PayPal isn't a bank, folks. If you treat PayPal like a bank, you will have a bad time.
Almost all horror stories you hear about PayPal involve the user treating PayPal like they were a bank. Just do not store money in PayPal... sweep nightly if you use PayPal for business. They even provide tools to make this automated.
The reason this policy exists is likely to remove super old liabilities for long-dormant accounts that have been long forgotten about.
PayPal is not interested in storing funds forever... they want you to buy stuff with it or transfer it to your real bank account.
This policy seems aimed at convincing people to "move it or lose it"...
1. Buy something from China.
2. Get a refund.
3. Account blocked for two weeks
1. Send €5. Add greeting note.
2. refuse to reveal last name and DOB of person mentioned in the greeting note to Paypal.
3. Have your account blocked and enter mailing loop hell with an Indian call center.
1. Have your account blocked for no reason
2. That's it.
No, Sir. I'm sorry. It's not just the storing of money side that doesn't work with Paypal.
I am currently in the mailing loop hell and had to message an old colleague who now works there for help. It‘s absolute insanity. You can‘t speak with a higher up. Each call, the new customer service rep has to start from the beginning. Every third call is canceled on you without notice. Every second call they ask you to reset your password and wait 24 hours.
I'm convinced that they just flag transactions from richer countries to poorer countries as fraud. But sending money from the poorer country to the richer country is completely fine.
I had a PayPal support person lock my account for fraud because I insisted that I needed to talk to a supervisor. She refused five times, hung up on me and locked my account. After two weeks they simply unlocked it again. No explanation, no apology. I never did get to talk to a supervisor.
That's where I am. Sent one trasaction via Paypal business, bank account forbidden and paypal business froze, with no option for me to ever use paypal business again.
Really interesting to hear. I haven't been a huge user of PayPal since eBay introduced Managed Payments, but my experiences with them in the past have always been surprisingly good.
That said, perhaps I was getting different support since they were probably processing around 10k of sales a month for us.
This is a practice that occurs elsewhere in U.S. fintech as well. A bank account can become dormant if there are no deposits or withdrawals over a specified period of time as determined by the governing state. For California, it's 5 years, but for other states, it can be as soon as 12 months. Once an account becomes dormant, the holding bank is required to send the funds to the state through an escheatment process. Those funds are then listed as unclaimed property.
PayPal is not a bank, but but rather operates banking services performed through Synchrony Bank. PayPal manages individual accounts within Synchrony, and it performs required communications and actions on behalf of Synchrony bank. In the U.S., the bank is ultimately responsible for servicing these accounts, but a partner like PayPal can take on that responsibility with the bank's oversight.
Some more info for the curious: investopedia.com/terms/d/dormant-account.asp
Rather than perform this (potentially expensive and arduous) process of handing dormant funds over to the governing state, companies like PayPal opt to just slowly absorb dormant accounts. It's scummy and I hate it. I assume this transfer of funds also keeps the account from being legally considered dormant (since funds did move).
I have an account with a local bank so I can use their branch services as needed. I keep the balance high enough to earn 1¢ of interest every month, and I set up an automatic system with my main bank to transfer that 1¢ to me. Avoids the dormancy fee!
$10 is maybe a bit much, but I think the principal is fine.
Last year, I received emails from a bank I used 10 years ago, asking me to contact them. It turned out they'd been writing to an old address. I thought I'd closed the account, but it had £0.75 in it.
The bank spent much more than that trying to contact me, and I wasted far more time than it was worth closing the account. (They were used to the problem, I asked them to donate the money to charity.)
Once you sync your bank account, Paypal can claw funds from your account for any reason it deems necessary.
Do not give them this access into your business's main operating account. Bite the bullet and open a separate, standalone DDA with another bank (not the same bank, that won't achieve its intended effect).
You can just connect it to an IBAN with 0 EUR/USD, and then requiring you to put currency on it before PayPal can withdraw (ie. no overdraw). My bank (bunq) gives me 25 IBANs.
It was unclear to me if they could claw funds in the USA way back when I looked. But I setup a small balance account and switched to it because I'd heard way back paypal managed to get people's bank accounts frozen for months in a dispute and if that was the same account you paid your bills out of you were in for a major hassle to you life. Which probably extorted a lot of people to give in.
