The developers of the “hacker Tamagotchi” Flipper Zero said that for two months now they have not been able to return $ 1.3 million that remained on the project’s PayPal account that was blocked without explanation. Even PayPal support cannot explain what is happening, and the developers say that what is happening is jeopardizing the production of Flipper Zero.
Let me remind you that in 2020, a record $4,882,784 was raised on Kickstarter for the production of a “hacker Tamagotchi” and an extremely interesting Flipper Zero multitool, about the creation of which we then talked with one of its authors, Pavel Zhovner.
At the beginning of 2022, the participants of the Kickstarter campaign began to receive their gadgets, and in June of this year, the open sale of Flipper Zero finally started. The blocking of the PayPal business account, which occurred shortly after, was reported by the developers on the official Twitter of the project.
The Flipper Zero team says that about half of the buyers chose PayPal as a payment method (it was also possible to pay for the order with a bank card directly), but after a few days, PayPal initiated the account verification process. “They asked for some [additional] documents, and we immediately provided them,” the team writes.
This was followed by several more requests from PayPal, to which the developers also responded, but in the end they received only a message about the permanent ban of the Flipper Zero business account.