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Is this Paypal experience customary?

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Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#71

Post by SXX »

sfifs wrote: post #49
SXX wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

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.

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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#72

Post by CommieBobDole »

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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#73

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

tannhaeuser wrote: post #44

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 t…

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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#74

Post by scrollaway »

davnicwil wrote: post #64

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 (si…

They've very slowly been getting better at various ridiculous UI issues. For example, they finally have a proper TOTP system (rather than their old security key that nobody used).

But yes 20 character password is infuriating. My guess is that, at some point, it's extremely hard to change the password character limit and make sure it's correctly updated everywhere at once. Passwords are used in several places and they're afraid of missing a few.

That's my most generous reading of the situation. I still think Paypal is pathetic. Their country locking is the most awful shit: you can't use a foreign phone number, it has to be one of the country you registered with Paypal. If you move country, tough fucking luck, you have to close your account and open a new one and that's "standard procedure".

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#75

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

joosters wrote: post #47
FDSGSG wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

But PayPal has an option to return a payment, it doesn't have to be you manually sending a transaction back to the person.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#76

Post by dhekir »

sushiburps wrote: post #22
kalleboo wrote: post #9

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 mi…

Totally agree with you, not sure exactly what happened he's upset about. They reversed an erroneous deposit.

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!

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#77

Post by pabl0rg »

FDSGSG wrote: post #18
voidwtf wrote: post #7

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 o…

PayPal, and the rest of the industry.

I hope Libra (the new currency from FB) will set a higher bar.

I can confirm that PayPal is horrible to legitimate merchants. One would expect better fraud protection given the high fees they charge. I never expected they would simply “freeze” our funds without explanation.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#78

Post by ForHackernews »

voidwtf wrote: post #7

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 o…

http://paypalsucks.org/toon1.shtml - from 10 years ago.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#79

Post by viraptor »

davnicwil wrote: post #64

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 (si…

I don't know where the low password limits come from, but everyone has some kind of limit. I guess people just choose a "nobody will use a password longer than X" number. This is completely unrelated to the backend storage and hashed passwords are commonly limited this way.
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