10 ms·

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

• 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.
      • threezero 7y ago
        If the customer’s emotions are affecting their account status, then it is entirely the company’s fault. If a customer is upset, a federally regulated financial institution should never be able to just shut down their account without recourse. That’s why we have regulations and laws, so some random customer service rep (possibly from a country with far different rules and regulations) can’t power trip over a customer.
• FDSGSG 7y ago
  In fact, it's a bit weird he didn't immediately refund the unexpected payment. Was he hoping to exploit the mistake and keep the money?
  • joosters 7y ago
    Bad idea. If you did that you could end up paying back the money twice, once for your own payment and another for paypal's own refund.
    • FDSGSG 7y ago
      This is incorrect and not how paypal handles refunds. This is merchant 101: always refund suspicious payments before your payment processor has to do it, it'd be really bizarre if Paypal was somehow the only exception in the industry.
      • dzader 7y ago
        lol couldn't possibly be worse advice in this thread. 100% do not listen to this and NEVER refund the transfer
        • FDSGSG 7y ago
          Why not? The only way I see this going wrong is if instead of doing a refund you create a new transfer to send the money back, but you obviously shouldn't do that.
          • dzader 7y ago
            ah sorry I always equate PayPal to venmo - there might be a valid way to refund on PayPal but certainly not venmo
        • thekyle 7y ago
          FDSGSG is absolutely correct. He should have immediately processed a refund on the $600 as soon as he saw the transaction. By not doing so he risked getting a chargeback and loosing not only the $600 but an additional $10 PayPal chargeback fee. There is no risk of OP loosing $1,200 to two refunds if he went through the proper refund procedure. A transfer can only ever be refunded once.
• benj111 7y ago
  Id be pissed if a bank silently refunded money from my bank account without my say so, if money enters my account I want some input in it leaving. I suppose the key is if Paypal put it in the wrong account then cleared up after themselves, I don't think that's a refund as such, you should be telling the account holder when they ask though. The other option is the payer paid money to the wrong account, in that situation this guy should be getting notified. This isn't just an issue of 'not his money'. How are you supposed to know if your account is hacked, or some weird fraud is going on, or even just a straight forward, he sold something and thought he got paid for it.
  • m-p-3 7y ago
    I don't even have to have my say, but I sure as hell would want to be notified with an explanation (ie: refunded customer, money sent to incorrect account)
• reaperducer 7y ago
  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. I had an unexpected deposit show up in my bank account last year and then disappear a day later. The bank sent me a letter in the mail explaining what happened. Maybe you need a better bank.
  • holtalanm 7y ago
    years ago, when Wells Fargo first introduced the ability to deposit a check via their mobile app, there was apparently a bug that caused it to sometimes deposit the same check twice. so, i deposited a $1000 paycheck (was working for a local guy, fixing computers) once and did NOT notice that i actually ended up with $2000 in my account. This went on for at least three months, when all of a sudden I lose $1000 from my account. Apparently Wells Fargo had figured out about the bug and found all the accounts that had gotten double deposits and 'fixed it'. All without notifying me. ...I don't bank with Wells Fargo any more.
