Slashdot Mirror
Online e-Commerce Issues w/ PayPal?
A concerned entrepreneur submitted this question for your consideration: "I run a very small online company and the main method we obtain payments for products is via PayPal. In this digital age having an easy way to accept payments for goods is critical to small business survival. Have you had problems with PayPal freezing your accounts, have you had any issues with PayPal harming any of your credit? Neither has happened to me but it
it still is a concern. Recently, I was sent this site, became concerned and wanted to ask Slashdot readers for their input on security and any problems they may have had with this service." If you send your money to a website for safekeeping, you expect it to be safe, and a large part of this perception is based on dependable customer support. According the warning site, it sounds like PayPal might be a bit deficient on this end. Have any of you experienced similar problems?
"I don't necessarily trust the website I linked to, nor PayPal's statements. PayPal requires you to register your credit card AND your checking account and could conceivably and legally(?) remove any and all funds and stop you from withdrawing a dime from your PayPal account as well as your own checking account at their whim. What is a small business to do?"
Just an aside, if you are signing up for a personal account, you only need your credit card. It's merchants who want to use PayPal's premium features who have to specify banking information as well.
The only problem I've had with PayPal was a looong delay in processing a bunch of payments for a group buy of webplayers. A lot of people in the co-op were highly irritated with the delay. They wanted the main buyer that we were sending our money to to prove his identity.. If anything this reassured me. I've also used it without a hitch to buy a few things off ebay.
I think the main thing to keep in mind is that PayPal is not a bank, and not FDIC insured.. I'd use it as a method to exchange money online, but not as a cash storage facility.
air and light and time and space
I think a lot of internet junkies are still wary because they're decent business-people too, and this being the case, the reason people distrust online banks and payment services are their apparent lack of physical stuff.
When you go into a regular bank, you look around and see they have pretty lightbulbs, nice counters, poorly decorated walls, and all sorts of plush chairs and things. They've even got those little pens. Other people are waiting inside. These things make you *want* to be there.
A website might be real, real pretty, but that doesn't have any physical worth. When I step into a pretty bank, I know that my money is probably going to be secure because in the worst case senario, they've got physical stuff to back my loan with. While this doesn't have practical application in the real world, this is a large part of how our brain percieves things.
Paypal is dubious because they've got nothing to look at. Sure, they've got a big customer base, but *where is* paypal, and who runs the thing? I think the digital world is still evolving in that we still can't estimate worth by a website. I hope we can in the future.
I paid to a "verified" seller, and PayPal refused to make good when he stiffed me. They took two months to even investigate my claim, and when they did, they responded that the bank account they had verified no longer existed. (Gee, no kidding). Since then, they've continued to send me spam, but won't do anything about the money. I look at using PayPal as being a step better than sending cash through the mail, but definitely several steps below using an actual credit card or even a check (since you can place holds on checks, and they take time to clear). I don't plan on using them ever again, and I steer clear of businesses that use PayPal as their only method of credit card payment.
Law is whatever is boldly asserted and plausibly maintained. -- Aaron Burr
This is just another issue like immigration or "Homeland Security" which is a balancing act between trust and convenience. Whenever you are operating with a third party, you need to balance trust versus convenience. If you favor trust, you will take more time for your safety: background checks (of people or Paypal), getting legal advice, insurance, anonymity concerns, etc. If you favor convenience, you will worry about reducing processing time, reducing bad experiences, simplifying and generalizing requirements, etc. Occasionally, technology can help increase both trust and convenience. But ultimately, even then, you are balancing trust and convenience against the provider of the technology. For example, open source software can be more trusted than closed source, but only if you forego convenience by actually checking the source!
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
I represent Fitsworth McGibbons, the legal firm who have been retained to manage legal affairs for Paypal, Incorporated. Negative comments without merit are actionable as slander, and we demand that you remove such objectionable material from your site immediately, or we will be forced to pursue legal action against you on behalf of our clients.
Thank you for your attention with regards to this matter.
P.S. IANAL.
If you ever "go bad" and decide to start screwing people, Paypal is your weapon of choice. If you are a scrupulous merchant, Paypal is probably the best way to go because there will be few complaints on either side of the transaction. As I am also an ebay power seller who uses Paypal, things have been just fine on that side of the table as well.
Just my 2c.
df
"Ain't no right way to do a wrong thing."