Yup. This is mandatory. I think doing it at the same bank would be fine enough, but if you can pull it off, go to a different bank. I definitely take that extra precaution myself.
> The reason this policy exists is likely to remove super old liabilities for long-dormant accounts that have been long forgotten about.
That’s exactly what this is. I don’t believe it’s meant to be a money grab towards existing customers (simply because it’s such a bad one). Everything has a lifetime. PayPal by now is full of accounts from dead people, money nobody is ever going to reclaim (even if someone out there has a better claim to it).
This money has to go somewhere, otherwise it’s very literally dormant. In my country (Belgium), the government has tools to let people find and reclaim money they may be owed that is sitting in bank accounts. But something like PayPal is not really able to do this.
With dormant fees, PayPal is able to create a lifetime on accounts with dormant money… they will eventually zero out.
That said, they’re still scum and nobody should use PayPal, ever, for anything. I work in fintech - if you’re using PayPal and need recommendations to replace it, reply with your use case and I’ll respond.
> In my country (Belgium), the government has tools to let people find and reclaim money they may be owed that is sitting in bank accounts. But something like PayPal is not really able to do this.
In the US, there's also a system of unclaimed property, administered by each state. States hold onto such property, and at least the few states I've lived in allow you to search online for it, and provide a means to have it sent to you on request. I've found a couple hundred dollars over the past 20 years, mostly cases where I've overpaid some sort of account, and then the account was closed, though I recall one case where Google had been the one to submit some unclaimed property to the state in my name (never found out what it was from).
PayPal could certainly set an inactivity limit -- say 5 years -- and then turn the funds over to the state listed in the account's user information. But they'd rather keep the money, and slowly siphon it off. I agree that this is a pretty bad money grab, but there's absolutely another option that would allow a PayPal user to reclaim that money later on.
> That said, they’re still scum and nobody should use PayPal, ever, for anything. I work in fintech - if you’re using PayPal and need recommendations to replace it, reply with your use case and I’ll respond.
....I'd imagine most of that would be "paying for stuff that has paypal as only payment method", or otherwise alternative being putting your CC information on the site you will use once and never again, and hoping that they have better security than paypal.
And the rest being "well I want to give my user easy way to pay for stuff and paypal is just that"
> if you’re using PayPal and need recommendations to replace it, reply with your use case and I’ll respond
I'm accepting donations for my open source software project (FreeSewing.org). I also need the shipping address because I send a little thank-you. What should I use instead that's available to people from different countries?
They had to register as a licensed bank because E-money-institutes are a recent addition to EU law long after PayPal obtained its banking license.
The law is written such that you are either allowed to do nothing or you are a full blown bank. There is no carveout for startups or anyone who doesn't want to run a full bank.
> Almost all horror stories you hear about PayPal involve the user treating PayPal like they were a bank
That's something I noticed many years ago when PayPal complaints were big on Slashdot, and I was confused about why anyone would be leaving significant sums in their PayPal account. They've always made bank transfers pretty easy.
Unless you prefer not to link your PayPal to a bank account. There are horror stories out there of PayPal making bank withdrawals customers feel they didn't authorize.
I wish you could get them to just simply mail you a cheque to get your money out.
The 20 year long trail of horror stories from PayPal that would be outright fraud if committed by an individual person is all the proof I need that our system is completely broken.
Unfortunately I can't test it or keep it updated anymore because, despite giving them many hundreds of dollars in legitimate eBay business fees, I was perma-banned without recourse (and in the process, I had to manually find via my bank a $1000+ clawback transfer they did but could not find in their system anywhere, and give them the info, so they could find it and eventually return it).
I'm curious why this tool's existence was necessary? If you have/had a business account, sweeping is free and built in - your onboarding rep would have even helped you configure it.
If you abused a personal account... well that may be a clue into why your account was frozen. PayPal only makes money off business accounts and their transactional fees... if you tried to circumvent that and were obviously operating a business, then they would have good reason to freeze your account.
Also, PayPal hasn't been part of eBay since 2014ish...
