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Class Action Lawsuit Says PayPal Restricted Funds
trenton writes: "CNET News.com reports a class-action law suit was filed Wednesday in California Superior Court in Santa Clara County. The suit charges PayPal with illegitimately restricting customers' access to their money. The suit asks for an unspecified amount of damages. Have you been ripped off or locked out?"
I can hear the price dropping now...
Visit PayPalSucks.com for an entire community pissed off at PayPal.com's practices.
I bought a bunch of their stock
All those people sending us their credit card numbers weren't venture capitalists?
Oops.
The service they provide is excellent, but that should not be confused with the level of service they provide, which, I must say is sorely lacking.
They have buggy software. This means on occasion, more money is withdrawn from your non-PayPal accounts then you authorized them to take. Giving them access to your checking account is a horrible thing to do, double-dipping is widespread and if you have any checks that need clearing, well......you are in trouble - assuming they haven't overdrawn your account in the first place (did it to me).
Due to the sheer size of their user-base, and their inability to correct their problems, much less deal with the number of complaints generated by things that aren't their fault (action sellers taking money and running, for example) they've taken to a scorched Earth manner of dealing with problems.
Any sign of trouble - your account is frozen - along with any money that might be there. Too bad if you're in the middle of a huge transaction involving lots of money that you really can't afford to lose.
This is like using a nuclear device to wipe out an ant infestation. It causes much more damage to innocent users than you could possibly imagine.
You have a problem, even if it is their fault they might not fix it. Wait more than 30 days to complain that they stole your money and guess what? The money is gone forever, you will never get it back. They will not allow you to file a complaint about their rape of your checking account if you wait more than a few weeks.
To sum it up, PayPal provides a great service, but they have shown themselves to be incapable of actually providing that service with any great degree of reliability or accountability.
This lawsuit has been a long time coming. More power to the plaintiffs.
Now, maybe this doesn't happen in every case. And maybe if you accept funds from unverified users you don't get protection. But I just want people to know that every fraudulent transaction doesn't result in Paypal seizing your account.
On the other hand, they are very difficult to get in touch with except by email (which we all know is easy to ignore). This is somehting that should definitely be improved upon.
Still, I like paypal. If you want complete control, I suggest you get a merchant account. Frozen paypal accounts are, I believe, rare. And I think they involve more than just a simple charge back in most cases.
Then if you use paypal regularly, set up a bank account for that purpose. If you only recieve money through paypal, withdrawl any money as soon as you are able to, then move the money out of your spare account, except for a token amount to pay fees and whatnot. This way, the worst that can happen with such a problem is that you lose the most recent transaction.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
NoPayPal is a site that made me avoid getting a Pay Pal account. I think Pay Pal is a great idea, however the business practices that is being portrayed is piss poor. Is there any competitors out there?
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
Not a debit card or checking account. If they screw you over with an unwarranted credit card charge, your can call your credit card company and stop payment on it. If they pulled money out of your checking account (either directly or through a debit card), you're pretty much screwed (good luck trying to get your bank to do anything about it).
FWIW, using a credit card for most purchases is actually good advice, because it avoids all sorts of frauds and other problems (for example, a restaurant in a foreign country once charged my card twice; I guess they thought since I wasn't from around there I couldn't come back and complain. The CC company removed the fraudulent second charge after a simple phone call...if I had paid with a debit card it would've been a real pain to try to get my money back). This is provided, of course, that you are disciplined enough to pay your credit card bill on time to avoid going into debt and paying high interest rates.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Well, if you read through the paypal TOS, you might see how it is a rights issue. Some examples:
.com statistic, you are out of luck with any money you have in your account.
-when you link a bank account with your paypal account, you are agreeing to let them take money out of your account at any time for any reason without warning. They have been know to empty peoples checking accounts to cover themselves if they suspect fraud.
-by agreeing to the TOS, you "waive" your right to pursue legal action against them. According to them, the only way to pursue issues with them is through an independant arbitrator. Obviously this doesnt hold up under scrutiny because a suit was just filed...
-paypal is not a bank- when you "deposit" money into your account, they become the legal custodians of that money. Thats how they can freeze peoples accounts on a whim.
-along with that last item, they are not FDIC insured, so when (not if) they become another
paypalwarning.com has a lot more info if you are interested.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush
I just discovered it while reading a Salon article on PayPal's weak service. Apparently, it's run by Citibank, a REAL bank, so you'll less likely to get fucked over by them. (Keyword: less; banks still try to ram a dildo up your ass once in a while.)
Zodiac Survey
Ummmm...to pay lawyers and law suit plaintiffs, meybe? Just like a real IT buinsess does these days.
