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Is this Paypal experience customary?

• andreimiulescu 7y ago
  Just avoid Paypal, I’ve always had issues with them from funds being blocked for no reason to my account being blocked, their support is an absolute nightmare, also my friend sold something on eBay the buyer said she didn’t get it so PayPal took the money back from my friend, she sent it and it was signed for but not at the address listed on PayPal the address that has been given by the buyer so it’s not protected. Shady shady business
• phpnode 7y ago
  Yes, yes it is.
• matthewfelgate 7y ago
  Yup. This is why I left eBay and PayPal. PayPal charged me £400 which I was lucky I spotted. Eventually after a week got the money back. I never got an explanation why it happened or how I or they would prevent it in future. I prevented it by leaving eBay and Paypal.
  • clort 7y ago
    Interesting that you are in the UK and still had trouble. Do you think that you got the money back because of the way they are regulated within Europe as a bank rather than the way that they are not regulated in the USA (which is where most of the horror stories I see seem to come from)?
    • matthewfelgate 7y ago
      I have no information to make a judgement of this as they didn't tell me what happened. All they did is close the ticket.
• edcrfv 7y ago
  This is standard PayPal. They don’t give a crap about their merchants and it’s been widely documented in the past. See https://www.google.com/search?q=paypal+horror+stories https://www.google.com/search?q=paypal+horror+stories
  • FDSGSG 7y ago
    Can you name some payment processors which do care about their smaller merchants?
    • tadzik_ 7y ago
      Stripe. We moved most of our payment processing from Paypal to Stripe last year, they're unbelievably more competent (an extrapolation from the quality of the tooling and APIs) and actually respond with meaningful input when a problem arises.
      • FDSGSG 7y ago
        I use Stripe, the support is certainly better than Paypals but it's not like they'll do anything to keep your business if they consider you a risk.
  • benj111 7y ago
    This isn't a merchant though, this is just some guy who had some money transferred to him, that was silently transferred out.
• dejan 7y ago
  Could get much much worse.
• Grollicus 7y ago
  And I'd bet their fraud detection machine learning bingo tool will learn "owner did not contact us after the ban" as a correct ban and continue to be more obnoxious to all the other customers. Oh well, whoever are still using Paypal should know by now what they are risking.
• voidwtf 7y ago
  PayPal manipulating, removing, or holding hostage the balance of your account? Yes that’s normal for PayPal. Getting a the runaround about how and why it happened? Yep, that’s expected too. Actually getting a non-form letter response of any type? That’s just lucky. We couldn’t get an account rep on the phone for almost 4 days when ~35k was suddenly deducted from the account. Nor when they accidentally cancelled all of our customers subscriptions while working an an unrelated fraud incident. Of course in both of these instances the customers blamed us for not being able to process refunds and being unable to reactivate their subscriptions. PayPal, working as intended.
  • voidwtf 7y ago
    P.s. never ever link any account with shared funds to PayPal. Business or otherwise, open a completely separate account for PayPal if you must use it. Imagine having PayPal place a hold on the funds in your account to make sure refunds/fraud can be handled. Then when a customer does request a refund you’re literally unable to process the refund because it won’t take it from the funds you just received that are held. So now you automatically lose all disputes and they just start raiding your linked bank account. So why did they hold the funds in the first place? PayPal needs to end IMO.
    • username444 7y ago
      I just did this last month. It's a solid risk management move. Never had an issue with PayPal debiting funds though, in 10+ years using them.
    • stakhanov 7y ago
      Actually that doesn't even work. When they don't have a payment method on file that they can abuse, they'll be happy to send your PayPal account into overdraft and start threatening legal action to bully you into settling the balance. Really the only thing to do, as soon as you see a "pay with paypal" screen is to go away screaming. Here's the anecdote: I had had a company with a bank account and PayPal account, then dissolved the company and closed the bank account. Months after that, a former supplier of the now nonexistent company who had PayPal authorization deducted funds fraudulently from the PayPal account, claiming they had rendered services that were never rendered to a company that obviously and provably no longer existed. PayPal sent the account into overdraft. When they couldn't deduct payment from the bank account that no longer existed, they started sending threatening communications to get me to settle the balance. I took things up with their fraud unit to get the transaction cancelled. Their fraud unit dismissed my case without looking into any particulars regarding the services that the vendor didn't render or the company that should have received services that no longer existed. To them the only thing that mattered was that, years ago, I was, in actual fact, stupid enough to click on "Pay with PayPal", the ramifications being that vendors are entirely within their right to use PayPal as an instrument of fraud and legal intimidation against me. It's your own damn fault, sir, for being so stupid and using PayPal. Knowing that taking the legal route would have been way more costly than the amount of the transaction, and wanting to sleep soundly again against the backdrop of PayPal sending threatening communications, I wired money from my personal account to settle the balance and jumped through a shitload more hoops to make sure the PayPal account was properly closed and couldn't come to haunt me again in the future. I think that's how they get away with it: Since the transactions they handle tend to be small, no one will take legal action.
• jonnu 7y ago
  Similar to my experience, especially the ping-ponging between eBay and PayPal. In my case, I _did_ actually sell something, but then the buyer decided to return it. Somehow both my eBay and PayPal accounts got into a 'locked' state, with no way to resolve it instead of contacting customer service. The experience with their CS department was beyond frustrating - they're happy to send 'red' letters demanding refunds and transaction fees despite cutting off all my ability to do anything about it. Reading this post has given me the final nudge I need to look into closing both those accounts.
• kalleboo 7y ago
  No, most people would not be this agitated about a mistaken transaction being silently refunded. At best they'd probably assume the notification went to spam or something and went on with their day My bank doesn't notify me about any transactions, I have to check my bank book manually. Once a mistaken transaction showed up and disappeared a few hours later, with no trace left behind at all. I just assumed it was a mistake and didn't bother getting angry.