• pbhjpbhj 7y ago
  You're not agitated by being called a liar, nor being implicitly accused of fraud? It sounds like PayPal, or someone, made a mistake that PayPal then processed a fix on. When the guy called to say someone took money from his account with no notification, "what happened?", they said _he_ had actioned the refunding of the money. Which he hadn't. They lied, purposefully and deliberately. But there's a good chance that the person on the phone wasn't lying IMO, instead someone altered his account in a way that didn't show [to their phone reps] in their system ... which is IMO much more messed up. So PayPal lied to him. Then they asked for details of the transaction that they said he had refunded and "blocked" his account for not providing them. Government financial services should impose heavy fines on things like this, not informing a creditor when debits are made on their accounts. His PayPal account should have a user traceable error (with doubled entries in the other relevant account entries) - money paid from $ACCNUM with $ACCID money paid due to PayPal error and refunded to $ACCNUM I mean come on, is basic accounting beyond them? If they could do accounting properly then they wouldn't have to implictly accuse him of fraud (demanding the transaction details). My experience of PayPal has in general been pretty good, but I did have a person pay for something from eBay, then when I was sending it - like just about to head to the post office I realised I'd not checked the payment. On checking the transaction link in eBay the transaction didn't appear on PayPal .. uh oh, so I checked PayPal and I couldn't find a transaction for the amount in my account list. So I checked eBay and the buyer had asked to cancel the completed transaction ... so I said yes, very begrudgingly. Then a few days later the buyer asked for the money back, but I never had it, and they (assuming they weren't lying) had a transaction for paying me ... which should be impossible with proper accounting because that transaction should include an entry in my account ledger too his payment and my receipt are one transaction. My suspicion is that their database processing is lacking and their account ledgers as displayed to users don't properly demonstrate the status of accounts.
  • nicky0 7y ago
    Lied perhaps ... or somebody made a mistake. Support rep might just not have understood the information they were seeing on their screen. Why immediately say THEY LIED rather than, they were mistaken. I find it more fruitful in life not to assume bad faith from the outset.
• pjc50 7y ago
  > I just assumed it was a mistake and didn't bother getting angry. No need to get angry, but you might need to get careful. It's a bit like seeing a single cockroach in a restaurant; you can't just kill and remove it then declare that everything's fine. Contacting them and confirming that it was a mistake is basic CYA, it establishes with them that it's not your transaction and hopefully gets something on file. (I've just got off the phone with EE after a mysterious charge appeared on my account. They couldn't tell me where it had come from or even when it was applied, so after putting me on hold for a while they agreed to just take it off again. But I only spotted it because I'm checking my bills carefully after a previous dispute ...)
• luckylion 7y ago
  > 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. In many (all?) countries, your bank would've acted criminally. If money has been deposited to your account, only you or a court order can get it out again. If somebody "just does it", they are on a similar legal basis as somebody that forgot a jacket in your house and decides to break your lock and enter your house without your knowledge or authorization to get it back.
  • taormina 7y ago
    PayPal has convinced everyone they shouldn't count as a bank in the US. I have zero idea how they managed this, but the cynic in me would lobbying?
  • astura 7y ago
    This is totally and completely incorrect for the US, reversing ACH transactions that are made in error is totally a standard and perfectly legal. Requiring a court order to correct simple bank errors is entirely infeasible and, frankly, pretty silly. https://digital.wf.com/treasuryinsights/portfolio-items/tm3192/ https://digital.wf.com/treasuryinsights/portfolio-items/tm31... >A payor can attempt to reverse a payment made with an ACH credit only if the payor claims the beneficiary was already paid by a previous ACH credit entry, or the beneficiary was the wrong recipient of the funds, or the original ACH payment was in the wrong amount. Otherwise, the credit is considered final.
    • luckylion 7y ago
      No clue how that works in different countries. Here it's pretty simple: once the money is in the account, you can't do anything. While the transaction isn't complete, you can cancel them obviously. There's a good reason for that: nobody want's banks to take money out of accounts because they "feel that's the right thing to do". There's one notable exception: SEPA direct debits getting reversed. Using DD requires a special agreement with your bank, however, and it won't happen that money ends up in your account without you requesting it - or if it does, you will get a phone call from your bank where somebody explains the situation, apologizes a dozen times and asks you to look into the matter and authorize a reversal. Acting on their own would be a criminal matter and likely be of interest to the regulators as well.
• Mister_Snuggles 7y ago
  A friend of mine had declared bankruptcy, meaning he wasn't eligible for any kind of credit whatsoever, and his bank let a $10,000,000 withdrawal go through and put his account into overdraft. Naturally, this was on a Friday before a long weekend so he had to wait until Tuesday to get it corrected. When the bank corrected it the transaction completely disappeared, apart from the screenshots he took there was no trace of it whatsoever.