I have never myself had a problem with PayPal, but others have had some. Some good advice:
1) Transfer all money out of your PayPal account IMMEDIATELY. This doesn't give them a chance to freeze it.
2) Tell your bank to not allow PayPal to withdraw from your account without your authorization. I've heard of them dipping into the checking account if the funds aren't in the PayPal account.
3) Having your customers pay with credit cards... that way if anything happens they can dispute the charges.
Hopefully with these precautions you should be okay.
-- Dr. Eldarion --
I've kinda sidestepped this issue with my own dealings with Paypal. What I did is:
1. Signed up for a Yahoo! Mail account, and told Paypal to send policy updates and transaction details there. I think alot of these companies want to keep in contact with you so you don't get trapped when they have to change policy.
2. Signed up, and received, the Paypal debit Mastercard. You get this by being a Premier or Business member. This debits straight from the Paypal account. I pay for art prints, supplies, and shipping through Kinkos, Mail Boxes Etc, and even the US Postal Service (yep, they take credit cards now).
Their main aim is to keep cash in the account, so that they can make money off of it. They make no jokes about it either -- clues are there if you go to their money market fund and read through the prospectus.
Also, Paypal *does* insure the accounts though The Traveler's Group (a well known, respected insurance company). They sidestep that issue.
Of course you could use Spamazon (more trouble than it's worth) or Yahoo! PayDirect (less features, more secure, more time consuming). But Paypal's the best bet here.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
One of the serious flaws in the Paypal setup is that once Paypal believes that a visitor is you (i.e. logged in) that credentialed visitor has complete access to any accounts that Paypal knows about.
About a month ago, I logged into my email to find email "receipts" for nearly $12K in payments, all of which were made while I was sleeping during the night before. Someone had gotten into my account and transferred to several other people various sums of money ranging from $75 to $5000 per transaction. Most of them were against my credit card, but several were against my personal checking account (used mostly for hobby spending so it didn't have much in it) including the $5000 one. I called my bank to protect the checking account and they were very helpful. The credit card company's fraud detection department called me before I even had a chance to call them. Paypal's fraud detection??? Nothing. When I called them (and getting that phone number is no easy task), that sudden burst of activity hadn't even made anyone curious.
My paypal account was put in restricted status and I detailed exactly which transactions were fraudulent. I moved the remaining checking funds out of the path of paypal and had the credit card number cancelled. You'd think that this would stop anything from going forward and efforts could be concentrated on reversing the transactions. Nope. The middle of the next week brought me a series of automated messages from Paypal indicating that my transactions to withdraw all that money from my checking account failed, but not to worry, they'd try again in 3 days. I called paypal and was told that those attempts were automatic and *nothing* could be done to stop them from completing their course.
My bank has been great, letting those transactions bounce and not charging me a dime for stopped payments or overdrafts related to this. The credit card company is treating it like any other fraud, and while it may take a bit to work out, they're working with my refusal to pay for these transactions. As for Paypal? Their handling of this was totally unprofessional for anyone handling money.
The icing on the cake was the emails I started getting once Paypal took the money back from the recipients. I was being accused of cheating them and being asked to resubmit the payments I owed. When I asked to what address they sent the merchandise (hoping to get the mailing address of the perpetrator), it was implied that it was for something related to warez in an IRC channel. At least one of the recipients still thinks I am just out to cheat him out of his money. So, whoever set this up screwed both sides over.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
I've used PayPal and worked as described. I was pleased and would use it more, but I'm at their introductory limit (I don't recall the amount -- $200?) and they won't let me continue without opening a regular PayPal account. OK, fair enough, but they won't let me do it with a simple credit card, it has to be my credit card *and* my checking account. My bank charges $5/month to set up an account for electronic payment, and I'm not about to do that just for PayPal. If I were interested in paying all my bills that way, maybe $5/month would be worth it, or maybe it would piss me off and I'd switch banks. But I'm not interested in electronic bill payment so I don't care if they charge $5 or $500/month.
The $5 aside, why should I give PayPal an open pipeline into my checking account when I intend to pay with my credit card? If they want a backup, I'd be happy to give them two credit card numbers, but I refuse to give them access to my checking account. And I don't see why I should open a 2nd checking account just for them.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
I'm not sure how much it costs for online stuff, but for bricks and mortar stores, you can lease the equipment cheap, and the fees per transaction are not much. You are much better protected in this case.