  • amingilani 7y ago
    Conversely, I'd be very annoyed if I didn't immediately get a notification from my bank about a decrease in my balance. However, I don't think either of us is qualified to speak for most people.
  • sushiburps 7y ago
    Totally agree with you, not sure exactly what happened he's upset about. They reversed an erroneous deposit.
    • pownr 7y ago
      He is upset about the reversed deposit not being notified. I thought it was pretty clear from the post.
    • dhekir 7y ago
      Receiving unintended funds can have all kinds of unintended consequences, including related to law enforcement. In his case, he just got suspended and asked to provide documents he is physically unable to produce (contrary to presumption of innocence). the next day, and after almost two weeks since the refund to place (but only one day after the long phone discussion) my account was blocked as "suspicious" activity and in order to unblock it I will have to provide original product receipts of the product I was "selling", something that I do not have as I do not even know what I was selling!
      • diminoten 7y ago
        Yeah but it didn't here. Any negative consequence this man experienced was due to his anger and outrage. Calmly handling this situation would have resulted in a completely different outcome. Yet again, emotion and anger are now somehow the company's fault.
• random_savv 7y ago
  I've long stopped using Paypal, except where absolutely necessary because of this sort of thing.
• DanielBMarkham 7y ago
  A few years ago, I sent my youngest son to a well-known online retailer to buy some computer gear. What he got was a counterfeit, a fake that was broken. He started the refund process, but I was pretty miffed that my reputation with my kid got mixed up in these poor business practices. So I emailed management and asked that they apologize to the kid. It took almost forever to get them to figure out that I was not asking for a refund. I was asking for somebody to explain what happened, apologize, and take steps for it not to happen again. He finally got a refund, although whether it was from my actions or his nobody knows. He said it came in three chunks, as if various departments were each pitching in a bit. I thought my point was pretty clear: as leadership, when you take your company and allow its reputation to suffer like that, this is something you are responsible for and need to take action to fix. The money has nothing to do with anything. But they only have certain predefined channels that they seem to be able to communicate through. Anything outside of those channels causes a weird org fault. I've worked with call centers before, and it continues to amaze me the strange place we are putting humans. They're paid to answer the phone, but after that? They're basically little robots, paid to execute a predefined program, adding in a bit of human-sounding noises now and then to make things slightly more palatable to the person on the other end.
  • pjc50 7y ago
    On call centers, I will keep pointing people at: http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-call-centres-part-one/ http://www.harrowell.org.uk/blog/2012/01/21/the-politics-of-... > Inappropriate automation and human/machine confusion bedevil call centres. If you could solve your problem by filling in a web form, you probably would have done. The fact you’re in the queue is evidence that your request is complicated, that something has gone wrong, or generally that human intervention is required. > However, exactly this flexibility and devolution of authority is what call centres try to design out of their processes and impose on their employees. The product is not valued, therefore it is awful. The job is not valued by the employer, and therefore, it is awful. And, I would add, it is not valued by society at large and therefore, nobody cares.
    • DanielBMarkham 7y ago
• swalladge 7y ago
  Yes, my experience with PayPal has involved inconsistent UIs, bad UX, locked funds, and incompetent customer service. I only use paypal where absolutely necessary, such as for selling on ebay.
• fieryskiff1 7y ago
  https://paypalsucks.org/toon1.shtml https://paypalsucks.org/toon1.shtml
  • FDSGSG 7y ago
    Do you work for merchantinc.com? They seem to own and operate paypalsucks.org and have a history of advertising themselves with forum spam similar to your comment.
    • fieryskiff1 7y ago
      Nope, but I spent 2 years trying to make Paypal explain why they disabled my account, but even they didn't know. This was about 15 years ago, and back then this was the first Google result when you searched for "Paypal complaint".
      • Lutzb 7y ago
        The same happened to me. 10 years ago my personal account was frozen. They requested additional verification. Getting any information on why my account was suddenly frozen lead to nothing. Paypal was not able or willing to explain to me what caused this issue. This was the moment I decided I did want to do any further business with them.
        • fieryskiff1 7y ago
          I know, but 10~15 years ago there wasn't really any alternative. So I just created a different account. The funny thing is, Paypal just unfroze my old account after like 4 years...also for no reason!?
    • the-dude 7y ago
      You seem overly active on this thread. What is your affiliation?
      • FDSGSG 7y ago
• Hendrikto 7y ago
  > I guess it's easier to pretend they fight crime when they just target the easier target they can find. That is the story of the whole western world at the moment…
• tinus_hn 7y ago
  It’s difficult to understand why people are even using this service anymore. PayPal is not your ‘pal’ and to use them safely you need insurance and leverage all the way. The only reason I can imagine is that it works most of the time. But the times where it fails are invariably a disaster.
  • noir_lord 7y ago
    PayPal survives because they keep end users happy, we (the people using PayPal to take payment or integrating it) aren't the end user. Proof a ruthless focus in the right place can overcome almost anything. They've been shit forever.
    • SXX 7y ago
      > PayPal survives because they keep end users happy, we (the people using PayPal to take payment or integrating it) aren't the end user. I have no clue where you get that idea. PayPal was freezing end-users accounts, had a bad support and very inconsistent refund limits since forever. Almost everyone I know who heavily used it had issues with it at some point in time. Yeah as long as you just use PayPal once a year to make some payment through your debit card it's okay, but any advanced user who use it more often will eventually get in trouble.
      • sfifs 7y ago
        PayPal generally these days doesn't get hacked. As an alternative to supplying credit card number to a random online merchant, it is infinitely more secure.
        • SXX 7y ago
          I have no doubts about security and avoid giving my card credentials to random merchants it's exactly my use case for PayPal, but I still got account randomly locked several times over 10 years. What exactly caused it I have no idea, but might be traveling or using VPN. Once I tried to make fairly big $2000 transaction to pay for my new laptop and spent a week re-verifying my identify with them.
