Why PayPal finds your money of interest  eBay's PayPal division
will start holding payments for up to three weeks for certain
"high-risk transactions" next month. Some sellers are pissed,
but it's totally legal. PayPal is not a bank. It is not insured
by the FDIC — the government program which insures deposits
should a bank go under. PayPal is a "deposit broker," meaning
the company pools deposits from all its users and holds them in
bank accounts under PayPal's name, collecting interest on the
money — and deposit brokers are not federally regulated.  PayPal
"has gone to great pains to ... not be a bank" according to
Christa Quarles, managing director of Thomas Weisel Partners.
Some users think the company is holding the cash to make money
on the interest, but it's a small enough amount — an estimated
$10 million a quarter, tops — that it doesn't make a significant
impact on eBay's bottom line. (If it hadn't taken a massive
writeoff for its Skype purchase last year, eBay would have made
more than $1 billion i