Live data from Hacker News

Is this Paypal experience customary?

gist.github.com

271–280 of 295 posts

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#271
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol couldn't possibly be worse advice in this thread. 100% do not listen to this and NEVER refund the transfer

FDSGSG is absolutely correct. He should have immediately processed a refund on the $600 as soon as he saw the transaction. By not doing so he risked getting a chargeback and loosing not only the $600 but an additional $10 PayPal chargeback fee. There is no risk of OP loosing $1,200 to two refunds if he went through the proper refund procedure. A transfer can only ever be refunded once.

[deleted]

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#272
post #247
post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

lol couldn't possibly be worse advice in this thread. 100% do not listen to this and NEVER refund the transfer

Why not? The only way I see this going wrong is if instead of doing a refund you create a new transfer to send the money back, but you obviously shouldn't do that.

ah sorry I always equate PayPal to venmo - there might be a valid way to refund on PayPal but certainly not venmo

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#273

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…

He is not complaining about a reverse transaction, but a movement of money from his account without telling him

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#274

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…

How did you manage to call them?

I've been fighting a similar issue. I woke up one morning to an email that my account was permanently suspended, along with several family members' accounts that don't live with me. All of our accounts were shut down at the same time, with no reason given. None of us had used Paypal in months, and I haven't received money on Paypal in years. We can't get a hold of anyone to find out what happened.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#275

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…

The reason for the limit is actually quite stupid. PayPal does store the hashed version of your password as is required of any user database that is part of a payment processing system. However, because PayPal has been around so long your password is transmitted to the server using a two-way encrytion scheme so that the server side can consistently apply hashing without requiring client side code to do so which makes things much harder and requires more bandwidth to be delivered.

Bandwidth concerns finanlly brings us to the reason that paypal limits the password size to 20. PayPal uses an authentication scheme that stores the encrypted password client side and requires it to be resent with every request (or at least used to). Because the password isn't hashed before being transmitted, and is present with every request, they limited the size.

All of this was designed and implemented more than 10 years ago and even though both the bandwidth concerns and the need to send the password with every request are both outdated and paypal has likely updated to newer systems that remove these concerns entirely, companies rarely re-examine these kind of hard coded limitations unless they are legally required to.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#276
I guess someone inside PayPal is using random people’s accounts to launder money. Deposit dirty money into innocent account- let it sit for awhile then take fresh clean credits out. In Greece? My guess is that it’s an arms dealer

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#277
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ye…

This feature doesn't really make sense if you combine it with PayPal's aggressive notifications about the original transaction. If I'm being notified about a relatively large transaction, I should also be notified if it's changed or canceled.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their 2FA policy is awful, SMS or nothing. At least that's the case in Canada (I heard it might be different in other regions).

Just now I (in the US) added TOTP (Google Authenticator) 2FA, and removed my old SMS 2FA. It does seem a bit laggy but I was able to do it and log in.

PayPal allows directly adding totp now? When I added 2fa, I had to use a python script that emulates the stupid Symantec software they were using in order to get the secret; it instead gave you a code to give the Symantec app, which prevented you from using 3rd party apps.

Re: Is this Paypal experience customary?

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the "logic" behind modern low password length limits for services like Paypal. Too many of their users are literally incapable of remembering their passwords and call/e-mail them bitching about how they're entering the right password and their account won't let them in and now they can't get to their money and bogus threats of legal action. So they encourage weak passwords and try to handle security on their s…

If you forget your password then there is basically no way of contacting them. I lost my 2FA phone number, and wanted to know if there is anything I can do to get my account back? There is no contact form, no customer chat/phone number, and their issue tracker is only available if you log in. Finally, I found an email address on some other website, contacted them, then I got an email saying they answered my issue, an…

Oh, I remember having that problem a long time ago! It's still like that? I'm pretty sure this was more than 10 years ago for me. I just abandoned that account.
Post reply on HN