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Is this Paypal experience customary?

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Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#81

Post by username444 »

voidwtf wrote: post #10
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…

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.…

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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#82

Post by a254613e »

ilaksh wrote: post #48

This is why people should support real cryptocurrency.

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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#83

Post by huffmsa »

kyberias wrote: post #35

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.

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"?

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#84

Post by chrisdew »

brobdingnagians wrote: post #68
ethbro wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does anyone know of or can think of a better explanation for this? Mainframe.

Could you elaborate a little bit on this? I'm not familiar with mainframes, but genuinely curious what specifically would cause this?

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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#85

Post by stevekemp »

DavideNL wrote: post #45

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 :)

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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#86

Post by gruez »

nikolay wrote: post #53

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 ch…

>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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#87

Post by andreimiulescu »

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

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#88

Post by kibwen »

viraptor wrote: post #79
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.

A limit as low as 20 absolutely has its roots in insecure prehistoric password storage policies, even if the implementation happens to have been updated at some point in the past two decades to no longer store passwords in plaintext. As you say, everybody has some kind of limit, if only to prevent DoS attacks, but that limit should be closer to 1000 bytes than 20 bytes.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#89

Post by pjc50 »

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…

Given the expansion of "Faster Payments" and "open banking" (banks must support APIs!), I wouldn't be surprised to see the EU try to mandate a bank-to-bank ""federated"" payment system. Norway already has Vipps everywhere, although that's more like Venmo than Paypal.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#90

Post by brownbat »

chrisdew wrote: post #84
brobdingnagians wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate a little bit on this? I'm not familiar with mainframes, but genuinely curious what specifically would cause this?

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, t…

It's possible, but this explanation still implies they're storing the passwords, not the hashes.
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