So double check your needs. Maybe you can rationalize accepting credit cards directly.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
The only downside to "real" processing is the barrier of entry. You've got to fill out a bit more paperwork, talk to at least one real human (the banker), and there are some startup fees associated with it. But once you are up and running it quickly will become more economical than paypal, because of the difference in transactions rate (5% vs. 2.5% as mentioned above), not to mention you won't loose sales to people that don't want to sign up with PayPal.
And just as you thought I was posting to get karma...no, you guessed it, it's Shameless Plug(tm) time!
The only Open Source payment processor in the business: TrustCommerce
Mention Slashdot when you sign up for a test account and you'll get a free...um, well nothing, but at least we'll know you're cool.
The reason it takes so long to transfer money is because that's what PayPal's primary income source is - interest on your money.
Look at it like this:
You pay money to a merchant, he lets it sit there for a couple of weeks before he pulls it out.
The merchant pays a small amount to PayPal for the convienence, but the big money comes from the interest on the money.
$50 for two weeks might not seem like much, but multiply it by thousands, and it adds up quick.
Consequently, when you want to take money out, they have the transaction take a couple of extra days to squeeze every drop of interest.
I like you, Stuart. You're not like everyone else, here, at Slashdot.
I think that some of the ire toward PayPal is because you only hear about the bad things that happen. When a transaction goes well, no one stands up and screams.
I've been using PayPal for a long time, and I've never had a problem with it. I wish I could say the same for some of the vendor sites out there (e.g., I'll never buy again from half.com, but that's another story).
In case anyone's wondering, this isn't astroturf support. I'm a real person who just happens to like PayPal.
Tim
Paypal only makes sense if you're pretty low volume. If you're making any real money with your business it's always safer to sign up with visa/amex/whoever and accept credit card payments. It's not much more expensive than paypal and it's a lot safer for both customers and merchants.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
I have had them freeze my account and hold payments (supposedly randomly), but I have had them do it more then a few times. I am by no means someone I would consider suspcious, I occsionally sell extra things I have on eBay and use PayPal for payments, also occsionally buy things and use PayPal to pay.
But on 3 separtate occasions I have had payments held, and also on one occasion I have had my account frozen. And yes it did take me FOREVER to get a hold of anyone on the phone (thank god for "free" LD on my cell). I was told it was a "routine" random freeze, blah blah blah, several days later they "unfroze" my account. And yes it was a major and total bitch, but there really aren't any other shows in town, so what do you do?
The problem isn't that Paypal is an online bank, it's that it's not a bank at all!
Real banks have state charters and are closely supervised, have strict documentation and recording requirements, etc. I don't give a damn about the physical appearance of my bank, I do care about that little sign on the front door saying "FDIC insured." This doesn't mean that I'll never have problems, but it (and the state charter required for that insurance) does guarantee that they keep sufficient records for problems to be resolved, that money in accounts won't go *poof* if the bank goes under, etc.
But Paypal is nothing. If it goes under, the money it holds just disappears. If it says it's never heard of me, I have no way of proving that I have an account with thousands of dollars. If they make a payment, they have no statutory requireemnt to document that it was authoritized or to refund my money.
I'm not totally without rights, but instead of strong local oversight I have to deal with a civil suit in the Federal courts for a contract dispute. If I could prove that we had a contract (did you ever get a signed document from PayPal?). If I could afford the expense. If I could affort the long delays before the case is heard. And all of that assumes that they haven't changed their "terms of service" to require binding arbitration by an arbitrator of their choice.
During the early days, this may have been justifiable. Not just because it costs money and time to do it right, but because the regulatory agencies wouldn't have known what to do with something like PayPal. I know, because I actually checked local laws and discovered requirements for things like a physical location open to the public, cash reserves, etc.
But not now - even if PayPal is completely honorable (and I have no reason to believe otherwise), the lack of oversight limits how much confidence we can have in them. If they are acting like a bank and being perceived as a bank, it's long past time for them to BE a bank. Until then, they're no different than trusting "my buddy Bob" to deliver you the cash promised the next time he's in town.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
Just an aside, if you are signing up for a personal account, you only need your credit card. It's merchants who want to use PayPal's premium features who have to specify banking information as well.
