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PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts
- pansa2 6y ago> for anyone whose account has been dormant for at least a year, but still has some money left in it. Isn’t it considered a bad idea to ever keep a non-zero balance in a PayPal account? When money comes in, transfer it to a real bank account straightaway.
- bdibs 6y agoAbsolutely, otherwise they can shut down your account with $15k in it and hold it for 6 months. Ask me how I know, haha.
- katsura 6y agoWell, I'm glad I don't have money left there, because I had two factor authentication turned on, and for some unforseen circumstances, I lost my phone number. PayPal customer service is actually quite hard to contact, because every possibility they give you requires you to log in. I found an email address somewhere, but when I wrote them telling them about my situation, I got an email that if I log in I can check their answer in the internal ticketing system. Then a few days later there was another email asking me about my experience with their support. I'll never use PayPal again. No way in hell I'll trust a company with handling my money when they make it impossible to contact them.
- lumberjack 6y agoI have the same exact problem! I wanted to delete my account, just in case, but I cannot login. I haven't used Paypal in over 10 years. Their "service" is really not needed anymore.
- jghn 6y agoA lot of e-commerce sites will take PayPal these days. I like to use that vs giving my credit card information. Granted, I prefer to use things like Apple Pay but there are circumstances where PayPal is the only indirect payment form I have in common with a site
- RinTohsaka 6y agoyou might be interested in privacy.com as an alternative!
- hellojason 6y agoOr if you have Capital One, they offer a browser extension called Eno to generate unique virtual numbers for each site or purchase.
- hyperdimension 6y ago...But does it play ambient music while the virtual number is valid?
- jqpabc123 6y agoThe odd thing about privacy.com is that in order to use it, you have to surrender all privacy. You are required to provide them full access to your bank account.
- mysterydip 6y agoIf you sell on eBay, Paypal is heavily integrated, to the point I'm not sure you can complete a transaction without it.
- wikibob 6y agoThat is going away
- walrus01 6y agoI have recently purchased a number of things on ebay with 'buy it now' and giving my visa card number directly to ebay, in what looks like a very ordinary shopping cart checkout workflow, with no involvement of paypal. No login to paypal and no mention of it. The browser I was doing it from has never logged in to my paypal account and has no credentials cached for it.
- trident1000 6y agoPaypal still does the credit card transaction. I know because their black box algo blacklisted me for whatever reason many years ago and I tried that. They have no customer support its just an abyss of a company and you are a statistic. Fine with me because I really dont use Ebay but I remember that.
- justinclift 6y agoNo, this parent poster is talking about a new thing. I think the one you're talking about is the previous system, whereas PayPal would be the transaction processor anyway. You'd still get email (receipt?) and other bits from PayPal after the transaction was done. Now though, the CC processing on Ebay seems to be a non-PayPal version. At least, that's what it looked like today when getting stuff. No mention of PayPal anywhere, which I was pleased with having had a very bad experience with them (PayPal) a week ago.
- ipqk 6y agoeBay is in the midst of migrating all seller accounts away from paypal to their own integrated solution. While buyers can still use paypal to pay, as a seller, you no longer have to touch paypal if you don't want to. On the other hand, you now have to give them your SSN #.
- cute_boi 6y agosame here. Lost 2fa due to water damage on phone. and all the data was irrecoverable. Now even if i give every data their customer service don't care. From that day i haven't used any 2fa and just use password manager with additional backup.
- xrisk 6y agoUse a 2FA that lets you take backups?
- vmception 6y agopassword managers let you store the one time password key. this removes the "two factor" nature of two factor, but retains the one time password nature of one time password. I honestly can't relate to people losing their access because something happened to their phone. The QR code is just a string of letters and numbers and you can save the QR code and the string of letters and numbers. I've been doing this for like a decade.
- justinclift 6y agoSimilar here. I've been using PayPal to receive our Patreon balance each month and pay various project (sqlitebrowser.org) related experiences. Just over a week ago, when I tried logging in to PayPal (2FA is not enabled) a new screen appeared saying they'd sent an SMS with code to my phone number, and I need to type it in. Problem being, the phone number they displayed is not mine. I've never given them my mobile number, as they've always had a little blurb about that saying people have to also give them permission to receive marketing messages. Hell No. So now I'm locked out of my account. With sufficient screwing around in their help system, there is a phone number you can call: +44 203 901 7000 Trying to get through to a human being there however has proved an impossible task (after many attempts). From just being hung up on by their system, through to being told they're out of business hours (nope, double checked that), etc. Looks like in about 51 weeks, they'll start stealing the remaining balance until the account is empty. Fucking scammers. PayPal is the main reason I'm not positive on Elon Musk's history... they've been "known bad" for many years, including when he was there. He started his fortune from building a company that knowingly scams people. :(
- xoa 6y ago>PayPal is the main reason I'm not positive on Elon Musk's history... they've been "known bad" for many years, including when he was there. He started his fortune from building a company that knowingly scams people. :( There's plenty of possible things to criticize him for, but this seems like a weird one. PayPal was started by Confinity. He founded X.com in 99ish and they merged like a year after, but then he got the boot as CEO in a matter of, months? Weeks? Don't remember why, but while he still owned a ton of stock he was out in management. Then Ebay bought it all in like 2002. 20 years after his departure, itself before he had any real chance to make a mark, and 18 years after being bought, seems like a bit of a stretch to hold that of all things against him? Edit: also man what a crazy time, I mean it was obviously crazy even at the moment but still thinking back on the timelines it's still wild.