• Moru 7y ago
  Once I ordered some expensive gear from UK and only option to pay was PayPal. I ordered and paid for the goods, order shipped and a few days later I get a mail from the selling company asking why I locked their account for fraud protection or some such. PayPal sent me the money back and I got the goods. Offcourse I didn't use PayPal again and sent them a normal bank transfer instead. Was also a better exchange rate than PayPal.
  • FDSGSG 7y ago
    >few days later I get a mail from the selling company asking why I locked their account for fraud protection or some such How come most of these stories seem to involve obviously incompetent merchants?
• DagAgren 7y ago
  Paypal may, under good circumstances, fix problems they have themselves caused. However, the concept of explaining to a customer why they did something is utterly alien to them. This just does not seem to be part of any process they have. It bewilders them to no end if you ask them for an explanation of anything.
• cpg 7y ago
  PayPal is horrible, both as a merchant and a customer. In every single way possible. From APIs to service, to explanations to everything. It's time for someone else to take their place and everyone stop using PayPal.
• kyberias 7y ago
  Very weird case. The person got angry even though it was not his money to begin with. Absolutely no harm was caused to him. The person demanded explanation why an erroneous amount of money visited his account. Yet it's none of his business. There was a moment in this incident where any reasonable person would have just moved on.
  • jtbayly 7y ago
    Wrong. He got upset because he wasn’t notified of the refund. Notification of deducted money is something that is quite reasonable to expect. In this case he was trying to figure out what to do, it was handled by others, and a notification would have let him know that it was handled.
    • jeltz 7y ago
      Yeah, what if he had refunded it manually then it would have been refunded twice.
    • kyberias 7y ago
      > Notification of deducted money is something that is quite reasonable to expect. You choose to say it like that. "Notification of deducted money". The money was first added, then removed. It would have been different if it was first removed, then added. But it wasn't.
  • huffmsa 7y ago
    It is his business, it's his account. What if he'd had an auto-transfer setup to clear his account and it sucked up the money before the magical refund? Then he'd have PayPal up his ass about "hiding funds". Would you let some 3rd party use your PO box or parcel locker as long as "it was none of your business"?
    • kyberias 7y ago
      > It is his business, it's his account. It's not his account. It's a service paypal offers. They own the service, the bits, everything. He owns the money. Paypal added some money that was not his, and then they took it away. Nothing of his was touched.
• TomMckenny 7y ago
  If anyone wanted a de facto software monopoly to break up, this would be a good one.
  • jeltz 7y ago
    But how would one do that? There are competitors which are cheaper, have better APIs, better customer service, and better user experience.
    • TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
      Aside from Stripe - who? And sellers on larger sites like eBay can't easily use a competitor. It's a classic anti-trust pattern and should be treated as such.
      • ryanlol 7y ago
        There’s no monopoly, certainly no “classic anti-trust pattern”.
      • carapace 7y ago
        https://www.bolt.com/ https://www.bolt.com/
• tannhaeuser 7y ago
  Is it too much to ask for regulations for payment transactions to step in, at least in EU? I know we're not too regulation-friendly here, and I haven't made up my mind yet, but I tend to think it's only consequential that digital payment transactions are considered a field where governments should exercise authority, on similar grounds that give (or doesn't give) government authority over establishing a currency in the first place. Note this isn't a snark at paypal specifically. I'm just interested if anyone with an economic background has an opinion to share.
  • TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
    The EU has a lot of law about digital payments. In September this year, a new provision will come into force in the entire EEA that requires digital payments to be made with two-factor authentication, for example. I don't know whether or how that affects PayPal though.
    • lucb1e 7y ago
      Ugh, I'm really going to need virtual phone numbers for all these "second factors" (i.e. linkable identifiers), I'm just not sure where to get them. Twilio requires a credit card, and most other businesses that offer this look super shady.
      • TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago
        There's no requirement it be SMS. Card payments in Sweden are already able to comply with this just by having a phone app for authentication.
        • lucb1e 7y ago
          I won't install an app on my phone. It probably won't work without Evilcorp Play Framework, it probably won't work with root, and even if neither of those are an issue, I still don't trust my device enough (I won't install banking, password managing, or pgp apps on there, it's too much of a play thing for that). My trusted things are computer-based, not a mobile device that goes everywhere and that I want to be able to use without having to unlock the screen with a complicated password every time. So it'll probably be SMS, and otherwise they can ship me a second factor -- as the Rabobank already does for as long as I know: they basically send you a payment terminal that creates 0 cent transactions on your card, if I understand it correctly. While a bit annoying, it is safe and not too inconvenient.
• DavideNL 7y ago
  I avoid PayPal, but in the rare case where there is no other payment method possible and i really need something, i simply create an account, do the transaction, and immediately delete the Paypal account again. I find this the best way to deal with them :)
  • stevekemp 7y ago
    I opened my paypal account in Sep 2003, and deleted it in November 2013. Even though I didn't have to concel their "support team" it started to feel like a scammy site I couldn't trust by 2010 or so. I've found a few sites over the years which only supported Paypal as an option, in every case I've chosen to buy elsewhere or not at all. Paypal is not a company I could support.
  • herghost 7y ago
    I once closed my account only for it to be re-opened 4-5 months later by them with a debt balance assigned. Long story short is that someone I'd previously transacted with owed them money so they determined that they would take it from my account and recover it from me. I complained the Financial Ombudsman in the UK. They agreed with my position that it was unreasonable for me to be held financially accountable for people I've transacted with indefinitely. Paypal stuck to the line that "You cannot close your account in order to avoid a debt". Despite the fact that I had no debt, except the one they assigned me several months after account closure, out of nowhere.
