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Is this Paypal experience customary?

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Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#211

Post by kyberias »

stratosgear wrote: post #108
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.

OP here. If you do NOT get a notification that some money were removed from your account you will NEVER know of the fact (unless you are logging in everyday to check the balance and the account movements) My bone is NOT with the valid/legal refund, but for the fact that Paypal did NOT bother notifying me. If that refund was somehow invalid/illegal/callitwhatyouwill, I will have never found out for months. TOO late to…

You just decide to care about the notification. The money that was added on your account and subsequently removed was just bits on hard disc. Those bits didn't affect your life until you decided to demand Paypal to notify about it.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#212

Post by kyberias »

jtbayly wrote: post #40
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.

Wrong. He got upset because he wasn’t notified of the refund. Notification of deducted money is something that is quite reasonable to expect. In this case he was trying to figure out what to do, it was handled by others, and a notification would have let him know that it was handled.

> Notification of deducted money is something that is quite reasonable to expect.

You choose to say it like that. "Notification of deducted money". The money was first added, then removed. It would have been different if it was first removed, then added. But it wasn't.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#213

Post by macspoofing »

PayPal is stuck between a rock and a hard place. At their scale they are are constantly targeted for all kinds of criminal activity and are under enormous pressure to follow rigorous laws pertaining to handling money.

They keep trying to balance this with good customer service, but I'm not sure you can do any better ... and I hope nobody thinks that cryptocurrencies are the answer.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#215

Post by ryanlol »

luckylion wrote: post #195
ryanlol wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

How about you name a single jurisdiction in which you are correct? Seems like a far easier starting point.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#216

Post by luckylion »

astura wrote: post #204
luckylion wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sp…

So if you decide not to reverse the mistake transaction you just get free money? Unless it's a real lot of money going through the courts to get reimbursed would be impractical and if you transposed two numbers while typing an account number then you might not even know who the money went to.

> So if you decide not to reverse the mistake transaction you just get free money?

No, the law gets involved and at some point, a judge will decide whether you owe the sender the amount they mistakenly sent. It's basically the same for "I mistakenly sent you 100 that I meant to send to my friend" and "I mistakenly sent you 100 when I only meant to send you 50 that I owe".

And yeah, it's a hassle. At least you can generally find out which account the money went to, and with new IBANs, you need to mess up multiple digits, since they include a checksum. If the checksum doesn't match, the money bounces back into your account. Previously, some banks required that the account number and account holder match (within reasonable limits, misspelling the last name would work), but that changed with the IBAN system, only the account number matters now.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#217

Post by luckylion »

ryanlol wrote: post #215
luckylion wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

How about you name a single jurisdiction in which you are correct? Seems like a far easier starting point.

Germany, UK. Those are two.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#218

Post by stakhanov »

ryandrake wrote: post #199
stakhanov wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It was something like €100, so really not something to bring in lawyers about.

But, standing on principle, I would have really liked to lodge a complaint with the regulator. Only problem: Since I was acting as a company (that now no longer even existed), it was never a consumer transaction, so consumer complaint wasn't a viable route, and you obviously hurt your case, even if it's just a complaint with a regulator, if you then settle the balance since they'd read that as you admitting guilt in some way.

Not settling the balance and lodging a complaint with the regulator could have had the side-effect of raising the stakes for them. So in a situation where they'd not normally take you to court, they might now actually do that since there would now be real money at stake, if the regulator launches into a full-scale audit into their processes & business practices. In such a case, winning a court case against me would have helped them in calling off the dogs if the regulator were to take an interest.

If you ask me, it should be the other way round: The banking regulator should play the role of public prosecution. When you complain against them with the regulator, then the regulator should either (a) tell you to bugger off without charging you for the privilege and allow it to end right there (b) take on your case in the sense of taking it to court on their own dime and if it looks like it was processes & business practices that were at fault then they should come after the financial institution for that kind of a failure hard.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#219

Post by hombre_fatal »

lucb1e wrote: post #198

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…

> 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.

Yeah, exactly. I had the same thought when support told me to open a new Paypal account from the country I live in abroad and only use that account when I'm abroad.

Wait, what? Their official policy is to use a different account for N countries you spend any time in?

To link my new US bank account to my Paypal account, I ended up using a US VPN and then gave Paypal my friend's US telephone number so that he could feed me the security code.

It made me suddenly feel very precarious about how I currently use my Paypal account. I would've thought international-use was one of Paypal's main marketing bullet points.

Though, to keep things in perspective, Paypal does let me do things that my bank certainly doesn't, like send and receive money for free internationally and work remotely for anyone with a Paypal account. I can't complain too much and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt that they are hamstrung to some degree by psychopathic anti-laundering/KYC bullshit.

I hope Facebook's Libra will be more polished and be built on the expectation that people ever leave their country of origin.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#220

Post by mrunkel »

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?

I'm guessing we have a failure in communication between the poster and ebay support.

Additionally, a seller on ebay probably fat fingered their ebay information, so when the item was sold, the seller accused the customer of fraud (I never go the money!) and the buyer thinks the seller is fraudulent (I sent the money!) and probably reported the "seller" which is actually the poster as fraudulent.

That, plus the increasingly irate phone calls from the poster and the refusal to ID themselves led PayPal to shut down the account.

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