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Is this Paypal experience customary?

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Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#101

Post by martin-adams »

I'm not surprised. I accidentally created a seller account trying to create a test account for a project I was working on. I never verified the account as I realised quite soon. I've never sent or received any money.

But can I close the account? Nope! I have to send official paperwork to prove it is a valid seller account before I can close it.The only reason I want to close it is so I can reuse the email address. But you can't even change the email address.

Their process is flawed and lacks common sense.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#102

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

jeltz wrote: post #55
TomMckenny wrote: post #41

If anyone wanted a de facto software monopoly to break up, this would be a good one.

But how would one do that? There are competitors which are cheaper, have better APIs, better customer service, and better user experience.

Aside from Stripe - who?

And sellers on larger sites like eBay can't easily use a competitor. It's a classic anti-trust pattern and should be treated as such.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#103

Post by nerdponx »

tobiasSoftware wrote: post #66

I recently had a similar experience with eBay, though it got resolved: -I had an old eBay account that was closed through inactivity -I wanted to buy some headphones so I decided to create a new account -When I went to eBay it had already given me a username through some sort of linked google account feature that used the google account I was logged in to -I tried to buy 2 $40 headphones and it wouldn't let me, sayin…

Why did this shake you so bad? You talked to a rep and they fixed it. That's what customer reps are for. If you have humans combing through records for malicious activity and reading off a rubric, you probably would've had the same issue.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#104

Post by lukeschlather »

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…

bcrypt is has long been regarded as the "best" secure hashing function, and it limits input passwords to 50-72 bytes. Assuming utf-8 input a character can plausibly be 4 bytes, which turns 72 bytes into 18 characters max.

It looks like Argon2 is newer and doesn't have a max length but still it's likely most sites are using bcrypt.

There's also a kind of handwavy "more than 20 characters is likely to be malicious input." Which is a little bit of a cop out but also probably true in general.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#105

Post by swish_bob »

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.

There's really no good reason for anybody to be asking people for their credit card number any more. 3-D Secure exists and all the major schemes have implementations.

Given two merchants, I'll choose the one that uses a credit card over paypal every day. At least with a credit card I've my bank _and_ the scheme on my side. With paypal, it's me (and my bank) against the world ...

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#106

Post by nerdponx »

tomp wrote: post #91
DanielBMarkham wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call centers, warehouses, and distribution centers; all places where people seem to be required yet their creativity and input isn't. For a large part, we treat them like they're just meat robots. I remember the first time I saw the computer-controlled voice-directing picking. You wear the headset. The computer tells you what to do. I see this way of working eating up more and more workers. One economist put it this…

There's a lot more jobs like this... Bank teller, fast food server, garbage collector, store clerk...

What's interesting to me is that human creativity and input are indeed required for excellence in these jobs, but not basic competence.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#107

Post by viraptor »

kibwen wrote: post #88
viraptor wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't have to be an old decision. I've seen new systems applying the same rule without any technical reasoning.

Google "(framework) signup form" and you'll find lots of examples. Third link for rails: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31105996/ruby-on-rails-w... - written in 2015, has artificial limit 8-20 characters without any technical reason.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#108

Post by stratosgear »

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 do something about it by then

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#109

Post by reaperducer »

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.

I had an unexpected deposit show up in my bank account last year and then disappear a day later. The bank sent me a letter in the mail explaining what happened.

Maybe you need a better bank.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#110

Post by claviska »

I processed a few hundred thousand in revenue through PayPal subscriptions starting around 2008. Everything went fine for a few years, then I moved to Stripe because of the horror stories that kept popping up about PayPal (frozen accounts for 6mo+ with no recourse, inability to contact anyone, etc.).

It just isn’t worth the risk, IMO. At least with Stripe I know I can talk to somebody if a problem arises.

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