torrent sites and file-hosting services but now it seems that the payment processor has an issue with VPN and SmartDNS services too. This week, PayPal began refusing to accept payments for a company providing users with VPN or SmartDNS tools to bypass geographical restrictions on content like Netflix or YouTube.

The first service to be affected by this is UnoTelly and according to a report from TorrentFreak, there could be even more. UnoTelly received a message from PayPal this week, saying that unblocking tools like VPNs are against PayPal's terms of service: “Under the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for items that infringe or violate any copyright, trademark, right of publicity or privacy, or any other proprietary right under the laws of any jurisdiction”.

“This includes transactions for any device or technological measure that descrambles a scrambled work, decrypts an encrypted work or otherwise avoids, bypasses, removes, deactivates or impairs a technological measure without the authority of the copyright owner.”

This decision apparently came as a shock to UnoTelly, whose business account has now been permanently limited, there is also no appeal process for this decision either, forcing them to switch payment providers.

KitGuru Says: A lot of people like to use unblocking services to access content not available in their region on legal services like Netflix, Hulu, YouTube etc. However, it seems that PayPal wants to distance itself from these practices. Right now we don't know if more unblocking services are set to be affected but we may hear more speak out over the next week. 

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