• ilaksh 7y ago
  This is why people should support real cryptocurrency.
  • a254613e 7y ago
    As a buyer I would never want to use cryptocurrencies. There is absolutely zero customer protection without the cryptocurrencies going trough a middleman, at which point it's nothing else than another version of PayPal. This is the primary reason I, and I assume a lot of others, use PayPal - not because of their amazing customer support, but because of their customer protection which works just fine in 99.9% cases - which is still a lot better than 0 customer protection.
    • LMYahooTFY 7y ago
      >at which point it's nothing else than another version of PayPal No. At this point you have a trusted broker, who can choose to broker your transaction or not, but they cannot choose to decline it. This is nothing like a "version of PayPal".
• ilaksh 7y ago
  This is why people should support (real) cryptocurrency.
• nikolay 7y ago
  I just got an invoice from Google Account. Basically, scammers send people invoices stating that they exceeded their 5GB and people have to pay $120 not to lose their Google account. I'm sure there are tons of rich idiots who will pay $120, but I wonder why: - There was no merchant contact info. They managed to upload Google's logo and use Google Account as the merchant name. Isn't PayPal doing any basic blacklist check, etc. or check against stock logos (there are tons of companies now, which provide logo by provided company name). - There's not way to report the invoice as scam attempt - I can only "cancel" or "archive", which sends the "merchant" an email and they can know that my email belong to a valid PayPal account after that as the email is sent by PayPal. In general, after so many in business, PayPal is a lazy, slow, and stupid company. I am sorry to say that, but it's the truth. Their developers are a bunch of old timers, who have entrenched into the company and there's no innovation going on. There are many, many, many complains about PayPal, which I can list here. Most of the are very simple to spot and fix by PayPal, but, no, they are untouched for years. I feel like their dev teams is maybe a dozen people who just do maintenance of critical issues and that's it. Their recent interface upgrade took years and it still sucks and feels like in the dawn of DotCom. Compare PayPal to Stripe, let's say - there's no room for comparison! Stripe innovates at a huge pace, they provide a much better DX (Developer Experience), and are so much nicer to work with! PayPal recently acquired Xoom - a very expensive and shady money transfer company. Compared to TransferWise, they are a total joke. In general, I think PayPal is managed by technological morons! P.S. PayPal Here is also a disaster compared to the rest. I bought the device (as PayPal gives nonprofit discounts like Stripe but unlike Square) and many of our transactions failed, so, we switched back to Square. Now we're integrating with Stripe's reader, so, we'll get the best of both.
  • gruez 7y ago
    >Their recent interface upgrade took years Nah it's still not done. There are nooks and crannies of the site where the early 2000s theme is still around.
    • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
      You'd think paypal was run by two people in someone's basement ...
• noonespecial 7y ago
  Learned the hard way you make a separate bank account to link to PayPal. You turn off overdraft and you keep that sucker empty. It's like living with a drug addict. They may be family but you sure as hell dont leave cash or valuables laying about...
  • canada_dry 7y ago
    > like living with a drug addict Great analogy! Despite enjoying a long relationship, Paypal will very possibly stab you in the back and rob you blind in a blink of an eye then become incommunicado.
    • NightlyDev 7y ago
      As a business I can confirm that. "Oh, yeah, don't worry, 3D secure can't be forced for all payments, but we got you, we'll enable it when we think it might be abuse. Also, our seller protection covers you." All the time: "Here is a customer that made 12 purchases during the last 13 months. We took the money, but you have to prove that the card wasn't stolen and that the customer got what he paid for. We didn't enable 3D secure for this transaction, so please fix this for us and we'll give you your money back. Also, if you don't we'll take some more money from your account. Seller protection does not cover this as services are in a gray-zone." 240K frozen and taken since 2012 and still counting! At least I've started to win all the cases, but it takes a lot of time. Time to switch to stripe where I can force 3D secure... PayPal is a joke. A bad joke.
• davnicwil 7y ago
  I rarely use Paypal, but was forced to use it recently for something with no other payment option. Whilst there I decided to change my password, and was horrified to find that they limit passwords to 20 characters. It got me thinking about the standard assumption that any system limiting chars in a password must be storing passwords in plaintext and not hashing them, else there would be no logical reason to do so (since hash length is constant regardless of input length) - with the only exception being placing a really large limit (say 1024 chars) just to avoid performance issues with hashing really massive passwords. But.. I refuse to accept that's what's happening here. It simply can't be the case that Paypal is storing plaintext passwords, can it? So there must be another explanation - but what is it? The only thing I can think is that perhaps they are encrypting passwords, instead of hashing them, or started out doing this in the early days and have since switched to hashing passwords, but there were by then so many layers of validation cruft and/or dependent systems that somehow relied on the 20 char limit being enforced, that they were unable to remove the limit without breaking everything, and they've decided the tradeoff of just sticking with a 20 char limit is worth it. Does anyone know of or can think of a better explanation for this?
  • ethbro 7y ago
    > Does anyone know of or can think of a better explanation for this? Mainframe.
    • brobdingnagians 7y ago
      Could you elaborate a little bit on this? I'm not familiar with mainframes, but genuinely curious what specifically would cause this?
      • chrisdew 7y ago
        Some financial systems, a large number of which run on mainframes, have databases where all fields are fixed length. (A database with fixed-length records is trivial to access randomly.) One of my credit cards lists my name as "Christophe" rather than "Christopher" as they have a fixed-length 10 character field for first names. Customer support said it was unfixable. It only takes one such system, in a complex web, to impose that limit on all systems.
