Is this Paypal experience customary? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#221

Post by gambiting » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 5:00 PM UTC

jorvi wrote: post #166

fxleach wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is it "literally the only way to counter scamming sellers"? There are so many competitors out there that offer better services... Stripe, Google Pay, Moneris, Braintree, Square, WePay, Authorize.net, the list goes on...

I'm talking about eBay and Craigslist sellers, not companies. Anything I buy from companies I can just put on a credit card and chargeback if scammed. Edit: also googling around none of those seem to have the solid buyer protection that PayPal has. With PayPal I can just open a dispute with a picture of the error (color is off or whatever) and within a relatively short time period the seller is forced to reimburse me…

Maybe in the US it's simpler, but recently I had to do a chargeback on my Polish credit card and first of all I couldn't even initiate one until the transaction was fully processed(while it was only showing as "pending" on my account), so that took 3 days, then I could file a chargeback by making a complaint about a transaction, which I was then told would be "reviewed in no more than 2 weeks" and that is genuinely what happened - the transaction was reversed and the money returned but it took the full 2 weeks from the day I requested a chargeback.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#222

Post by 867-5309 » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 5:01 PM UTC

if it's an infrequently used account linked to an email address from 20 years ago it probably had an easy-to-guess password

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#223

Post by rogy » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 5:06 PM UTC

Recently had a terrible experience with PP Dispute process.

1 - Bought tickets for a show via twickets.live 2 - Seller (supposedly) sent a transfer request to me via the ticketmaster portal. 3 - I received, nothing, tried to contact seller, got no reply till after event. 4 - Open a dispute as I paid for something and received nothing. 5 - PP sides with the buyer citing ‘evidence’ the tickets were sent to me 6 - PP won’t share ‘evidence’ with me, wont reopen my dispute, no option to create a new one.

Now I’m down a wad of cash, didn’t go to the show, and got no opportunity to do anything about it. Closed my account immediately afterwards.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#224

Post by ryanlol » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 5:17 PM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #102

jeltz wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There’s no monopoly, certainly no “classic anti-trust pattern”.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#225

Post by canada_dry » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 5:33 PM UTC

noonespecial wrote: post #54

Learned the hard way you make a separate bank account to link to PayPal. You turn off overdraft and you keep that sucker empty . It's like living with a drug addict. They may be family but you sure as hell dont leave cash or valuables laying about...

> like living with a drug addict

Great analogy! Despite enjoying a long relationship, Paypal will very possibly stab you in the back and rob you blind in a blink of an eye then become incommunicado.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#226

Post by 542458 » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 5:43 PM UTC

daveFNbuck wrote: post #194

542458 wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

For sure, but I've never seen a bank that notifies you when a transaction gets reversed, altered or canceled. It just happens invisibly. IIRC it's actually a feature, in that some companies will open a transaction against your account (for example - a deposit on a rental), and then cancel/alter it if the funds aren't needed. That part of the story is 100% normal for big financial institutions in my experience.

And yeah, PayPal support is legendary in just how incompetent it is - I won't deny that. But it seems like the author was originally upset about something that is a normal part of banking.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#227

Post by Animats » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 5:53 PM UTC

"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." - Orwell.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#228

Post by saltminer » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:11 PM UTC

viraptor wrote: post #107

kibwen wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yep, just look at the CTA's Ventra system, which came online in 2013. 20 character password limit, but implemented in the worst possible way: only on the web UI, and they don't tell you about it.

Basically, I generated a 32 character password in my password manager, pasted it in, got no errors when I made my account, and could login in Chrome successfully. However, I couldn't login on the mobile app. I tried manually typing, copy/pasting, nothing worked (it doesn't even seem like they auto-lock accounts after 15 failed login attempts...). So I went to change my password on my desktop and noticed it stopped accepting anything after 20 characters. The field silently truncated my password. So I typed the first 20 into the mobile app, and was able to login.

The worst part about this system is that since the mobile app doesn't respect the limit (not sure if there is a limit in the app, I was able to do 64 characters successfully), you can make your account inaccessible from web browsers with a >20 character password (meaning it's not a DB restriction, it's just an arbitrary client-side restriction, and it's even not implemented consistently). I reported this bug last week and got a generic email response, so it probably still works for now.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#229

Post by _57jb » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:25 PM UTC

Yeah, I dropped paypal a while back after Adobe made charges to my account which I had cancelled.

Paypal makes it very easy for subscription services to keep sneaking those charges in.

Closing my Paypal made it very easy to stop that nonsense.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#230

Post by saltminer » Fri, Jul 05, 2019, 6:26 PM UTC

scriptproof wrote: post #159

zxcvbn4038 wrote: post #69

I very rarely have to contact PayPal for anything, but I’ve had to talk to them a couple times. My experience is that they absolutely will not answer any question they don’t have a pre-written response for, instead choosing whatever they think is closest to what I am asking, even if it doesn’t answer the question. I’ve even had them send me the same response again when I explain that it didn’t answer my question the…

This is one experience. I have some exchanges with paypal and their answers were perfectly accurate and personalized. After many transactions, I have no reason to complain for now. About the case of the OP, I once had 2000€ credited on my bank account for no reason. I knew it was an error and did not touch it. Several days after, the amount was silently debited. No message from the bank. This is not specific to Paypa…

>Several days after, the amount was silently debited. No message from the bank. This is not specific to Paypal.

Except if you asked the bank, they'd say there was a system error we had to correct, sorry for the inconvenience, please take our survey. PayPal will say you sent/refunded the money, we never touched these funds and can do no wrong, and if you can't produce documents that never existed related to this transaction that was entirely in error you can kiss your account goodbye.