Boardgames and the indirect surveillance state

Big Brother is watching–for boardgamers buying suspicious game titles, that is.

A current thread on BoardGameGeek describes PayPal investigations triggered when gamers have used the service to buy games with certain words in the title. The PayPal query looks like this (with personal details redacted):

Dear [X],

As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the PayPal system. During a recent screening, we noticed an issue regarding your account.

PayPal’s Compliance Department has reviewed your account and identified activity that may be in violation of United States regulations administered by the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

PayPal is committed to complying with and meeting its global regulatory obligations. One obligation is to ensure that our customers, merchants, and partners are also in compliance with applicable laws and regulations, including those set forth by OFAC, in their use of PayPal.

To ensure that activity and transactions comply with current regulations, PayPal is requesting that you provide the following information via email to compliancetransactions@paypal.com:

1. Purpose of payment [XXXXXXXXXXX] attempted on [DATE] in the amount of $[XX] including a complete and detailed explanation of the goods or services you intended to purchase.
2. Explanation of [WORD] in the above transaction.

Please go to our Resolution Center to provide this information. To find the Resolution Center, log in to your account and click the Resolution Center subtab. Click Resolve under the Action column and follow the instructions.

If we don’t hear from you by [DATE], we will limit what you can do with your account until the issue is resolved.

We thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. We apologize for any
inconvenience.

Thus far, games that have triggered a PayPal investigation include:

• Cuba Libre!
• Drive on Damascus 
• Cuba: The Splendid Little War 
• Santiago de Cuba 
• Shining Path: The Struggle for Peru
• Tupamaro 
• Kandahar
• Target: Iran

You can guess which keywords are popping via their internal transaction-monitoring algorithms!

All of this is an example of the powerful indirect effect of Treasury Department rules—and the consequent fear of financial institutions that failure to adequately monitor transactions might not only violate US law but also leave them open to civil lawsuits.

h/t Rory Aylward and Brian Train

UPDATE (22/01/15):

Jon Compton at One Small Step Games recounts his own experience with this issue:

We recently released the game Shining Path. Every time someone purchases the game via PayPal, the transaction is held pending investigation. Takes about a day, and then the money shows up in the account. On the flip side, the map artist for the game lives in Europe. When we paid her via PayPal, the transaction was held up almost a week, and we had to write a lengthy explanation for why we were paying a foriegn national for something that contained “Shining Path” in the title.