Troubles with ProtonMail's Paypal Account

ProtonMail is a new email service that is developed by a team of scientists working at the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva. The service protects people around the world from the mass surveillance. Because of end-to-end encryption, the data of the users is already encrypted by the time it reaches the ProtonMail servers. The company has no access to the user’s messages, and since ProtonMail cannot decrypt them, the start-up cannot share them with third parties.

For financing the expansion the team has decided to start a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. At the moment contributors have already committed more than $280’000. However the campaign was hampered by the blocking of ProtonMails PayPal account. 

In a blog post the ProtonMail team comments: “While the $275,000 ProtonMail has raised in the past 2 weeks is a large amount, it pales in comparison to many other crowdfunding campaigns that have raised sums in excess of $1,000,000 so we can’t help but wonder why ProtonMail was singled out. When we pressed the PayPal representative on the phone for further details, he questioned whether ProtonMail is legal and if we have government approval to encrypt emails. It seems PayPal is trying to come up with ANY excuse they can to prevent us from receiving funds.”

Today at 5.30 pm Swiss time ProtonMail announced that the account was restored. Before that articles around the world had been published about the blocking by Paypal, for example by The Register, NZZ or Le Monde. It seems that the secure email service has a lot of supporters. 

In the meantime PayPal has published a press release with an explanation and an excuse. Paypal comments: "PayPal recently made changes to the way it handled accounts of people who were using crowdfunding sites to support their ideas. In response to customer feedback we established a streamlined process to specifically support crowdfunding campaigns. This process involves engaging crowdfunding campaign owners early on to clearly understand their campaign goals and help them ensure their campaigns are compliant with our policies and government regulations.

In the case of ProtonMail, a technical problem this week resulted in PayPal applying restrictions to the account. We have contacted ProtonMail today to solve this and can confirm that ProtonMail is able to receive or send funds through PayPal again. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused."

ProtonMail was founded in summer 2013 at CERN by scientists who were drawn together by a shared vision of a more secure and private Internet. Early ProtonMail hackathons were held at the famous CERN Restaurant One. The service is developed both at CERN and MIT and the company is headquartered in Geneva.