PayPal - hypocrites!

I've had a couple of friendly games of Poker recently with some people I know from a newsgroup. It's just a bit of fun roughly once a month and the losers all pay the winner £5. We've been using PayPal up to now but a couple of us (myself included) have had our accounts frozen because apparently gambling breaches their acceptable use policy.

On the surface this seems fair enough, if perhaps a little harsh. However, if they have a principle that the service cannot be used for gambling then I'm happy to abide by it. This was the e-mail they sent me:

"After a recent review of your account, it has been determined that you are currently in violation of PayPal's Acceptable Use Policy. Under the Acceptable Use Policy, PayPal may not be used to send or receive payments for activities that involve gambling and/or gaming activities, including but not limited to casino games, sports betting, horse or greyhound racing, lottery tickets, certain games of skill, and other ventures that facilitate gambling."

Of course it's not as simple as that, because PayPal are in fact perfectly happy to allow you to use their service for gambling as I found out upon investigation:

https://www.paypal.com/uk/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=xpt/cps/general/BetFair-outside

"You can now use PayPal with Betfair – the world’s largest betting exchange."

So, either they do allow the service for gambling or they don't, which is it? It would seem it's both! You see they are quite happy to let their principles slide when they can make a profit from it. They take a cut from all transactions made through PayPal to BetFair and that's fine. But if you just want to organise the occasional friendly game of Poker then you are an evil gambler who must be banished from PayPal forever!

Like I said in the title, PayPal are hypocritical *&%$*!