Paypal has always loved keeping money they didn't earn. They should be treated like a crypto exchange: never keep your funds with them, only use them to transact then move funds away (if no other alternatives available).
Ah, i've avoided them for over a decade now - but that does sound very concerning.
Sounds even worse than the issues that made me abandon them originally (seizing on-paypal funds and preventing withdrawal via making verification process broken and obtuse)
>They love to debit any linked bank accounts to pay any fees or clawback any money so they can freeze it.
>And PayPal requires you link an account for verification now.
What's the problem here? If you give them access to your main bank account, you're an idiot. Just set up a separate account for the sole purpose of linking to PayPal. You should do the same for any case where you need to link a bank account to an external entity.
How exactly are they able to extract money from your account just from having account number and your name? Does this mean I can, too? (I assume you don't give them your password, and even then an outgoing transaction requires an OTP.)
> And PayPal requires you link an account for verification now.
Interesting, I wonder if this is only for new accounts? I've had an account for a good 20 years now, and I don't have a bank account linked, only credit cards.
With their inflated fees and treasure trove of user horror stories, why does anyone even use Paypal? And if they are forced to, why have there been no alternatives?
I have only ever used paypal to pay for things with a credit card. I was tricked into having the account at all by a fraudlent and misleading UI built by ebay and that's the only reason I had it in the first place. I did use it to pay for some things so I guess their plan worked.
Paypal recently, after a decade or so of use, demanded I hand over multiple forms of ID. I refused and said close the account. They refuse to close the account because I have not handed over ID documents that I don't want them to have on their files because they are untrustworthy both ethically and in terms of competence as you guys know well.
So the account is there ready to be hacked. I've pointed this out to them on about 20 separate occasions and they refuse to close it.
Paypal are crooks. It is in their dna. They're crooks for no reason, just from force of habit. You cannot trust them in any way. Society allowing them to have any market power whatsoever is completely insane. Yet another case of a cpu attached to a network being on the critical path of what some company is doing preventing otherwise intelligent humans from thinking a normal, critical fasshion about what they are doing and forming a minimally appropriate response, trapping the rest of us who literally cannot act at all.
> I was tricked into having the account at all by a fraudlent and misleading UI built by ebay
They've cut out the middleman and will just trick you directly. I don't have an account but I use it a lot for discogs. Everytime, it goes one of three ways.
1) They have a prechecked "Create Account" option, so that completing the purchase creates an account.
2) They use the classic "big, bold button" dark pattern, so that completing the purchase creates an account.
3) They require creating an account to complete the purchase. I've cancelled orders over this one.
It hasn't even been a progression. I've seen all three recently, and which one I get seems to be a dice roll.
The problem is their ubiquity for payments (manageable on its own, though some sites only take PayPal),
AND the most reliable/usable p2p micropayments UX for non-technical people and international, under one umbrella. Yes there's crypto but good luck getting your parents to use.
Unlike in Europe and elsewhere, Americans don't have good (and somewhat standardized UX for) direct payments from bank (e-check sucks), or bank-to-bank. And you'd never want to use wire ($18+) for paying friend back for pizza.
What does it leave? CashApp, Zelle, etc. ? And Wise for international. They only address a subset of the latter use case.
So from PayPal's perspective you signed up for an account willingly, used it happily for ten years, tripped some fraud detection or other where PayPal now thinks the account may have been compromised and locked it, asked for proof of ID to restore access, and you refused, and asked them to close the account.
What else do you want them to do? There's a bagillion compromised PayPal accounts actively scamming people. It's why PayPal G&S is the gold standard for buying stuff from people online. Like I get that closing the account seems like a safe action but letting someone who isn't the account owner do anything with the account is bad move.
Do you work in PR? Because that is 100% grade A PR damage control spiel and seems completely plausible and reasonable unless you know better, which both I and they do and so will you shortly.
There was no fraud detection, no flags, no payments to me ever. None.
Paypal demanded, out of the blue copies of drivers licenses, passports, bank statements etc that they have no right to, claiming they needed them to comply with law. Suspicious much? Well I sure was and am. They have only ever been an online click-clack machine for my credit card and nothing else. Ever.
I have the _right_ to refuse to do business with them if they unilaterally change their rules. I have done so.
