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Is this Paypal experience customary?

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Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#181

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…

There's basically a 0% chance that it is because they don't hash passwords and they're a limit on a table column or something. Paypal has faults, but they're not that incompetent. The more charitable logic for this policy goes like this: 1) for those who want security, 20 digits of random characters using a password manager is plenty 2) for those who actually remember and type a password (i.e., just a regular passwor…

A passphrase can easily exceed 20 characters and be memorable. They are usually considered a good security practice for people not familiar with (or not willing to use) password managers.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#182
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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#183
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…

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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#184
post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ja…

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/tm31... >A payor can attempt to reverse a payment made with an ACH credit only if the payor claims the beneficiar…

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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#185
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#187
post #157

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 transacti…

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 lega…

You would never notice a bank correcting it's own error on your bank statement. They don't post it as a credit followed by a reversal - they remove the accidental credit. It just disappears from your statement.

It happens ALL the time, and you'd never notice or be notified.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#188
post #178
post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 lega…

This is such a weird comment, reversing of transactions happens for mistakes on checking accounts too, such as a deposit to the wrong account. On top of that the vast majority of people don't get a notification every time a transaction happens on their checking account. Some banks are implementing a notification feature for some transactions nowadays, but it's rare, new, and opt-in. The general case is money just flo…

I think the more concern is that it was withdrawn without notice to the account holder while denying it was PP who authorized it. I don't think the post was really worried about keeping the money but more or less, what if PayPal decided randomly to deduct a ton of money with no reason and no notification to the account owner?

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#190
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Do you have an alternative? most of Paypal's conduct around these cases is defined by the regulations. If you think Paypal is bad, try Skrill (which I guess is the EU Paypal). And no, I don't mean actually try it, i still have $700 locked in there which i believe they're taxing for inactivity, because all they have for ID verification is an automated 3rd party system. What i would love is for these services to requir…

A _lot_ of banks allow you to generate 'virtual credit cards'. It's basically an auto generated valid credit card number.

You can use them for recurrent expenses or make them single use (the card is cancelled after first payment).

You can also max them to any arbitrary value. So if I need to buy 23.03 dollars of something online I can issue a card that maxes out at 24 dollars. So even if the details were stolen you could only take the remaing cents until it maxed.

None of this is new or innovative I never really understood the need for paypal in online shopping.

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