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

PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 136 posts

Re: PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts

#111

Post by stevesimmons »

katsura wrote: post #92
ValentineC wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Anyway, PayPal didn't allow changing account country through the UI, and there didn't seem to any other way of doing it either. I believe the "proper" way is to close your old account, and reopen a new one from that country's site. Most people I know just have multiple accounts. I don't know if PayPal warns or shuts people down for doing so. It makes sense legally, since a user would have to agree to a different se…

Last time I checked their terms (it was a few years ago), you weren't allowed to have multiple accounts. As you said when one moves to another country, they just have to close the previous account, and create a new one in the new country.

Which of course causes problems for those of us who do genuinely live in two different countries.

Re: PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts

#112

Post by jandrese »

qz2 wrote: post #40

They’ve basically found a way to steal what’s left in the account. That’s all this is. There’s probably tens of thousands of accounts that people got locked out of or abandoned with money in and this lets them steal it.

Well how else are they going to get the money out of all of those accounts they locked for no good reason?

Re: PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts

#113

Post by huhtenberg »

Thorncorona wrote: post #109
qz2 wrote: post #40

They’ve basically found a way to steal what’s left in the account. That’s all this is. There’s probably tens of thousands of accounts that people got locked out of or abandoned with money in and this lets them steal it.

Oh there's more than that. I've done some work in the past in some video games, and used to get paid through a Paypal registered under a pseudonym. But since now Paypal requires your name, DOB, SSN, banking info, to simply transfer money out, the money is stuck. I can't use the money to pay for things, because they require you to link banking info DESPITE the fact that I have cash balance. So basically, I had cash th…

Yeah, that's the KYC for you. For all they know your account can be a part of a money-laundering scheme.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer

Re: PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts

#114

Post by jandrese »

edwinyzh wrote: post #63

Do you have any reliable alternative to Paypal?

For person to person stuff Venmo seems to work ok for me.

If you're running a storefront I've had good experiences with Square, but this is just one datapoint. Their fees are a bit higher than you can get elsewhere, but if you're a small fry doing a handful of transactions a day/week they're fine.

Re: PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts

#115

Post by corty »

xvilka wrote: post #66

Google Pay and Apple Pay can surely substitute Pay Pal quickly. Alipay and WeChat Pay in Asian regions. Other, less famous alternatives as well. All of them are more consumer-friendly than PayPal itself. So far, only adoption from the merchants is lacking.

Do you have any details on how those others are more consumer-friendly than paypal?

For buyers/consumers, PayPal is relatively friendly. Getting back money from an uncooperative merchant is pretty simple and hassle-free, just need a few days wait for the response time.

Re: PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts

#116

Post by t-writescode »

Isn't this a consequence of attempting to use PayPal as a bank account, something you shouldn't do in the first place? (Assuming they're not doing nefarious things).

Doesn't the rogue, excess money add a cost to their accounting at the end of the year, similar to how companies don't like letting employees keep their vacation days after so long, because they have to keep the functional equivalent of that much money in savings, in case the employee leaves and they want to cash it all out?

This seems pretty reasonable, to me, barring a couple edge cases that should have a vanishingly small percentage and perhaps could be argued for as special cases (people in jail, for example).

Does Paypal have any sort of auto-deducting money out of PayPal and into a normal bank?

Re: PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts

#117

Post by dylan604 »

jandrese wrote: post #112
qz2 wrote: post #40

They’ve basically found a way to steal what’s left in the account. That’s all this is. There’s probably tens of thousands of accounts that people got locked out of or abandoned with money in and this lets them steal it.

Well how else are they going to get the money out of all of those accounts they locked for no good reason?

Oh, they had good reason. One for every dollar in the account

Re: PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts

#118

Post by baobabKoodaa »

Moneybookers (Skrill) introduced a similar dormant account fee a few years ago. I hadn't used my account for a while, and then I needed to use it, so I first logged in to check if my account balance was negative, before I deposited money to it. It was $0, great, I can safely deposit. And what do ya know, as soon as my deposit hit that account, Moneybookers retroactively applied a dormant account fee to my account. They even forged the timestamp for the fee event in my account history to pretend like it was applied several months earlier, when in fact it was applied only after I deposited.

Re: PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts

#119

Post by justinclift »

stevesimmons wrote: post #111
katsura wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked their terms (it was a few years ago), you weren't allowed to have multiple accounts. As you said when one moves to another country, they just have to close the previous account, and create a new one in the new country.

Which of course causes problems for those of us who do genuinely live in two different countries.

Yeah, I came from Australia, moved to the UK, then have moved back to Australia. And I'll probably be back in the UK for a bit, once the Coronavirus problem is solved.

So, not being able to change country in PayPal is pretty bad. It doesn't match up with the actual reality of how people live. :(

Re: PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts

#120

Post by chrisseaton »

clintonb wrote: post #103
justinclift wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> yearly expenses for the bank to keep up with the legal paperwork on that account Wouldn't the yearly expenses to keep up any individual account be such a small fraction of a single cent, that we might as well call it zero? Account information is literally just a few strings of bytes, and transaction info is similar. Even with a lot of transactions it'd likely be less than (say) 10kB per year?

Note: I'm on the board of a credit union. There is no "legal paperwork" for accounts. The only real costs for managing accounts comes from mailing monthly statements. The last time we discussed these statements at a meeting, it was reported they cost about $1.00 (on average) to send.

Do you literally still mail paper statements? Why?
Post reply on HN