Big Brother is watching–for boardgamers buying suspicious game titles, that is.

A current thread on BoardGameGeek describes PayPal investigations triggered when gamers have used the service to buy games with certain words in the title. The PayPal query looks like this (with personal details redacted):

Dear [X],

As part of our security measures, we regularly screen activity in the PayPal system. During a recent screening, we noticed an issue regarding your account.

PayPal’s Compliance Department has reviewed your account and identified activity that may be in violation of United States regulations administered by the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC).

PayPal is committed to complying with and meeting its global regulatory obligations. One obligation is to ensure that our customers, merchants, and partners are also in compliance with applicable laws and regulations, including those set forth by OFAC, in their use of PayPal.

To ensure that activity and transactions comply with current regulations, PayPal is requesting that you provide the following information via email to compliancetransactions@paypal.com:

1. Purpose of payment [XXXXXXXXXXX] attempted on [DATE] in the amount of $[XX] including a complete and detailed explanation of the goods or services you intended to purchase.

2. Explanation of [WORD] in the above transaction.

Please go to our Resolution Center to provide this information. To find the Resolution Center, log in to your account and click the Resolution Center subtab. Click Resolve under the Action column and follow the instructions.

If we don’t hear from you by [DATE], we will limit what you can do with your account until the issue is resolved.

We thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. We apologize for any

inconvenience.