Customers are invited to pay $25,000.00 at once or in up to 25 monthly payments. Customers may pay ahead at any time, and their prototypes are built as the funds arrive. Customers are sent photos of their car in progress every 2 weeks and are invited to visit their car in progress during the build.
Accepting deposits (pre-selling) is not likely a good idea, at least not for U.S. customers and definitely not using PayPal.
The PayPal payments are sent to the
finance@wikispeed.com PayPal account. This is likely registered with PayPal as a U.S. business account (shows as verified since 2011).
At some point PayPal's compliance group is going to see amounts too large for their taste, and will decide that "contributions" are not really donations but instead made with the intention that there is a car delivered once the $25K of donations is completed. That's a pre-payment and not "donation". Even if there was a car being built for this pre-sale buyer with all components already procured (or the car already built and sitting in a warehouse or showroom somewhere) it would still violate PayPal's usage agreement.
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https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=ua/AcceptableUse_fullProhibited Activities
You may not use the PayPal service for activities that:
3. lay-away systems
So this is a near guarantee that PayPal will at some point freeze the funds (take existing balance from Wikispeed's PayPal account and claw back from bank withdrawals if the amount to freeze exceeds the PayPal balance). Frozen funds sit for 180 days. The disposition from there might be that funds are returned directly to the buyer.
This would probably be quite disruptive to WIKISPEED. It is probably best to not challenge the PayPal beast, as their track record is fairly consistent.