- genidoi 6y agoIt’s even more bizarre because things like Patreon and SMS text authentication weren’t around in 2002 and hardly even in 2012. Might as well criticise Tim Bernes-Lee for not developing the HTTPS spec in the 80s
- walrus01 6y agoIt's interesting to see that exactly what you wrote (except for the 2FA part) was happening to paypal users 18 years ago. Things haven't changed. Their entire business model is built on nearly complete automation and no human in the loop customer service interaction.
- justinclift 6y ago> Their entire business model is built on nearly complete automation and no human in the loop customer service interaction. Same as the Google model then? ;)
- lioeters 6y ago> when they make it impossible to contact them Funny (and infuriating!) to be in the same situation. I have lost access to my account and the money in it, because they have the wrong phone number on file. In their support forum, there are pages of people with the same issue - they're locked out of their account, with seemingly no way to contact anyone at PayPal to resolve it. I hope they get sued for this practice of abandoning their customers, cutting off contact, and keeping the money.
- jccooper 6y agoYou don't just have to hope; you can do it.
- z3t4 6y agoThe cache-less society is no different, it's just the bandits that has changed. And it's for protecting the banks money, not your money. Paypal has always been on the consumer side though. Not trying to make an excuse for all the horror stories, just some advice: Make sure you have backups/exports of the 2:nd factor keys so they can be imported when lost. For example print your password and store it on one location, for example in a safe, then print the 2nd factor key/export (QR code, or backup codes) and put it in another safe/location. Or make several copies and store on many safe locations. And don't forget to TEST YOUR BACKUPS on regular intervals to make sure they work when that day comes.
- trzeci 6y agoMaking sure that discussion will not heat without checking the content: > PayPal is to introduce a £9 “inactivity” fee for anyone whose account has been dormant for at least a year, but still has some money left in it. So it applies to money that's left on account. Once the balance is 0, there is not extra cost. It's not that I'm happy in particular, as I have account there also, and I had to transfer remaining money. I believe there is more cases like mine, that has PayPay to pay on some portals that accepts only that payment method, and we're not willing to share credit card information.
- vmception 6y agoNice, a bailin. But sure, most banks have fees like that, and typically don't for a few years just to attract the broke people that were looking for an account with no fees. Then they turn them on.
- colejohnson66 6y agoThere’s also “low balance” fees. You have less than $300 (or whatever) in your account? That’s $5/month.
- Symbiote 6y agoIn Britain (and the article is in a British paper), most banks don't charge fees for normal, consumer bank accounts. They make the money in other ways, which is a different discussion, but it does mean people aren't used to paying for a bank account.
- chrisseaton 6y ago> But sure, most banks have fees like that A bank account with fees? I've never seen that. They make money by loaning out your money, so they don't need to charge a fee.
- vmception 6y agoAll the biggest banks in the US have monthly maintenance fees for most of their account types, typically waived by having a certain minimum balance. So, congratulations you are privileged by being wealthy or living in a developed nation, check it.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ThisIsMeEEE 6y agoSeems more like they're trying to get abandoned accounts down to $0 in their wallets so they can cancel all the abandoned accounts wasting space on their server than actually trying to charge people a fee for something.
- sneak 6y agoThis isn't about "wasting space on their server", it's about confiscating money left in those accounts. It's illegal for them to just take it, because it's not theirs.
- colejohnson66 6y agoIs it illegal? I’m 100% certain their TOS say they can change them at any time for any reason. Not to mention that almost every bank has fees too. Overdraft fees are charging you because you didn’t have money!
- sneak 6y agoIt's illegal for them to take it arbitrarily as abandoned; they can institute a new fee system to take it when they could otherwise not.
- colejohnson66 6y agoWhich is exactly what they did. It’s right in the title actually: “PayPal introduces new fee...”
