MEGA Changes Payment Systems

27 February 2015

PayPal has ceased processing customer payments effective immediately.

MEGA is aware of a report published by NetNames (partially funded from the MPAA supported Digital Citizens Alliance) that incorrectly claims MEGA's business to not be a legitimate service. MEGA is aware that Senator Leahy (Vermont, Chair Senate Judiciary Committee) then pressured Visa and MasterCard to cease providing payment services to the companies named in that report.

Visa and MasterCard then pressured PayPal to cease providing payment services to MEGA.

MEGA provided extensive statistics and other evidence showing that MEGA's business is legitimate and legally compliant. After discussions that appeared to satisfy PayPal’s queries, MEGA authorised PayPal to share that material with Visa and MasterCard. Eventually PayPal made a non-negotiable decision to immediately terminate services to MEGA. PayPal has apologised for this situation and confirmed that MEGA management are upstanding and acting in good faith. PayPal acknowledged that the business is legitimate, but advised that a key concern was that MEGA has a unique model with its end-to-end encryption which leads to “unknowability of what is on the platform”.

MEGA has demonstrated that it is as compliant with its legal obligations as USA cloud storage services operated by Google, Microsoft, Apple, , , Spideroak etc, but PayPal has advised that MEGA's "unique encryption model" presents an insurmountable difficulty. The encryption models claimed by various USA and other entities apparently do not represent any problem to PayPal or the parties behind PayPal.

MEGA supplies cloud storage services to more than 15 million registered customers in more than 200 countries. MEGA will not compromise its end-to-end user controlled encryption model and is proud to not be part of the USA business network that discriminates against legitimate international businesses.

Until new payment systems are implemented, MEGA will temporarily not enforce its storage limits or suspend any accounts for non-payment and has extended existing subscriptions by 2 months free of charge.

MEGA Statistics February 2015

Registered Users > 15 million Growth in registered users > 30,000/day Files Stored > 4 billion Files < 20MB in size > 99.7% based on 24 hour sample Takedown notices 9,052 for Q4 2014 % of stored files taken down 0.011% for Q4 2014

Encryption models not objected to by PayPal or Visa/MasterCard

Domicile / Ownership Apple (Facetime, iMessage, iCloud) USA Box USA Dropbox USA Spideroak USA Whatsapp USA Switzerland / USA