PayPal "locks" user accounts

One of my favourite authors, George R R Martin, is having something of a problem with PayPal - they've decided to "lock" his account, freezing his money and refusing to let him have it back unless he jumps through a number of pretty onerous hoops to prove his ID. Apparently the US Treasury Department has put his name on a list  to do with foreign assets control, and while neither George nor eBay have a clue why they've nonetheless frozen his account.

He points out that at any given moment he might have upwards of a thousand bucks in his PayPal account, and comments that a lot of heavy PayPal users may well have a lot more than that in there. Some people earn their living on eBay; PayPal has more than 100 million users; and with a 41% increase in year-on-year revenues (SeekingAlpha) makes an increasingly important contribution to the eBay bottom line. But if eBay is given to simply freezing user accounts on the unexplained say-so of some US government department, I can only echo his advice - people should not  use PayPal as a bank account, because they might suddenly find eBay not letting them access their money.