PayPal

PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American company operating a worldwide online payments system. Online money transfers serve as electronic alternatives to traditional paper methods like checks and money orders. PayPal is one of the world's largest Internet payment companies. The company operates as an acquirer, performing payment processing for online vendors, auction sites and other commercial users, for which it charges a fee.

Established in 1998, PayPal had its IPO in 2002, and became a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay later that year. It was spun off as an independently traded company in July 2015.

In 2014, PayPal moved $228 billion in 26 currencies across more than 190 nations, generating a total revenue of $7.9 billion (44% of eBay’s total profits). The same year, eBay announced plans to spin-off PayPal into an independent company by mid-2015 and was completed on July 18, 2015.

History

Early history

PayPal was established in December 1998 as Confinity, a company that developed security software for handheld devices founded by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, Luke Nosek and Ken Howery. PayPal was developed and launched as a money transfer service at Confinity in 1999, funded by John Malloy from BlueRun Ventures.

PayPal 14

The PayPal 14 are a group of defendants allegedly connected with the hacktivist group Anonymous, thirteen of whom pled guilty in a San Jose court in California, United States in December 2013, to charges of conspiring to disrupt access to the PayPal payment service. The attempted four-day disruption of PayPal's operations was allegedly in response to PayPal's refusal to process donations to Wau Holland Stiftung's PayPal account set up to collect funds for Wikileaks, and was part of a wider Anonymous campaign, Operation Payback.

Court proceedings

The defendants were charged under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in July 2011 for the attempted denial of service attacks, which occurred in December 2010. On December 5, 2013, ten of the defendants plead guilty to one misdemeanor count of damaging a protected computer and one felony count of conspiracy, and three others each pled guilty to one misdemeanor. The 14th defendant had their case handled separately.

New York-based attorney Stanley Cohen, who represented one of the defendants, claimed that the 13 committed acts of civil disobedience in political dissent, adding that he thinks that the acts were free speech protected by the First Amendment. In an interview for SKP News Cohen compared the digital 'sit-in' to protests organized by the civil rights movement. Cohen further noted that the guilty pleas were for misdemeanors resulting in probation, instead of having the defendants face possible felony convictions and jail sentences. A fine of $86,000 is being equally distributed among the 13 activists, each owing $6,615. The fine must be paid by December 2014.