If you’ve been using PayPal to chargeback your donations to crowdfunding campaigns, listen up: Those days are coming to an end. PayPal has announced that as of June 25th, it will no longer grant such protections to its users, referring to such donations as “investment”:
“In Australia, Brazil, Canada, Japan, United States and other countries, we have excluded payments made to crowdfunding campaigns from our buyer protection programs. This is consistent with the risks and uncertainties involved in contributing to crowdfunding campaigns, which do not guarantee a return for the investment made in these types of campaigns. We work with our crowdfunding platform partners to encourage fundraisers to communicate the risks involved in investing in their campaign to donors.”
As anyone who tried to donate to our own Kickstarter with PayPal knows, Kickstarter does not currently support PayPal payments in any case, but Patreon, for example, does, as do most studios who run a crowdfunding system on their own websites after their initial campaigns.