First of all, some corrections of what was stated above...PayPal requires only a credit card, but you can only make $1000 worth of transactions with the account. This doesn't mean that it's a $1000 per transaction limitation, but more like all of the money you can ever use with them. Once you give them a bank account, *then* this $1000 restriction is removed. I believe their single transation limit is $250, but this might be for accounts without a banking account linked to them.
About 6 months or so ago, I noticed a $250 charge on one of my credit cards from PayPal. It struck me as odd, since I had only performed a single $50 transaction. I contacted PayPal and my credit card company, and found out the following:
The card with the $250 charge on it had actually not been the card I registered with PayPal. The info had been stolen from some other online vendor, and the thief created a new PayPal account with my card. The PayPal rep I spoke to claimed that the name on the account has to match the name on the card, so, obviously, this person found a way around their system (or the rep was wrong).
But, both PayPal and my credit card company handled the problem well. I wasn't accountable, and I had all of the money returned to me. The moral of this story is to make sure you check your credit card statements, because when mysterious charges start popping up, it's ultimately your own responsibility to catch them. How many people even bother to look at their monthly statements?
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
If you sell normal items with PayPal, I can say that I've never had a problem with it. I know a few people on here have horror stories to tell, but I really can't.
If you are selling anything where the sender is most likely going to specify a different address (i.e. gift sales), DON'T USE PAYPAL UNLESS YOU'RE DESPERATE. PayPal insists that the two addresses agree. I did a payment system for a Chicago popcorn business, whose main revenue comes in at Christmas when everyone's buying those big cans of caramel corn to send to their relatives. At that time, PayPal allowed different shipping addresses.
As Christmas season started, they changed their policy and stopped allowing it, basically axe-murdering my neat little scripts. :\ I wrote a work-around so they could specify their shipping address on our site, then buy the popcorn using PayPal...but it's ugly and I don't recommend it.
So if you're a gift company...be smart...keep in mind the constraints you have to work within if you're going to do a front-end to PayPal. PayPal doesn't work for everyone, although it can be really useful sometimes.
There's no sig like this sig anywhere near this sig, so this must be the sig.
To unfreeze it, I needed to fax them:
Despite the glaring violation of privacy, I did get the account unfrozen in under 24 hours, and I did find them easy to communicate with.
FYI, if you're using C2IT.com: CitiBank has been unresponsive to fixing their security holes. They do not secure your CC number or bank account numbers and other sites can script transactions out of your account. My note on security holes.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
How curious. Just today I got a forwarded e-mail from a friend who hadn't set up her PayPal account to receive a payment I sent her. The e-mail read :
Dear [recepient's e-mail address suppressed],
On 09/03/00 you received $10.00 from [my e-mail address suppressed].
Our policy is to cancel unclaimed payments after 30 days, so
unless you sign up for a PayPal account these funds will be
returned to the sender. Don't let your money get away!
Note that this warning was sent some 14 MONTHS (!!) after the payment was sent. This is in gross violation of the stated policy of returning funds after 30 days. Moreover, as a sender, you don't have any clue in many cases whether the funds were actually credited or not.
In my case, it was only $10 at stake, but if many other payments were similarly misused, the interest racked up could have been quite substantial.
Bob
Science, like Nature, must also be tamed, with a view turned towards its preservation.
I've been using PayPal for 3 months to sell a variety of items and I've been very happy with it.
My tips are:
1) Setup a "Firewall" bank account. This allows me to receive payments from sellers to my PayPal account, then have PayPal direct deposit the money into this "firewall" bank account. This bank account has no money in it and once money has been transferred from PayPal to this bank account, I use the bank's tools to transfer the money to a checking account or savings account. This way, if someone gets into my PayPal account, they'll have very little or no money to rob from my associated bank account.
2) Use a dedicated Credit Card for Payments. With so many Credit Cards offering me free cards with 0% interest rate, I have the ability to use one just for online transactions. When the bill comes every month, it is easy to review. Fraud, or simple mistakes like double billings, should stick out greater than they do on my primary card.
3) When making Payments, use an affinity credit card that provides you with some benefit instead of your bank account. Using a bank account is preferred by PayPal because the cost to withdraw money from your bank account is significantly lower than charging your credit card. But their savings doesn't give you anything, so turn this neutral into a positive. By using an affinity card you can earn points on each of your PayPal purchases. I even had one case where someone on ebay bought something for me from $300 and due to problems I had to refund it. His $300 went to my bank account, then $300 came from my credit card to refund it back to him through PayPal, then I used the $300 in my bank account to pay off my credit card. I lost a little bit of money in the process due to PayPal's receiving fees, but at least I got 300 frequent flyer miles out of it!