There /can/ be /zero/ fraud possible by closing the account because I don't trust them and going elsewhere to get my credit card processed.
From their point of view it would be a negative metric. Better to not have declining account numbers you have to report so just block them.
They are just crooks from top to bottom. It's their default response. They are arrogant, obnoxious and deserve to be prosecuted and should be.
What I want them to do is repect my wishes not to be associated with them in any way and not to have an identity theft vector avaialble with people and an organisation I have justifiably decided don't trust when I have told them that is what I now want.
So f%#k them and anyone sticking up for the crooks they are.
PayPal created an account without ID, they can close an account without ID. Using your logic, couldn't people just open a fraudulent account because they didn't present an ID? That is a much worse outlook.
The account (email) that created the PayPal account is requesting it to be deleted, that should be sufficient. If both accounts have been insecurely breached, that's really the user's fault. PayPal could even mark the account as pending deletion after 30 days if we're really worried about this.
You shouldn't be able to stand around and blackmail the user for even more personal information to sell or "accidentally leak" to advertisers under the guise of "security."
Why is Paypal G&S a better standard than normal credit card protection? Also if part of their offerings is something that is the gold standard in fraud detection and similar, why are there a bagillion of compromised accounts?
I understand but that reason/excuse only works to a point. They might not need to close it right away but should still close it soon. They should lock the account attempt to contact the person using their contact methods and give them perhaps 30 days (90 at most) in case:
- The person asking to close the account isn't the same person the account belongs to, and the person who created the account is on a vacation or something
- There is some nefarious activity in progress and closing the account would hamper dealing with it
...and after this they can close the account without demanding the ID.
It definitely happens in the UK, I've done this and also made the same mistake. I don't think it's illegal, because they give you the terms clearly: pay it off within x months and it's zero interest. It's not like Klarna where they say you agree to make a 1/x payment every month. It's also not (as far as I know) a direct debit agreement. Virtually every credit card company also does this; you have to request to pay the full balance every month if you want to avoid interest. The only exception I can think of is the Amex cash cards where you have to pay off in full mothly.
I've noticed it can be tricky to avoid PayPal at times due to their partnerships with other large companies.
Are there any decent alternatives that are viable competitors to PayPal that one might want to move to if their terms become unacceptable? If not, I guess there's always the notion of refusing to do business with those who use PayPal as their one and only payment processor.
> Are there any decent alternatives that are viable competitors to PayPal
I guess this lack of competition is the exact reason why PayPal can behave as such. I'm writing this as a very happy 10+ years PayPal user, however the number of complaints and horror stories I've read during all those years is so large that it probably means I'm rather the exception than the rule, for now (touches various things).
Every time we see a 'PayPal bad' report here, it's someone running afoul of a perfectly reasonable condition. The biggest one is people running businesses that take money now and deliver a product at some time in the future, putting all the liability for chargebacks on PayPal, and then freaking out when PayPal puts a hold on the business's funds till their product is delivered.
I'd say it's not the lack of competition that allows PayPal to have the user agreement they do.
It's the fact that PayPal's user agreement is as liberal as running a successful money transmitter business can allow.
Are there even that many businesses that only let you pay via PayPal? I don't think I've ever encountered one. I use PayPal often enough for convenience (and to avoid giving out my CC number for a one-off purchase from a new website), but I don't think I'd be too bothered if I had to close my PayPal account. And yeah, if I ran into a website that only accepted PayPal, and didn't have an account, I'd just move on and buy somewhere else.
Checking on user agreements, all clients of PayPal (Europe) Sàrl and PayPal Canada Company are covered, and I can confirm that clients of PayPal Pte. Ltd. (Singapore et al.) and PayPal Inc. (US) are NOT covered.
Definition of Europe seems to be EU, EFTA (ex. Switzerland which is governed by PayPal Pte. Ltd.), and UK.
Oh, that makes sense, I heard that Switzerland have bilateral treaties that allows them greater autonomy on financial matters.
I guess PayPal not setting up a UK subsidiary is mainly due to FCA being a decent institution (Britons might disagree, but have you tried complaining to the Luxembourg CSSF?)
I used PayPal since 2006, because of the promise that I'd get my money back if I get scammed.
