Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Is this Paypal experience customary?

gist.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 295 posts

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#191

Post by ryanlol »

luckylion wrote: post #141
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…

> 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…

>In many (all?) countries, your bank would've acted criminally

Well, you clearly aren’t a lawyer (anywhere).

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#192

Post by LMYahooTFY »

a254613e wrote: post #82
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 -…

>at which point it's nothing else than another version of PayPal

No. At this point you have a trusted broker, who can choose to broker your transaction or not, but they cannot choose to decline it.

This is nothing like a "version of PayPal".

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#193

Post by astura »

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.…

Why would you "automatically lose all disputes?"

This is what happened to me:

I got an eBay order and shipped it out, transferred the funds out of PayPal.

Buyer sends me an eBay message saying "OMG I'm so sorry but my eBay account was hacked." I believe them because when I googled the shipping address the package went to a foreign freight forwarder.

I don't worry because the address was "confirmed" in PayPal, so I'm protected from fraud. I always make sure to ship only to confirmed addresses.

eBay account owner initiates fraud investigation.

PayPal refunds buyer while the investigation is pending, I have several linked bank accounts, they didn't touch them, my PayPal account just goes negative.

PayPal sends me an email telling me I can't have a negative balance and I need to fund my account to get my balance to zero, against their TOS to carry negative balance. No biggie, I fund it. I think I was even able to fund it with a credit card.

Fraud investigation proceeds. I have to provide a tracking number to verify I actually shipped the item.

A few days later PayPal decides it's fraudulent, but I'm covered under their seller protection.

PayPal refunds me the money, I transfer it back to my bank.

I'm perfectly happy with how it was handled.

I guess that doesn't make a good blog post though.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#194

Post by daveFNbuck »

542458 wrote: post #177
_jal wrote: 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…

Can’t this happen with regular bank accounts too? Cheques and transfers can be reversed or altered long after they’ve entered your account without any approval from you or even notification to you. Sure the PayPal support process here sucks, but I don’t think they did anything wrong by reversing the transaction.

The person writing about this isn't upset that the transaction was reversed. They're upset that the transaction was reversed without notification, and that PayPal is claiming that the transaction was reversed by the account holder and not by PayPal itself. If this happened to me, I would assume that my account had been hacked.

There's also the issue of this resulting in the account being suspended. If this was just a normal transaction reversal, they definitely did something wrong for it to result in account suspension.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#195

Post by luckylion »

ryanlol wrote: post #191
luckylion wrote: post #141

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…

>In many (all?) countries, your bank would've acted criminally Well, you clearly aren’t a lawyer (anywhere).

That's accurate. Are you implying that I'm wrong everywhere? I'd love to hear some info on that instead of snarky comments.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#196

Post by maemilius »

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…

The rules surrounding financial institutions (in the US, at least) are weird and some of their information "security" rules are laughably out of date/ineffectual.

I'm not particularly familiar with those security rules (even less with the rules of other countries) so I wouldn't be surprised if this isn't a rule in one of the countries PayPal operates in that they just decided to use everywhere to make it easier.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#197

Post by johnchristopher »

stakhanov wrote: post #92
voidwtf wrote: 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.…

Actually that doesn't even work. When they don't have a payment method on file that they can abuse, they'll be happy to send your PayPal account into overdraft and start threatening legal action to bully you into settling the balance. Really the only thing to do, as soon as you see a "pay with paypal" screen is to go away screaming. Here's the anecdote: I had had a company with a bank account and PayPal account, then…

> Really the only thing to do, as soon as you see a "pay with paypal" screen is to go away screaming.

I recently bought some piece of clothes and paid with paypal (had some money in it and I wanted to spend it before Paypal decides to close the account for whatever reason).

There was a panel saying "you allow the clothing company to ask for whatever amount of money there is in the account and if there isn't enough we will take it from the credit card linked to the accound". That credit card is the one I used to put money in the account in the first place.

A few days ago I decided to give money to a charity a friend set up on facebook for his birthday. Had a choice between paypal and my credit card. Same kind of Paypal panel but I felt better giving facebook my credit card than linking Paypal and Facebook.

I am nervous and I am going to buy a pi or something and close the Paypal account forever.

My credit card is a "fill it to use it" kind. You need to put money on it from your bank account and then it acts as real Mastercard. So there's always 0 euros on it except when transfering money from bank account to buy something online. And I can put the money back from the cc to the bank account, no fees. With Paypal I can't, it's like I am forced to spend it now.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#198

Post by lucb1e »

I still sometimes make the mistake of trying to login to paypal without a VPN. I once lived 50km westwards in another country and if I try to login to my account accidentally, it'll lock me out, also after I VPN back into the original country I still can't login. It is randomly resolved after a cool-off period.

When you call support, either in the original or the new country, they both offer the same thing:

- change your password (I know my password, and though they seem to understand, their script seems to tell them to offer this)

- close your account (what, after telling you my email address and the last 4 digits of my bank account (not even a credit card)? That's password-equivalent?!)

Support tells me it's not supported to login to your paypal account from another country. Don't thousands of people do this every day? On holiday, while traveling for work, or moving countries like me... doesn't this happen thousands of times a day? I live an hour driving from five different countries, it's not uncommon for anyone here to be somewhere in, y'know, the EU.

A few years ago I remember being locked out of a PayPal account (which I just forfeited) for not knowing my security questions. Like, duh, you think I answer truthfully what my favorite food is for a payment account after I (the 13 year old leet haxxor) 'hacked' a classmate's Hotmail by guessing a very common favorite food? They still use security questions, but these days I enter my current password there so I can at least answer when prompted.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#199

Post by ryandrake »

stakhanov wrote: post #148
IAmGraydon wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you take the vendor (who made the fraudulent charge) to court to get your funds back?

No, because of the same consideration: The amount at stake was just too small to justify a court battle. But I really think that the banking regulator should take note of user stories such as the ones that are regularly all over HN and get to the bottom of it. After all PayPal, at least in Europe, is subject to the same regulation as other banks and payment processors. And if that's not the job of a banking regulator…

How much was in dispute and how much would it have cost? Most attorneys offer free initial consultations. Did you get a quote? For a lot of these kinds of disputes, you can do the paperwork yourself and not even involve court. For example, (if you're in the USA) many common disputes involving companies claiming you owe them money fall under the Fair Credit Reporting Act, which I've found to be very consumer-friendly and incompetence-unfriendly. Remember, your opponent generally also does not want to spend more money than they believe is owed in order to resolve the dispute.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#200

Post by astura »

kernx16 wrote: post #188
astura wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>what if PayPal decided randomly to deduct a ton of money with no reason and no notification to the account owner?

Your bank could do the same thing, I don't get notified when an ACH transaction or check clears.

Post reply on HN