4) Withdraw money promptly from PayPal. ANY company can suddenly go bankrupt from bad financial decisions you don't know about. It is therefore wise to use PayPal as a payment service and not a virtual bank account. When someone makes a payment, transfer it to your firewall bank account immediately so that it's in your control.
5) Read the fine print on PayPal's website. They have some very good fraud protection services that will protect you from evil people. But these services require specific things like "advertising PayPal as the only electronic Payment service you will receive." This really isn't much of a problem, it seems, since 90% of my ebay electronic payments have been made through PayPal (other 10% are BillPoint/Ebay Payments or Money Orders.) But you need to realize that if you take them up on their fraud protection, they have many ways to disqualify you if you don't follow their rules.
6) Trust your credit card. If you're using Credit Cards to handle purchases, many states like Maryland have VERY tough credit card laws which protect consumers. If you're using a 'new' service like PayPal, hide behind more conservative, regulated things like traditional credit cards and bank accounts.
Another thing I like about Kagi is that unless I sell something, I don't get charged anything. And when I do, it's a flat rate, and very reasonable for the ability to take checks, credit cards, and foreign currency.
I'm not affiliated with them, but I am a satisified customer. If you're looking for a way to safely process a small number of payments online, look no further.
- Vincit qui patitur.
From reading these posts and linked websites, I think I have some advice. I understand PayPal could be a great way to accept payment over the Internet, but there are some things companies need to do if the absolutely rely on PayPal for commerce.
First, have your PayPal checking account seperate from your company's checking account. This will be good for several reasons. If they dispute your account, and freeze your funds, your main checking account will be fine. Next, if you transfer all funds from you PayPal account to it's associated checking account (nightly, hourly whenever), and then from that checking account to your checking main account, the money will be safe. And since most banks nowadays let you manage your account online, this becomes very simple.
Second. If you are relying on PayPal, have more than 1 account. This is called redundancy. I'm sure most of you have heard it. If your main paypal account goes down, fall back to your secondary. And if you have 3 or 4 accounts, this only makes you more protected. Having these multiple accounts, you will need a quick and easy way to change from one to the next in your ordering procees.
Now, I've never dealt commercially with PayPal, only buying a few ebay items, and making my monthly donations to PennyArcade.com. I don't even know if what I said abaove is "allowed" in PayPal's TOS (or TOU, where U = Use), but if they aren't, and all these problem occur as often as I've read, then PayPal isn't something you should be relying on anyways as a company.
Just My 2x10^(-2) Dollars
Th
I'm the Lead Programmer at a adult service provider. We are selling our service online with credit card processing (not paypal) and cause of a LARGE ammount of fraud we have develop a new system for user who want to buy more then X amount of $ per month. They give us their bank name and phone.. we call the bank and verify if the address, phone, name they provide us correspond... if they do we authorised them for a unlimited account...
/. readser or +18 !]
This is a good way but NEVER do we ask for bank account Infos... we don't need their bank acocunt or anything.. only the bank name and phone...
I don'T know what PayPal ask from their user but they shouldn't ask more.. and for their merchant.. they need their bank account to transfert the money in the account !!!
[Note: I'll not post the URL of our site as I'm sure that not all
"Tui Nati vulnerati."
my bank said the only way to do this was to put a $.01 stop payment order in for PayPal. That's fine and dandy but it costs $15 (CDN) and expires every month... that just isn't reasonable - I haven't looked at what other banks would do given this request, but doubt that there would be any difference since they are all cut from the same cloth.
I am looking at creating a new chequing account just for the swept funds which then I will transfer the whole balance to an account that PayPal doesn't have access to.
Wrong. I have a standard account, and the first thing I bought was over $100, so they insisted on banking info.
It's really moot, though.
They keep changing their story, and their requirements so much, you can't keep up with them. Any money you have in your "account" isn't really yours at all, if they say so. I would be very scared to have more money in that account than I could afford to lose, which lately has been about $20.