A few years ago I played a browser game, Game of Thrones Winter is Coming. Chinese company. I'm in the EU. In the EU we have laws and regulations, if someone tries to scam you, you usually get your money or the product.
The US has less support for the customer, aka the customer is in a worse place.
In China you as a foreigner have no support.
I bought a 20 eur package of Margery Tyrell, because I like the way she looks. I thought when I buy I, I would have her in my collection and could use her as my avatar.
I bought it, but what I bought was 5 out of 10 requires tokens to unlock the base version of her.
So I paid 20 eur for effectively nothing.
It wasn't mentioned anywhere that I would need 10 tokens.
The next 5 tokens would cost 70 eur!
I wrote PayPal that this was a scam and that I wanted my money back.
The response was that I have no proof and the case was closed with no way of appealing.
I closed my PayPal account and will never return.
I will also never spend money on a Chinese game.
PayPal restricted my account for a very stupid reason 10 years ago, so I kept 1 penny in there until a couple of weeks ago. I finally closed it a few weeks ago, which had to be done through customer support due to the account value being lower than the transfer minimums. I hope I cost them a lot more than the value of the account.
I got screwed in 2002 on EBay using paypal: product never shipped but they kept the money. My CC company refunded me, but paypal wouldn't let me use it again until I paid the $500 that the CC company reversed. A few years later PayPal offered amnesty and waived the $500, so I started using them again in 2006, still using them. Damn, that's almost 17 years.
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Almost all horror stories you hear about PayPal involve the user treating PayPal like they were a bank. Just do not store money in PayPal... sweep nightly if you use PayPal for business. They even provide tools to make this automated.
The reason this policy exists is likely to remove super old liabilities for long-dormant accounts that have been long forgotten about.
PayPal is not interested in storing funds forever... they want you to buy stuff with it or transfer it to your real bank account.
This policy seems aimed at convincing people to "move it or lose it"...
1. Send €5. Add greeting note. 2. refuse to reveal last name and DOB of person mentioned in the greeting note to Paypal. 3. Have your account blocked and enter mailing loop hell with an Indian call center.
1. Have your account blocked for no reason 2. That's it.
No, Sir. I'm sorry. It's not just the storing of money side that doesn't work with Paypal.
Mind boggling.
Close your PayPal accounts.
I hate paypal
Really interesting to hear. I haven't been a huge user of PayPal since eBay introduced Managed Payments, but my experiences with them in the past have always been surprisingly good.
That said, perhaps I was getting different support since they were probably processing around 10k of sales a month for us.
PayPal is not a bank, but but rather operates banking services performed through Synchrony Bank. PayPal manages individual accounts within Synchrony, and it performs required communications and actions on behalf of Synchrony bank. In the U.S., the bank is ultimately responsible for servicing these accounts, but a partner like PayPal can take on that responsibility with the bank's oversight.
Some more info for the curious: investopedia.com/terms/d/dormant-account.asp
Rather than perform this (potentially expensive and arduous) process of handing dormant funds over to the governing state, companies like PayPal opt to just slowly absorb dormant accounts. It's scummy and I hate it. I assume this transfer of funds also keeps the account from being legally considered dormant (since funds did move).
Last time I checked they sure as hell have a banking license and operate in Luxembourg. Wikipedia says:
"Since July 2007, PayPal has operated across the European Union as a Luxembourg-based bank." [1]
I suppose they're not a bank in USA, but the world (and HN readership) is bigger than USA (also bigger than where I'm from; EU).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PayPal
Minor nit, but I don't think we need a neologism for 1,000 year-old institutions.
Last year, I received emails from a bank I used 10 years ago, asking me to contact them. It turned out they'd been writing to an old address. I thought I'd closed the account, but it had £0.75 in it.
The bank spent much more than that trying to contact me, and I wasted far more time than it was worth closing the account. (They were used to the problem, I asked them to donate the money to charity.)
Add a middle layer between your bank and paypal.
Once you sync your bank account, Paypal can claw funds from your account for any reason it deems necessary.
Do not give them this access into your business's main operating account. Bite the bullet and open a separate, standalone DDA with another bank (not the same bank, that won't achieve its intended effect).