- justinclift 6y agoYes, that's what the parent poster was pointing out. ;)
- colejohnson66 6y agoI was pointing out that it’s not illegal because they’re allowed to do it. Then OP said (again) that it is illegal unless it’s a fee (not an all-at-once thing), which it is
- exabrial 6y agoFairly unethical, though their rationale is probably something like 'hey everyone else is doing it!' My state has a law where it account goes dormant for a long time, the balance is turned over to the state. The state sees this as revenue, but an individual can submit a claim online and recieve it for no fee, up to 10 years I think.
- colejohnson66 6y agoI think every state has a “lost money” system, but some do have a time limit for the obvious reason that people die after never claiming it.
- carapace 6y agoTL;DR: Paypal owes me $200. Yeah I got a letter from the State Comptroller about an old account that paypal locked me out of and wouldn't re-activate (I jumped through all their hoops but they never replied) saying "call this (paypal) number to get your money or they'll give it to us (the state.)" So I call the number and the person says "check or paypal balance?" and I choose check because of course I've been locked out of the account for years. So she says "Okay, we'll mail you a check." And that's the last I ever heard about it. I figure they kept it. I could follow up with the comptroller's office, but it's already more than my time is worth, so I just complain about it in public, like this, from time to time.
- schmorptron 6y agoOr: Jump through the hoops to get it, and then over the next year use that $200 to pay people on fiverr to complain about it online periodically FOR you. Think of the time savings!
- tauwauwau 6y agoYou are probably talking about Escheat system. Planet money had a nice episode about it, here's the link https://www.npr.org/transcripts/799345159 https://www.npr.org/transcripts/799345159
- shaicoleman 6y agoReminds me of my experience with Skrill (Moneybookers). Skrill charged me €50/month inactivity fee (€600/year), after 6 months of inactivity, without notifying about changing of terms and conditions or any warning that my account is inactive. The only email they sent was that they were introducing a change to the terms and conditions about charging €1/month after 12 months. PayPal's €10/year inactivity fee after 12 months is reasonable, especially if they warn users in advance. However, this is one of their "boiling-the-frog" tactics, and I'm sure these fees will significantly increase in the future.
- electro_blah 6y ago"PayPal says it will consider the account to be inactive if the user hasn’t sent, received or withdrawn money, or logged in for a year or more. Importantly, that means users can avoid the fee simply by logging in."
- qz2 6y agoThey’ve basically found a way to steal what’s left in the account. That’s all this is. There’s probably tens of thousands of accounts that people got locked out of or abandoned with money in and this lets them steal it.
- seibelj 6y agoNo silly, it costs them tons of money to maintain a database record. Storage costs alone are on the order of kilobytes!
- droopyEyelids 6y agoYou're right about that, AND PayPal has some sort of aversion to debt obligations. I remember reading something about how PayPal can't loan out or use the money it is holding for users like a normal bank would- it's a sacrifice to their strategy to avoid being a bank in the USA. I think that would make having all this money on their books annoying from a business perspective, along with the 'it's not mine' problem
- Thorncorona 6y agoOh there's more than that. I've done some work in the past in some video games, and used to get paid through a Paypal registered under a pseudonym. But since now Paypal requires your name, DOB, SSN, banking info, to simply transfer money out, the money is stuck. I can't use the money to pay for things, because they require you to link banking info DESPITE the fact that I have cash balance. So basically, I had cash that I couldn't take out or use. Now finally, they are figuring out how to steal that money.
- thenickdude 6y agoThis is completely unavoidable due to government-imposed Know-Your-Customer regulations.
- huhtenberg 6y agoYeah, that's the KYC for you. For all they know your account can be a part of a money-laundering scheme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer
- danishdev 6y agoBanks and fintech have ridiculous powers when it comes to charging fees. Imagine Google Cloud slapped you a 70 pound fee because you are not using it enough, or "maintenance fee". The fact banks deal with money, shouldn't allow them to abuse clients like they do.
- AnonC 6y agoDoes anyone know if this is only in the UK (since the report is by The Guardian and the fee is mentioned in GBP) or is it introduced in other countries too (if so, which ones)?
- lxgr 6y agoI wonder if a similar fee would even be allowable in the US. It would seem to run counter to many states' escheatment laws (at least in my completely anecdotal understanding).
- macjohnmcc 6y agoHow much could it possibly cost them to have an account doing nothing? Sure they don't make money if it is dormant but it costs them nothing.
- tannhaeuser 6y agoWhat's up with the few monopolies left over tightening the screws to squeeze every penny out of their "customers"? YouTube playing ads every two minutes, RedHat stopping CentOS, AMZN dumping parcels somewhere in your neighborhood so they can claim to have delivered, now PayPal "introducing" (as if they could unilaterally) fees. To those always apologizing just how much of a suck the web has become: it's not like we didn't tell you all the time. More worrying is the outright nerviness - as if those companies know there are no alternatives left, or know something about our grim economical outlook.
