The Machine Fired Me
I had a sort-of related experience with PayPal where the machine said &quot;No.&quot;<p>I&#x27;ve been using it for at least 10 years at that point.<p>What I did was try to pay for some cheap VPS hosting in Italy. The transaction was denied. I thought there was some problem with my CC, so I immediately tried to do a $1 transaction with some other company and it went without a hitch.<p>So I contacted PayPal support about it and the next day I actually get a <i>phone</i> call from one of their support staff.<p>He says my transaction was flagged as &quot;suspicious&quot; by the fraud prevention system. So I asked, okay... but now a Human has looked at it, can you manually approve the transaction? The answer was &quot;No, I am not allowed to tell you why&quot;.<p>I was incredulous, so I asked &quot;Wait... you acknowledge that I&#x27;m not a scammer or a terrorist (since my PP account still worked and does to this day), and the party I&#x27;m trying to purchase from is obviously not either since they&#x27;re still accepting PP, but The Machine thinks there is something fishy about us two specifically and there is no way for someone to manually approve this transaction?&quot;<p>And he said something to the tune of &quot;Yes. I&#x27;m sorry, but there is nothing I or anyone at PP can do about it, and for security reasons we&#x27;re unable to offer further details.&quot;<p>So yeah. This was just a minor nuisance for me, I purchased similar services elsewhere. But the whole thing was a real eye-opener. That was the day I realized that there is no pleading or reasoning with The Machine.