NEW YORK: US-based online payment service PayPal has decided to block financial transfers to WikiLeaks after governments around the world initiated legal action against the whistleblower website.
“PayPal has permanently restricted the account used by WikiLeaks due to a violation of the PayPal Acceptable Use Policy, which states that our payment service cannot be used for any activities that encourage, promote, facilitate or instruct others to engage in illegal activity,” PayPal said in statement released late Friday.
“We’ve notified the account holder of this action,” the statement said.
Over the past several days, WikiLeaks has begun publishing the first of 250,000 US diplomatic cables, creating an international firestorm as American diplomats’ private assessments of foreign leaders and politics has been publicly aired.
The release was the third major publication of secret US files by WikiLeaks this year, after the whistleblower website published tens of thousands of American military files from the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts.
The United States and other governments said the release of the documents were against their laws.
