Ebay buys PayPal

mdahlman was among several readers who submitted the story that eBay has bought Paypal in a deal worth $1.5B in stock. The article is mostly numbers and money related stuff, but it also briefly mentions some of the controversy surrounding eBay.

Comments

PayPal's Issues

[BitGeek]

I thought the people upset with Paypal were a small minority until I tried to use the service. I sold a friend something. PayPal screwed it up. The amount of the transaction was $5. But they managed to take the money from my friends credit card, claim they never took it, charge my friends account for it, giving it a negative balance, and reverse the charge on my account.

So over this $5 transaction PayPal grabbed $15 for itself-- $5 from me, $5 from the friends bank and $5 in a charge to the friends paypal account that they have to pay to fix it.

Then they decided this friend was committing fraud and suspended their account.

This is totally unacceptable. This was the FIRST TRANSACTION for all of us, after we both became verified members, etc. The bank is clear that the money went to paypal, and paypal wouldn't say a peep about what went wrong.

I wouldn't say PayPal was a fraudulent company, but in my experience, they have a %300 failure rate-- 1 transaction and they took money from three entities.

In the end my friend and I both closed our paypal accounts and settled up face to face.

Sheesh.