As a matter of trust, how can you trust an establishment that claims they can make all their money through interest on the float, and that they are quick and easy to use, then over a period of 18 months starts adding fees here and there, adding no value, and apparently doing something that gives fodder to those writing paypal horror stories? I can't claim that such stories are true, but where are the rebuttals? Where is the free/easy to use account I had a year ago? Something screwy is going on.
I registered with PayPal a long time ago (nearly a year before their merger with X.com). I had to give them banking info even way back then.
In all that time, I never had a problem with them until recently. I tried to buy a cell phone on eBay and was duped by a nefarious seller. I called PayPal customer support and they told me to contact the "card-issuing bank" for any neccessary chargebacks. I did this and then PayPal treated the chargeback as a stop payment and charged me again for the same transaction.
Highly irritated, I called PayPal back and raised holy hell about it. they told me that they dont do "chargebacks" on completed transactions (which raised the issue that we dont know if a transaction will be a success until after money is transfered and classified as complete by paypal, thus making it nearly impossible to fit into their strict requirement for a chargeback...)
Anywho, they instructed me to file a fraud complaint, which I did. Then I found out during filing the complaint that per some eBay-PayPal agreement, I have to wait 30 days to file a complaint. So, that meant I had to sit idle for over a month without a cell phone and without my bargeld (german slang - "cash").
Finally, nearly 45 days later, I managed to get PayPal to investigate (there was hardly any investigating at all, honestly) and they gave me my money back. But, all the while during their 10-day investigation, they put my account on hold, preventing me from buying sending or receiving money...
Alas, though, we are in a crux. Due to this, I have come to detest PayPal. But, their security measure, however slim, are much better than BidPay or Billpoint. So, what are we to do when our only means of performing some function is also our worst? Sounds eerily similar to the whole Microsoft conundrum.
[move
The easy answer to that is to use a credit card via Paypal, not a bank account. They tried to screw me once like they did you. I paid the guy and never got the goods. After 2 weeks of no contact, I called them and asked to have the transfer nixed. They gave me the run around and kept transferring me to different people. I seriously think that they do what a cartoon I once saw did. In that cartoon was a helpdesk. One person had an irate customer on the phone demanding the supervisor of the tech they were talking to. The tech put them on hold and looked around at his colleagues in the cubical farm and asked who wanted to play super. Someone said I'll play super for you if you play super for my guy on line 6. I swear they did that to me. I know I got a couple of those people twice and they played super a couple of times too. After a couple of weeks of getting jacked with by them, I threatened to call my credit card company, contest the Paypal charge, and let my card carrier sort it out. The person playing super that time bucked up and sent me to a person whom I think really was a super, or the designated person to call when that happened. He told me in a really pissed voice that if I did that, they'd "turn the matter over to our legal department and sue my ass off". Yes, I can quote those exact words. I told him to [censored] and hung up. My next call was to my Visa card carrier. I told them what was going on and that I wanted to contest the charge in the amount of $abc.de. They happily responded. They contested the charge and credited my account. They said they would get back with me if they needed more information. A few months later I received an official letter from my card company saying that they had investigated, received little cooperation from the and that they were siding with me and the credit to my account. It worked like a charm. I absolutely do not use bank account transfers from them. I use my Visa Check Card that withdraws straight from my checking account. It affords me all the protection from Visa like contesting charges and fraud protection. However I should use a card with a limit so that if it's stolen, my real $$ funds aren't possibly in limbo while I wait on a credit. I hope this helps someoen.
After visiting that same site myself, I decided not to use PayPal any longer. I had never lost any money through PayPal, though I've used it only a few times to buy stuff on Ebay. I went to cancel my PayPal account to simply be sure nothing would happen (it had zero, but it could have potentially be used). However, I could not log in on the site, and got an error message saying I did not have cookies enabled, even though I did (and confirmed it by logging in to here and a couple other places that use session tracking with cookies). I sent email to their various support addresses the web site indicated. The reply on those said I needed to submit the request on the website. But I needed to login to do that, which I could not. I called them on the phone but got stuck in menu hell and voice mail hell. No one ever returned my calls.
A few months later I got email from PayPal. It was promotional. Technically it was not spam, since my account was still active, but now I really wanted it canceled. I tried the web site again, and it had not yet been fixed. I tried mail again and got the same stupidity. I tried calling a few phone numbers. I actually got someone on the phone, but it sounded like the phone system redirected incorrectly as they were not expecting an inbound call. As soon as I explained what I wanted, they said I needed customer support, and forwarded me to menu hell. After spending at least $5 for long distance calls I gave up calling.