;^D
Soko
"Depression is merely anger without enthusiasm." - Anonymous
I for one have never had a problem with PayPal, and I've been using them for over a year and a half. I've needed to contact them for support exactly once (yesterday). Get this...I call the phone number and a REAL PERSON answers the phone on FIRST RING! Not only that, but they are courteous and helpful and resolved my problem in under 20 minutes. I've never had such a good support experience in my life.
`fortune -o`
...has been anything less than fun. Somehow someone got my password and changed my primary email address, thus not allowing me into my account. Luckily I caught the e-mail that this happened (at least PayPal notifies you of that, even though everything else sucks....) and immediately transferred all of my money out of my savings account that PayPal was linked to, I then called the bank and they said they'd watch my account and I should open a new one to be safe. I also wrote to PayPal, but didn't get a response until 4 days later. By that time, someone has already tried to withdraw over $900 from my account. And guess what they told me to do in their support e-mail, they told me to log into my account and fix it! Hello! If the problem is my account was stolen and the username/pw changed then I obviously can't!
Luckily my bank is being good about it and are not charging me for those overdrawn withdrawals. Needless to say, I will never use PayPal again, nor will I ever recommend it to anyone! Avoid it like the plague!
Two wrongs don't make a right, three lefts do!
If an auction seller screws you over one way or the other, eBay's complaint process is rather lame and PayPal literally can't do a damn thing for you (speaking from experience here).
However, if you spare a little more money to mail them a money order instead, what they did magically turns into something called "mail fraud." Federal agents wearing dark suits and carrying badges begin looking for this person to throw them into pound-you-up-the-ass penetentiary for up to five years (multiplied by however many other people he's ripped off through the mail).
Of course, if this is the first and last time they defrauded someone through the mail, there's a chance the Postal Inspectors might not have the time to really give it much attention. But just because they're not activley seeking the person doesn't mean there's not a felony warrant issued for the culprit, which will make employment background checks, driver's license renewals and plane ticket purchases a whole lot more interesting. And that's before we wonder how often he gets pulled over for traffic violations...
I ask you: If you don't wholly trust who you're buying from, where can you get more entertainment for $1.24? Certainly not PayPal!
I had a seller back out on me after I'd already paid. Paypal was supposed to refund the $$ to me but refused. They said there was nothing I could do about it. I told the woman on the phone (after numerous calls) that there sure as hell was something I could do about it. I made the payment with me bank's check card. My bank's check card is a Visa Check Card and it affords all the same protection that any other card carrying the Visa logo carries, including fruad protection. I told her all of that and that I'd simply contest the charge and let Visa sort it out for me. She immediately told me to hold on the line and transfered me elsewhere. A guy quickly answered and was pissed from the word go. He was all but yelling. He spewed out some dribble about how if I contested the charge, their many lawyers on retainer would bring a suit against me and this and that and on and on and on. I laughed at him. Literally. And I told him I was contesting the charges immediately and a few other choice phrases. I contested the charges, my bank account was credited by the bank, and I never heard another peep about it. Screw me? No, screw you paypal.
which has a wall of shame full of horror stories.
.1% have a problem, that is 13K people with only 400 Customer Service Reps. So the hold time is 30 minutes and often they just rudely say "You violated terms or conditions", or "Fax us all your identity papers - bank account, utility bill, driver's license", then they seem to have a part-time fax, and they constantly lose the faxes (apparently they haven't thought about things like case numbers).
The problem is that with 13M users, if
Meanwhile your account is locked without anything you can do about it, often for reasons you don't know or know to be false (a buyer pays, but PYPL thinks something is wrong with it and/or the seller and locks both).
When it works, it's fine. But if they ever lock an account (and you don't have to do anything) it is a nightmare.
dyndns.org has been accepting PayPal as our main source of income for quite some time now - we've had probably over $200,000 pass through PayPal without a single problem. In fact, yesterday they called to tell me that we've been assigned a dedicated account manager, with a secret VIP phone number and direct e-mail address and everything. So it seems that, at least to their larger customers, they're at least TRYING to improve the customer service.
All of these lawsuits and threats from states are sure making us nervous, though, and due to various other things we were probably dropping PayPal soon - that timeline's just been moved up now. But I agree with what someone said or at least alluded to earlier; even if 10,000 people have had problems like this, that's only a tiny fraction of PayPal's actual userbase, and that's pretty impressive to me.
Perhaps they're dedicating too many of their staff to providing "dedicated" account managers to their bigger "VIP" accounts. They have special phone numbers ("don't give this out to anyone else, it's just for our special VIP customers") and real e-mail addresses and everything. They seem to be staff at the same (or yet another) call center out in Omaha, Nebraska, anyway, though - the home of telephone support outsourcing!