• tobiasSoftware 7y ago
  I recently had a similar experience with eBay, though it got resolved: -I had an old eBay account that was closed through inactivity -I wanted to buy some headphones so I decided to create a new account -When I went to eBay it had already given me a username through some sort of linked google account feature that used the google account I was logged in to -I tried to buy 2 $40 headphones and it wouldn't let me, saying I was over my temporary purchase limit -I figured maybe you can only buy one item at a time as a new user so I tried to buy a single pair of $40 headphones and got the same response -I thought it might be my VPN, but my VPN was off at the time. -I created a normal account linking it to my normal email and everything seemed well. I purchased the headphones successfully -A few minutes later, I got an email that the first account had been suspended for suspicious activity. I first thought this was fine, until I read that I was not allowed to use any other eBay account ever again in my entire life. There were no options listed for recourse. Reading internet threads suggested that they were serious about this and that even if my other account still worked, they would eventually find it and close it. Eventually I called and got a rep. I got the feeling he didn't believe me, but he fixed the issue so now I can use eBay again without worry. The whole experience left me a bit shaken though that triggering some automated flag nearly resulted in being cut off from one of the largest marketplaces in the world for the rest of my life.
  • nerdponx 7y ago
    Why did this shake you so bad? You talked to a rep and they fixed it. That's what customer reps are for. If you have humans combing through records for malicious activity and reading off a rubric, you probably would've had the same issue.
    • tobiasSoftware 7y ago
      There's a few different reasons: First, reading about similar experiences didn't make me optimistic. It seemed like 50/50 between getting someone who would help and someone who would tell you that the case is forever closed without recourse. I got the feeling that the in weird cases like mine these techs didn't actually understand what was going on and it was just the luck of the draw of what tech you got. Second, I realized how powerful these big platforms like eBay are. I looked around for alternatives in case I did get permanently banned and I sure didn't find much. What was particularly creepy to me was how being an undesirable to eBay could potentially spread: they track your account, name, address, credit card number, IP, and so on and seeing any one of these can lead to bans on other accounts. In a lot of ways this makes sense, but in theory, if I happened to log on to my banned account at my mom's, it could match my account with her IP and ban her account as well. I doubt this would happen in eBay's case as support reps would probably help her if that happened, but it definitely brought to mind the Chinese social credit system where linking to an undesirable can make you an undesirable yourself. Third and most important was personal. I'm engaged to someone who is planning to use eBay. I wouldn't care too much about being banned off of eBay but I would hate to see her life become any harder just because of some weird glitch.
• zxcvbn4038 7y ago
  I very rarely have to contact PayPal for anything, but I’ve had to talk to them a couple times. My experience is that they absolutely will not answer any question they don’t have a pre-written response for, instead choosing whatever they think is closest to what I am asking, even if it doesn’t answer the question. I’ve even had them send me the same response again when I explain that it didn’t answer my question the first time. If I need something specific like the fedwire tracking number for a transfer, I’m basically SOL because they don’t have a response for that, they just send me links on how to view my statement. I don’t know why companies do this but I notice that companies that don’t compete with Amazon tend to have horrible customer support, but as soon as Amazon enters the market suddenly everyone picks up the phone second ring, has chat, and sends out hand written e-mails.
  • scriptproof 7y ago
    This is one experience. I have some exchanges with paypal and their answers were perfectly accurate and personalized. After many transactions, I have no reason to complain for now. About the case of the OP, I once had 2000€ credited on my bank account for no reason. I knew it was an error and did not touch it. Several days after, the amount was silently debited. No message from the bank. This is not specific to Paypal.
    • saltminer 7y ago
      >Several days after, the amount was silently debited. No message from the bank. This is not specific to Paypal. Except if you asked the bank, they'd say there was a system error we had to correct, sorry for the inconvenience, please take our survey. PayPal will say you sent/refunded the money, we never touched these funds and can do no wrong, and if you can't produce documents that never existed related to this transaction that was entirely in error you can kiss your account goodbye.
  • lucb1e 7y ago
    > they absolutely will not answer any question they don’t have a pre-written response for, instead choosing whatever they think is closest to what I am asking, even if it doesn’t answer the question I got the exact same feeling when talking to them. It sounded like they understood my problem, but the proposed resolutions were obviously not a match. Reasoning about it with them got me nowhere, they clearly had no other options.
• CommieBobDole 7y ago
  This is not a customary experience - Pretty much any interaction with Paypal support that doesn't involve you losing hundreds or thousands of dollars is an uncommonly good experience. Paypal is a well-oiled machine until you trigger some exception that creates a case with their legendarily incompetent support - at that point, the results will be essentially random and often apparently malicious, no matter the facts of the case.
• whydoineedthis 7y ago
  You never heard of bank transactions going sideways before? You should have opened the issue when you saw the funds, but you let your greed get the best of you and now your pissed you lost....what exactly?
• alkonaut 7y ago
  That sounds like normal procedure from a bank. If someone deposited a million to my account in error, the bank would (and should) most certainly just correct the error even if it means "decreasing the balance" on my account. I expect them not to hide it though, i.e. I expect to see the transaction log to say "+1000 deposit -1000 correction", and I expect them to be open about the mistake IF I ask. I do not expect them to give me a call to explain what happened, however. This is behavior I expect from any entity where I have an account with a balance, whether it's a commercial bank, PayPal, or anyone else.
  • pbhjpbhj 7y ago
    The mistake of having a deposit in your account shouldn't be furthered by the bank, or other company, removing money from your account without notice. They don't have to do a in-person phone call, a text message/email/automated call. There are many situations in which a person could receive money and genuinely think it was theirs to spend. Some of those situations could be ones in which the spending could be extremely detrimental. Other than that I agree.