I then proceeded to "get attention". Since the email was on an automatic bounce, I set up an automatic system to send them email. It was adjusted to send every 2 minutes so as not to cause damage, but perhaps get attention. After a couple hours of this, it did indeed get attention. I got email back from someone with a direct phone number. I cut off the process and called them. Although this person was in the technical area, he did promise to get my account closed out. He was unaware of the technical problems, and I tried to convince him he needed to get them fixed, although I didn't know what the cause was. We tried a few things, but it didn't fix it.
It's a shame that the only way to communicate with a company is by tactics like this, but this is not the first place this kind of thing has had to be done.
I have since found the problem and I know what fix is needed on their server(s) to correct it, although obviously that's not my job to do, so I won't.
My whole point is, this is a company that does not give a damn about customers, only about money. If they cared about customers, they would have much better customer support. If they had better customer support, they might be able to deal with some of the fraud problems people have a little better. Instead, they seem to be trying to cut back on staffing costs by cutting out customer support and trying to discourage customers from calling them. I even read in one of the various news articles that were linked from here that the president of the company had actually said they don't want to deal with people calling in to complain. To me that means they don't want their service to get better.
This is definitely a company that needs to go into bankruptcy. Just be sure your money is out before that happens. And if you have any reason to send me money for anything, please read my /. signature first.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
- Man starts online bookstore, running it out of his home. Achieves modest success with a small but loyal customer base.
- Nationally syndicated columnist discovers online bookstore, interviews owner. Writes it up as example of ordinary guy doing Amazon.com on a small scale.
- Thousands of people read column, go to bookstore site, place orders.
- Man gives resulting credit card transactions to his bank.
- Bank says, "Whoa nellie! That's a lot of money! How do we know you can fulfill these orders? Your account is frozen!"
- Online bookstore suddenly has no income, folds.
It's tempting to point fingers, especially at the bank. But that's shortsighted. Our monetary system has been around for so long, we forget how cumbersome and convoluted it is. Ultimately, every transaction carries a risk of fraud and loss. You shouldn't be suprised if anybody involved, merchant, buyer, bankers, whoever, does their best to avoid getting stuck.And all of them do get stuck occasionally, not just the little guy. Difference is the big guys can spread out the cost of fraud over more transactions.
I had zero problem with PayPal for a year till two months ago my account got hacked. Someone stole $985 to pay for two eBay auctions. The shipping address was trackable but the local police said the place was a very bad area and they don't know whether they can find the person. FBI is too busy to handle this, although there are evidences showing that this hacker may have stole much more money from other people.
The best part was, you feel pretty good with PayPal because of the third party insurance. But when you really need it, PayPal is not very helpful. I reported to PayPal right away and then realized that they don't even have a phone number regular users can call. It took them six days to reply my email asking for affidavit. I sent out my affidavit with police report right away via priority mail and it took them two weeks to reply me this time saying that they have never received it. Upon my request they finally gave me a fax number. About a week after I faxed everything to them, they reversed the two transactions, but then restored one, and then charged another $625 without any reason given. So my account actually got a even bigger negative number than before. I've sent tons of emails to them checking about this. And after 20 days silence, PayPal wrote me another email on Dec. 9, exactly two month since the hacking attack, claiming that they had never received my fax. Fortunately I did keep the receipt of the fax to prove that I have sent the fax and they had received it.
Today I got a statement from my bank saying that because the recurring overdraft situation has not been resolved for too long, they have closed my checking account and filed a record for five years. Next they will pass my case to an agent to collect the money from me. PayPal has no comments at all so far.
PayPal is a neat thing when there's nothing wrong. But once there's a problem (and the problem is likely to occur again since the hacker is still not tracked down yet), they just leave you aside. It reminds me a joke I've heard, something providing you a false feeling of security while you are actually being screwed. It refers to condom before... now I think it fits PayPal better.
I am working on suing PayPal since I have to get my banking record straight up. If anyone has similar experience and want to work on it together, please contact me at hook@263.net (sorry to use such an address... I only use it for first contact because it has spam filter.)
I have sufficient documents to prove the story. Including my certified affidavit, police report, bank statement, email history and transaction summary.
Hook