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Is this Paypal experience customary?

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Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#171

Whoa, I just got off of a call from PayPal as to why my account was banned. Turns out, 15 years ago when I signed up, I was 15 (I am 30 now) and that is against their terms of service. So my account is permabanned and they said to make a new one with a different email. I can understand they don't want people under 18 to sign up, but for fucks sakes, it was 15 years ago, this feels like a fairly stupid policy. I would…

Tip: don't follow their advice. My friend had a similar situation (signed up while underage and was banned) and they have banned all subsequent accounts as well. If you are permabanned from PayPal, you are permabanned, as a person.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#172

Whoa, I just got off of a call from PayPal as to why my account was banned. Turns out, 15 years ago when I signed up, I was 15 (I am 30 now) and that is against their terms of service. So my account is permabanned and they said to make a new one with a different email. I can understand they don't want people under 18 to sign up, but for fucks sakes, it was 15 years ago, this feels like a fairly stupid policy. I would…

Ask them to reverse all transactions from 12-15 years ago.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#173
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…

I would have just ignored them. Let them sue a non-existent company, let them win, who cares? You can't collect from a defunct company.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate a little bit on this? I'm not familiar with mainframes, but genuinely curious what specifically would cause this?

Some financial systems, a large number of which run on mainframes, have databases where all fields are fixed length. (A database with fixed-length records is trivial to access randomly.) One of my credit cards lists my name as "Christophe" rather than "Christopher" as they have a fixed-length 10 character field for first names. Customer support said it was unfixable. It only takes one such system, in a complex web, t…

At least American Express automatically changes "Christopher" to "C" so your first name is abbreviated rather than just cut off.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#177
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…

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.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#178
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…

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 flows in and out without much fanfare.

Some banks show you transactions that are pending. If a transaction never goes from pending to settled then it literally just disappears without a trace. Standard behavior.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#179
Every time I relocated, I ran into countless issues with my Paypal account being tied irreversibly to the country where it was first opened.

So I end up opening a new Paypal account -- which must use a new email address, and can't have my old credit cards added to it.

Now I'm stuck in a situation where my newest account doesn't accept the credit card from my local bank because

  This card is linked to another PayPal account.
  Please remove the card from the other account
  or try a different payment method.
But I checked my other accounts, and I'm sure it isn't there.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#180
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…

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 beneficiary was already paid by a previous ACH credit entry, or the beneficiary was the wrong recipient of the funds, or the original ACH payment was in the wrong amount. Otherwise, the credit is considered final.

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