• brownbat 7y ago
  A bit like chargeback without any consultation. Planet Money just had a story from the other side, one of the producers made a payment on another service in error, and tried to get it refunded.[0] [0] https://www.npr.org/2019/06/26/736352315/episode-922-the-cost-of-getting-your-money-back https://www.npr.org/2019/06/26/736352315/episode-922-the-cos... You could read one of these stories and come away passionately more pro or more against chargebacks, but the real solution for both situations is just more transparency and communication. In SG's case, if they're right that the money ended up at the right place, fine, just let everyone involved know what happened, how PP came to that conclusion, and what options there would be for the parties to appeal in the case of fraud or mistake. It sounds like in the PM story that that approach would have resolved everything faster there too. Transparency isn't going to kill you in this situation. You may be worried about privacy risks, but just make a clear policy as to what you can and can't say during the initial phases of disputes. Transparency will resolve the easy cases, but there are real dilemmas here between buyer and seller rights. I feel like some of the tech that is taking over the roles of payment systems are just pretending these dilemmas don't actually exist. eBay definitely stumbled through buyer vs seller rights for a while, maybe still doesn't have it right. Cryptocurrency is an interesting spin. In some ways its stance is that chargebacks are so anathema that they will design them completely out of consideration.
• martin-adams 7y ago
  I'm not surprised. I accidentally created a seller account trying to create a test account for a project I was working on. I never verified the account as I realised quite soon. I've never sent or received any money. But can I close the account? Nope! I have to send official paperwork to prove it is a valid seller account before I can close it.The only reason I want to close it is so I can reuse the email address. But you can't even change the email address. Their process is flawed and lacks common sense.
  • peteretep 7y ago
    Try GDPR'ing them
• potatoman2 7y ago
  I worked PayPal Trust & Safety in my rebellious youth, and I wouldn't use PayPal now if you paid me to do so.
• claviska 7y ago
  I processed a few hundred thousand in revenue through PayPal subscriptions starting around 2008. Everything went fine for a few years, then I moved to Stripe because of the horror stories that kept popping up about PayPal (frozen accounts for 6mo+ with no recourse, inability to contact anyone, etc.). It just isn’t worth the risk, IMO. At least with Stripe I know I can talk to somebody if a problem arises.
• fghtr 7y ago
  Similar (worse) things happen to relatively small organizations relying on PayPal: https://minifree.org/paypal/#paypalbastards https://minifree.org/paypal/#paypalbastards
• antihero 7y ago
  Yeah, had this happen to me. Currently my account is limited, they want me to send proof that I have shipped things that do not exist. I am not a merchant or anything like this, I just sent money to my gf and she sends money to me. It's fucking stupid. These companies are absolute shit.
  • sethammons 7y ago
    My wife and several of our friends are using venmo for transferring money and seem to like the app.
    • smoothgrammer 7y ago
      Guess who owns Venmo? You have 1 attempt.
      • sethammons 7y ago
        Wow, I didn't know that PayPal bought them a few years ago. Still, I hear lots of folks like Venmo.
      • wysifnwyg 7y ago
        Mr. Musk?
  • saltminer 7y ago
    One of my friends is in a similar situation. It ended up being easier just to mail him a check.
• nicky0 7y ago
  tl;dr: 1. Erroneous deposit appears in account 2. Soon after, the money is removed 3. Account holder makes a big fuss and falls out with paypal about it
• fxleach 7y ago
  Completely expected. As a developer that has been forced to integrate with PayPal numerous times I'm not surprised the customer service side is as abysmal as the developer side. Terrible service, run-arounds, just shitting all over the bed in general. Don't even get me started on their fraud resolution. They are simply the biggest name in the business and have been around the longest. There is absolutely no other reason they deserve the market share they have.
• floatingatoll 7y ago
  Yes, this is approximately customary.
• wbhart 7y ago
  If you do a calculation of the number of Ebay purchases that are handled by PayPal, it's certainly in the millions, and probably hundreds of millions. The rate of outright fraud is unfortunately very high, and the average person is so prone to error that PayPal must employ many people to handle all the cases. Once you have a very large organisation, consisting of many staff handling cases, all of whom need to be acting consistently, you face the real statistical likelihood of fraud within the company itself. Any sufficiently large company will have employees that try to defraud it. The upshot of this is that large companies handling many transactions like this, especially ones that will often be disputed, must implement security not just to prevent fraud from outside the company, but also inside. Such security measures are often very difficult to work around by employees trying to do the right thing by customers who are in the right, but where something unusual has happened that those security systems didn't anticipate. I can imagine this often frustrates the intention to have a smoothly working system. You also can't easily make changes to accommodate such corner cases without opening other security holes, both within and without the company. And it takes a long time to formulate and disseminate new protocols that your employees should work to. And then you have to communicate any changes in the way you handle things to your customers. Running a company like this must be an absolute nightmare of logistics. And it is surely made worse in that Ebay seems to have the ability to authorise chargebacks and refunds in disputed cases that can then be appealed to PayPal itself. But the alternative is in my opinion worse. As a buyer, you must pay for an item before receiving it. I am aware of so many complaints online of fraudulent sellers making off with tens of thousands from fraudulent sales, and there being nothing anyone can do about it because of banking privacy laws. Having a service like PayPal seems essential to reducing fraud in such online transactions. In summary, I can perfectly understand PayPal wanting to perform a security check for every long time customer for whom a flag was raised by some security protocol. And naturally, there are going to be many false positives, and many unfair decisions taken at such scale. Independent arbitration would indeed seem like a good idea. But who is going to pay for independent arbitration for potentially millions of disputed transactions? The reality is, almost every single transaction that has already been appealed to PayPal that can be appealed easily to an independent arbiter, will be. So you simply double the (already high) cost of such a service.
• blackethylene 7y ago
  > it's not like Paypal will miss me, I know, I would just feel too "dirty" to keep it open after all that happened It's comforting to know that other people feel the same way.
