Julian Assange, the founder of Wikileaks, is reportedly soliciting donations through the Swiss postal service after PayPal closed his account.
According to the Associated Press, Assange is also using “a Swiss-Icelandic credit card processing center and other accounts in Iceland and Germany.” Iceland is a Wikileaks-friendly country, where politicians have proposed making the country a “journalism haven” for outlets like Wikileaks.
PayPal, which is owned by the California-based eBay, cut off Wikileaks on Friday.
“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.
According to Bloomberg, PayPal denied any government involvement or pressure to boot Wikileaks.
Washington has been successful in hurting Wikileaks in other ways. Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) convinced Amazon.com to boot Wikileaks from its servers (although Amazon denies this version of events) and at least one other tech company followed suit. Likewise, the French government is considering outlawing Wikileaks.
After several attacks by hackers, Wikileaks moved to an address, Wikileaks.ch, owned by the Swiss Pirate Party.
Pro-Wikileaks hackers reportedly attacked PayPal after the move was announced.
Late update: PostFinance, the Swiss Post Office bank, has frozen Assange’s account.
“The Australian citizen provided false information regarding his place of residence during the account opening process,” the bank said in a statement.
Assange suggested the move was politically motivated.
“The technicality used to seize the defense fund was that Mr. Assange, as a homeless refugee attempting to gain residency in Switzerland, had used his lawyers address in Geneva for the bank’s correspondence,” Wikileaks said in a statement.
Also today, Britain’s Scotland Yard reportedly has the paperwork necessary to arrest Assange on sex assault charges.