In Britain, I think PayPal uses a direct debit, so it's easy to reverse any transaction.
That’s exactly what this is. I don’t believe it’s meant to be a money grab towards existing customers (simply because it’s such a bad one). Everything has a lifetime. PayPal by now is full of accounts from dead people, money nobody is ever going to reclaim (even if someone out there has a better claim to it).
This money has to go somewhere, otherwise it’s very literally dormant. In my country (Belgium), the government has tools to let people find and reclaim money they may be owed that is sitting in bank accounts. But something like PayPal is not really able to do this.
With dormant fees, PayPal is able to create a lifetime on accounts with dormant money… they will eventually zero out.
That said, they’re still scum and nobody should use PayPal, ever, for anything. I work in fintech - if you’re using PayPal and need recommendations to replace it, reply with your use case and I’ll respond.
In the US, there's also a system of unclaimed property, administered by each state. States hold onto such property, and at least the few states I've lived in allow you to search online for it, and provide a means to have it sent to you on request. I've found a couple hundred dollars over the past 20 years, mostly cases where I've overpaid some sort of account, and then the account was closed, though I recall one case where Google had been the one to submit some unclaimed property to the state in my name (never found out what it was from).
PayPal could certainly set an inactivity limit -- say 5 years -- and then turn the funds over to the state listed in the account's user information. But they'd rather keep the money, and slowly siphon it off. I agree that this is a pretty bad money grab, but there's absolutely another option that would allow a PayPal user to reclaim that money later on.
....I'd imagine most of that would be "paying for stuff that has paypal as only payment method", or otherwise alternative being putting your CC information on the site you will use once and never again, and hoping that they have better security than paypal.
And the rest being "well I want to give my user easy way to pay for stuff and paypal is just that"
I'm accepting donations for my open source software project (FreeSewing.org). I also need the shipping address because I send a little thank-you. What should I use instead that's available to people from different countries?
PS; Also in Belgium btw, hi!
You are saying the ECB should be having a bad time. Fair.
PayPal is a licensed bank in Europe [1]
[1] https://thebanks.eu/banks/16281/bank_identifiers
Edit: changed the link because it was a bit misleading
The law is written such that you are either allowed to do nothing or you are a full blown bank. There is no carveout for startups or anyone who doesn't want to run a full bank.
That's something I noticed many years ago when PayPal complaints were big on Slashdot, and I was confused about why anyone would be leaving significant sums in their PayPal account. They've always made bank transfers pretty easy.
Unless you prefer not to link your PayPal to a bank account. There are horror stories out there of PayPal making bank withdrawals customers feel they didn't authorize.
I wish you could get them to just simply mail you a cheque to get your money out.
But this is the first time I've heard it described the way you do. Why don't they make that more clear?
They can't keep getting away with this.
https://www.apra.gov.au/register-of-authorised-deposit-takin...
If you sign up to be an authorised deposit taking institute, you actually have to adhere to that!
It varies by jurisdiction. But if you think your model is that of a bank in one to register as a bank; MAYBE YOU ARE A BANK
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Is this new? Last time I used PayPal for an NPO, they had no such thing.
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Unfortunately I can't test it or keep it updated anymore because, despite giving them many hundreds of dollars in legitimate eBay business fees, I was perma-banned without recourse (and in the process, I had to manually find via my bank a $1000+ clawback transfer they did but could not find in their system anywhere, and give them the info, so they could find it and eventually return it).
If you abused a personal account... well that may be a clue into why your account was frozen. PayPal only makes money off business accounts and their transactional fees... if you tried to circumvent that and were obviously operating a business, then they would have good reason to freeze your account.
Also, PayPal hasn't been part of eBay since 2014ish...
And PayPal requires you link an account for verification now.
So it isn't really practical to use it as you describe - you're giving yourself a false sense of security.
Sounds even worse than the issues that made me abandon them originally (seizing on-paypal funds and preventing withdrawal via making verification process broken and obtuse)
What's the problem here? If you give them access to your main bank account, you're an idiot. Just set up a separate account for the sole purpose of linking to PayPal. You should do the same for any case where you need to link a bank account to an external entity.