• IAmGraydon 7y ago
  I’m going against the consensus here, but why was this guy so concerned about the reversal of a transaction that never should have happened in the first place? It wasn’t his money. Someone at PayPal obviously manually reversed the transaction when they realized the mistake. These things happen. I’ve been using PayPal personally for 10+ years without issue. I also own a company and have processed hundreds of transactions and withdrawals through a business account with them without a single problem. I’m not saying that dealing with PayPal is without risks, but it’s also possible that we’re hearing a vocal minority here.
  • ninth_ant 7y ago
    Because suspicious activity on your account could lead to your account being banned. Which it did.
  • doodpants 7y ago
    He made it quite clear in the article that he was not concerned about the reversal, he was concerned about the lack of notification of the reversal.
  • Aeolun 7y ago
    To me, how great a company is for a business is decided by how much they have your back when shit hits the fan, not when everything is working as intended. You’d expect that Paypal would notify him of the reversed transaction. Or would at least be able to tell him it was reverted instead of accusing him of refunding it himself.
  • _jal 7y ago
    You don't have a problem with money flowing in to and out of your account, so long as it all balances out in the end? Really? Then you won't mind if I borrow the keys to your account. You'll never notice a thing. Even if PP is just covering their embarrassment over a mistake, it is still nonsense on stilts that they stonewall and bullshit about transactions flowing through your account. Who knows if they're even legal transactions? Someone could be playing a game. Before you assert the belief that Paypal would never risk laundering money, you maybe want to look at Wachovia, HSBC and Deutsche. And it doesn't have to be "Paypal" in some formal sense; it could be employees there. It is incredibly naive to play "what, me worry?" about sketchy things going on in your accounts.
• electriclove 7y ago
  I had a similar experience with Uber Eats. Though I despise PayPal, I think this problem is common to these large companies that outsource all customer support. There is no venue to actually reach someone who gives a damn and at the top, they like it that way because they don't care about anything except how much money they are making. It is deeply flawed. I wish there was a good alternative to PayPal.
• antihero 7y ago
  Whoa, I just got off of a call from PayPal as to why my account was banned. Turns out, 15 years ago when I signed up, I was 15 (I am 30 now) and that is against their terms of service. So my account is permabanned and they said to make a new one with a different email. I can understand they don't want people under 18 to sign up, but for fucks sakes, it was 15 years ago, this feels like a fairly stupid policy. I would like to add that the customer service experience in this instance was pretty good - they had a queue system where you can leave your number and they call you back instead of keeping you on hold forever, and they representative was helpful and professional and told me straight up that I could make another account.
  • sb057 7y ago
    Tip: don't follow their advice. My friend had a similar situation (signed up while underage and was banned) and they have banned all subsequent accounts as well. If you are permabanned from PayPal, you are permabanned, as a person.
  • LanceH 7y ago
    Ask them to reverse all transactions from 12-15 years ago.
  • parliament32 7y ago
    Probably because they can't legally hold the data of a minor (who wasn't able to consent to their data policy or whatever at the time) so they have to delete everything.
    • driverdan 7y ago
      Nope. The account isn't deleted, it's locked. And if they did need to delete the data they could easily delete everything from when they were under age.
      • parliament32 7y ago
        Eh, kinda. If they entered their name/address/phone when they were underage, it's still data collected from a minor (even if it hasn't changed). To cleanup PayPal would have to have them re-enter everything... which is basically the same thing as creating a new account. I'm not saying they're right, but I can see why this is the easiest way for them to fix the legal situation.
• codewiz 7y ago
  Every time I relocated, I ran into countless issues with my Paypal account being tied irreversibly to the country where it was first opened. So I end up opening a new Paypal account -- which must use a new email address, and can't have my old credit cards added to it. Now I'm stuck in a situation where my newest account doesn't accept the credit card from my local bank because This card is linked to another PayPal account. Please remove the card from the other account or try a different payment method. But I checked my other accounts, and I'm sure it isn't there.
• diminoten 7y ago
  Getting offended, emotional, indignant, and angry about any of this was completely uncalled for, and if this is how you go through life, you're going to continue to have these kinds of problems at a rate much higher than the average person has these kinds of problems.
• jonahbenton 7y ago
  Yes. Next question.
• rpvreviews 7y ago
  paypal is horrible, once an issue happens forget about resolutions. Their customer service is one of worst
• lucb1e 7y ago
  I still sometimes make the mistake of trying to login to paypal without a VPN. I once lived 50km westwards in another country and if I try to login to my account accidentally, it'll lock me out, also after I VPN back into the original country I still can't login. It is randomly resolved after a cool-off period. When you call support, either in the original or the new country, they both offer the same thing: - change your password (I know my password, and though they seem to understand, their script seems to tell them to offer this) - close your account (what, after telling you my email address and the last 4 digits of my bank account (not even a credit card)? That's password-equivalent?!) Support tells me it's not supported to login to your paypal account from another country. Don't thousands of people do this every day? On holiday, while traveling for work, or moving countries like me... doesn't this happen thousands of times a day? I live an hour driving from five different countries, it's not uncommon for anyone here to be somewhere in, y'know, the EU. A few years ago I remember being locked out of a PayPal account (which I just forfeited) for not knowing my security questions. Like, duh, you think I answer truthfully what my favorite food is for a payment account after I (the 13 year old leet haxxor) 'hacked' a classmate's Hotmail by guessing a very common favorite food? They still use security questions, but these days I enter my current password there so I can at least answer when prompted.
