I thought I would give everyone a brief update on my continuing saga with trying to unsubscribe from PayPal’s marketing list. Because of what I do, I have some options not available to the average recipient. One of the things I did is ask people I know if they had any contacts at PayPal who may be able to address this issue.
I was given an internal contact at PayPal by a colleague who works at one of the certification companies. I sent the PayPal contact a brief summary of my experience. She explained she was not in a department that handled email any more, but that she forwarded my mail on to the responsible people. A little later I received another message saying that I had been unsubscribed and they were examining the tapes of my call. She also mentioned that their unsubscribe process would be changed “sometime in mid-July.” I was not given any details.
A colleague who attended the recent AOTA meeting in Seattle offered this comment.
I sat at a table during lunch with Michael Barrett, the CISO of Paypal recently at AOTA and I can assure you he is fully aware of CAN-SPAM laws and changes. Whether that translates to all layers of the company or not is another issue (one they are clearly not handling well). Ironically, his trust presenation talked about these types of battles for large companies.
In addition to looking for some personal contacts at PayPal, I contacted the vendor where I made the purchase from in February using a credit card through PayPal. He shared with me the information PayPal sent to him, including the notice that my PayPal account was unregistered. Unequivocal evidence that the last time I used their service, that I did not have an account with them. They had no business sending me that email.
His information confirms that their marketing message did violate CAN SPAM. The claims of the customer support reps that I had an existing account are contradicted by PayPal’s own statements to the vendor in February. There was no opt-out on the message as I received it.
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