- justinclift 6y agoNah, it's just a toxic combination of MBA's (?) being sociopaths to have the ideas + the companies involved having enough lawyers to shield them from any real harm.
- edwinyzh 6y agoDo you have any reliable alternative to Paypal?
- justinclift 6y agoDepends on what you use PayPal for. If it's just transferring money between countries, then TransferWise seems like a good alternative: https://transferwise.com/invite/u/justinc777 https://transferwise.com/invite/u/justinc777 <-- apparently that's an "invite" link. Just use the bare domain name if you don't want to do the invite thing. :)
- jandrese 6y agoFor person to person stuff Venmo seems to work ok for me. If you're running a storefront I've had good experiences with Square, but this is just one datapoint. Their fees are a bit higher than you can get elsewhere, but if you're a small fry doing a handful of transactions a day/week they're fine.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- xvilka 6y agoGoogle Pay and Apple Pay can surely substitute Pay Pal quickly. Alipay and WeChat Pay in Asian regions. Other, less famous alternatives as well. All of them are more consumer-friendly than PayPal itself. So far, only adoption from the merchants is lacking.
- corty 6y agoDo you have any details on how those others are more consumer-friendly than paypal? For buyers/consumers, PayPal is relatively friendly. Getting back money from an uncooperative merchant is pretty simple and hassle-free, just need a few days wait for the response time.
- nxtbl 6y agoThere is a way to regain access to your Paypal account. I used this when I forgot to change the 2fa phone number before they started enforcing it, thus leaving me no way to log in. Use a browser / computer you haven't ever used for Paypal. Incognito/Private browsing mode will probably be sufficient. Go to the normal Paypal login. Try to reset your password via "forgot my password". Follow the instructions; security code etc. Set a new password and confirm it. Paypal will now log you in.
- justinclift 6y ago> Follow the instructions; security code etc. Except, at least in my case, the security code gets sent to some phone number that's not mine. So, that's not going to help. ;)
- nxtbl 6y agoIt should work - I had an old, unusable number in file, too. If it doesn't, please try again and make sure they haven't "seen" your browser/device before. Temporarily even install a new browser if necessary.
- nathias 6y agodead man's tax
- pluc 6y agoPayPal is one of the worst places you can open an account on the entire Internet.
- wdb 6y ago> PayPal is to introduce a £9 “inactivity” fee for anyone whose account has been dormant for at least a year, but still has some money left in it. PayPal come on, first you keep, people's money hostage and now you even going to charge £9 fee? I can't get my money out because you have frozen it and I can't talk to a human being. Even you ignored my letters from my lawyer.
- justinclift 6y ago> Even you ignored my letters from my lawyer. Isn't the next stage, to actually take legal action?
- amadeuspagel 6y agoJust deleted my paypal account. Thanks for the reminder.
- hnarn 6y agoIt’s fascinating to me how a company that seems to be so universally despised by everyone manages to survive. Luckily for me I have always been spoiled with options, so I almost never had to deal with them.
- young_unixer 6y agoA year seems like an extremely short period to assume that an account is "dormant".
- extrememacaroni 6y agothere's my friendly reminder to delete my pp account
- t-writescode 6y agoIsn't this a consequence of attempting to use PayPal as a bank account, something you shouldn't do in the first place? (Assuming they're not doing nefarious things). Doesn't the rogue, excess money add a cost to their accounting at the end of the year, similar to how companies don't like letting employees keep their vacation days after so long, because they have to keep the functional equivalent of that much money in savings, in case the employee leaves and they want to cash it all out? This seems pretty reasonable, to me, barring a couple edge cases that should have a vanishingly small percentage and perhaps could be argued for as special cases (people in jail, for example). Does Paypal have any sort of auto-deducting money out of PayPal and into a normal bank?
- baobabKoodaa 6y agoMoneybookers (Skrill) introduced a similar dormant account fee a few years ago. I hadn't used my account for a while, and then I needed to use it, so I first logged in to check if my account balance was negative, before I deposited money to it. It was $0, great, I can safely deposit. And what do ya know, as soon as my deposit hit that account, Moneybookers retroactively applied a dormant account fee to my account. They even forged the timestamp for the fee event in my account history to pretend like it was applied several months earlier, when in fact it was applied only after I deposited.
- villgax 6y agoEven Payoneer has introduced the same without mentioning the fee amount in the change notification.
- 8bitsrule 6y agoCuz it costs a lot to have all of those numbers just sitting there.
- alpanka 6y agoI have s few cents left in my account. Is there a charity I can send it to, without giving most of it to PayPal?
- alpanka 6y agoSo what happens if I decide to close my account, have some money left and I don't want to give them my banking & SSN information?