  • hombre_fatal 7y ago
    > Support tells me it's not supported to login to your paypal account from another country. Don't thousands of people do this every day? On holiday, while traveling for work, or moving countries like me... doesn't this happen thousands of times a day? I live an hour driving from five different countries, it's not uncommon for anyone here to be somewhere in, y'know, the EU. Yeah, exactly. I had the same thought when support told me to open a new Paypal account from the country I live in abroad and only use that account when I'm abroad. Wait, what? Their official policy is to use a different account for N countries you spend any time in? To link my new US bank account to my Paypal account, I ended up using a US VPN and then gave Paypal my friend's US telephone number so that he could feed me the security code. It made me suddenly feel very precarious about how I currently use my Paypal account. I would've thought international-use was one of Paypal's main marketing bullet points. Though, to keep things in perspective, Paypal does let me do things that my bank certainly doesn't, like send and receive money for free internationally and work remotely for anyone with a Paypal account. I can't complain too much and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they are hamstrung to some degree by psychopathic anti-laundering/KYC bullshit. I hope Facebook's Libra will be more polished and be built on the expectation that people ever leave their country of origin.
• oneepic 7y ago
  What a timeline we live in, where people choose to post their complaints about random bs on GitHub or Twitter...
• macspoofing 7y ago
  PayPal is stuck between a rock and a hard place. At their scale they are are constantly targeted for all kinds of criminal activity and are under enormous pressure to follow rigorous laws pertaining to handling money. They keep trying to balance this with good customer service, but I'm not sure you can do any better ... and I hope nobody thinks that cryptocurrencies are the answer.
• yalogin 7y ago
  This served as a swift kick in the butt for me to remove money from my Paypal account. Done.
• 867-5309 7y ago
  if it's an infrequently used account linked to an email address from 20 years ago it probably had an easy-to-guess password
• rogy 7y ago
  Recently had a terrible experience with PP Dispute process. 1 - Bought tickets for a show via twickets.live 2 - Seller (supposedly) sent a transfer request to me via the ticketmaster portal. 3 - I received, nothing, tried to contact seller, got no reply till after event. 4 - Open a dispute as I paid for something and received nothing. 5 - PP sides with the buyer citing ‘evidence’ the tickets were sent to me 6 - PP won’t share ‘evidence’ with me, wont reopen my dispute, no option to create a new one. Now I’m down a wad of cash, didn’t go to the show, and got no opportunity to do anything about it. Closed my account immediately afterwards.
• Animats 7y ago
  "If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." - Orwell.
• mcnichol 7y ago
  Yeah, I dropped paypal a while back after Adobe made charges to my account which I had cancelled. Paypal makes it very easy for subscription services to keep sneaking those charges in. Closing my Paypal made it very easy to stop that nonsense.
• carapace 7y ago
  PayPal owes me $200. Details: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19773036 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19773036
  • ValentineC 7y ago
    Did you follow up after requesting for the check?
    • carapace 7y ago
      Like call the 800 number back? No. At the time I was making about $100/hr so the hassle wasn't really worth it. I figured if they send they check, great, if not I can just bitch about it from time to time on the Internet...
• wirrbel 7y ago
  I once ordered a domino's pizza via paypal. The app did not complete the transaction. I did find however 20 transactions to dominos on my paypal account. I tried to reason with Paypal that I did not authorize 20 transactions (just one), but Paypal did not want to reason with me. In the end, Dominos refunded 20 transactions. I now pay with credit card.
• tgb29 7y ago
  Paypal has taken thousands of dollars from me and won't let me access my account with a pre-paid phone. It's hard, but avoid them if you can. I inherently distrust Facebook's Libra project because of Paypal's involvement.
• kuroguro 7y ago
  This sounds like what happens if the buyer does a CC chargeback IIRC. You get no notifications, money just disappears.
• Doubl 7y ago
  I have to say that I have been lucky with PayPal so far and I have a PayPal account for a long time. I only use it as a buyer though. I really like it when a website has a PayPal option so I don't have to give yet another site my card numbers including the security number on the back. I think that maybe twice over the years I have needed to get a refund and apart from the process being a bit drawn out I had no problem. But then the unhappy stories are usually from vendors so maybe my experience is nothing special
• lhotkins 7y ago
  I tried to pay my Indian contractor through Paypal. Their system flagged the transaction, so I contacted support. After several days of trying to get anyone to respond, I was literally told that there is nothing that they can do and that I should use a different service :D One of the worst services I've ever used.
• bawana 7y ago
  I guess someone inside PayPal is using random people’s accounts to launder money. Deposit dirty money into innocent account- let it sit for awhile then take fresh clean credits out. In Greece? My guess is that it’s an arms dealer
• skydv 7y ago
  Oh man I sent some 30 EUR because the counterparty was retarded to have onkly Paypal listed and and paypal took 40 or something when I counted all the hidden costs. WTF
• gregknicholson 7y ago
  If you don't like PayPal's service, choose another company instead. That's how capitalism works, right? (Yes, I know that's impossible. My point is PayPal is effectively a monopoly.)
• beezischillin 7y ago
  Same thing happened to me. I git charged for a “refund” for a sale I never made. It took myaccount into the red and they demanded money and even more ID from me so I closed it. Stuff like this is why I don’t keep money in any place other than my bank acct. They also instantly and without warning locked my account after receiving 2000 dollars from a friend before that and demanded official documentation after I started investigating what happened citing EU laws. I wouldn’t have minded that since I’m not a criminal but surely locking away someone’s account without explanation is not a good way to take care if users. Especially if you’re basically a bank. Maybe I am in the wrong here but my approach each and every time to a project where I deal with someone elses' money is to try and figure out the most secure and most informative way to do everything, afterall it's one of the biggest responsibilities you can take on as an online service provider.
• bmania 7y ago
  Paypal strategy to get the ID: 1. Ask the user to sign up. 2. Pretend everything is complete. 3. Wait for the user to get a payment or money. 4. Block the account and ask for the ID.
• sharno 7y ago
  I got once a mistaken transaction on Paypal, the "buyer" contacted me to ask me to refund their money because it was a mistake. I issued a refund and Paypal took 30 cents fees because of the refund. I contacted paypal to ask why I was charged for a mistaken transaction and they just told me this is how it works and there's no way to avoid that.