Interesting, I wonder if this is only for new accounts? I've had an account for a good 20 years now, and I don't have a bank account linked, only credit cards.
Isn't that what most places do these days? If you're providing a service, you are the one determining what you "earn".
Paypal recently, after a decade or so of use, demanded I hand over multiple forms of ID. I refused and said close the account. They refuse to close the account because I have not handed over ID documents that I don't want them to have on their files because they are untrustworthy both ethically and in terms of competence as you guys know well.
So the account is there ready to be hacked. I've pointed this out to them on about 20 separate occasions and they refuse to close it.
Paypal are crooks. It is in their dna. They're crooks for no reason, just from force of habit. You cannot trust them in any way. Society allowing them to have any market power whatsoever is completely insane. Yet another case of a cpu attached to a network being on the critical path of what some company is doing preventing otherwise intelligent humans from thinking a normal, critical fasshion about what they are doing and forming a minimally appropriate response, trapping the rest of us who literally cannot act at all.
They've cut out the middleman and will just trick you directly. I don't have an account but I use it a lot for discogs. Everytime, it goes one of three ways.
1) They have a prechecked "Create Account" option, so that completing the purchase creates an account.
2) They use the classic "big, bold button" dark pattern, so that completing the purchase creates an account.
3) They require creating an account to complete the purchase. I've cancelled orders over this one.
It hasn't even been a progression. I've seen all three recently, and which one I get seems to be a dice roll.
Likewise.
You don't need to see my identification
We don't need to see your identification.
We can part ways and go about our business
Move along
Move along, move along..
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Paypal is for these groups:
1) criminals
2) princes in Nigeria
3) people too lazzy - to setup a merchant account.
AND the most reliable/usable p2p micropayments UX for non-technical people and international, under one umbrella. Yes there's crypto but good luck getting your parents to use.
Unlike in Europe and elsewhere, Americans don't have good (and somewhat standardized UX for) direct payments from bank (e-check sucks), or bank-to-bank. And you'd never want to use wire ($18+) for paying friend back for pizza.
What does it leave? CashApp, Zelle, etc. ? And Wise for international. They only address a subset of the latter use case.
What else do you want them to do? There's a bagillion compromised PayPal accounts actively scamming people. It's why PayPal G&S is the gold standard for buying stuff from people online. Like I get that closing the account seems like a safe action but letting someone who isn't the account owner do anything with the account is bad move.
There was no fraud detection, no flags, no payments to me ever. None.
Paypal demanded, out of the blue copies of drivers licenses, passports, bank statements etc that they have no right to, claiming they needed them to comply with law. Suspicious much? Well I sure was and am. They have only ever been an online click-clack machine for my credit card and nothing else. Ever.
I have the _right_ to refuse to do business with them if they unilaterally change their rules. I have done so.
There /can/ be /zero/ fraud possible by closing the account because I don't trust them and going elsewhere to get my credit card processed.
From their point of view it would be a negative metric. Better to not have declining account numbers you have to report so just block them.
They are just crooks from top to bottom. It's their default response. They are arrogant, obnoxious and deserve to be prosecuted and should be.
What I want them to do is repect my wishes not to be associated with them in any way and not to have an identity theft vector avaialble with people and an organisation I have justifiably decided don't trust when I have told them that is what I now want.
So f%#k them and anyone sticking up for the crooks they are.
The account (email) that created the PayPal account is requesting it to be deleted, that should be sufficient. If both accounts have been insecurely breached, that's really the user's fault. PayPal could even mark the account as pending deletion after 30 days if we're really worried about this.
You shouldn't be able to stand around and blackmail the user for even more personal information to sell or "accidentally leak" to advertisers under the guise of "security."
> What else do you want them to do? There's a bagillion compromised PayPal accounts actively scamming people
... actually check using humans and not "algorithm told me it's a fraud, therefore it's a fraud" ?
I had dumbassery like that trigger (not on pp) just because I didn't use account for few months then used it once...
- The person asking to close the account isn't the same person the account belongs to, and the person who created the account is on a vacation or something
- There is some nefarious activity in progress and closing the account would hamper dealing with it
...and after this they can close the account without demanding the ID.
If you use PayPal Credit with 0% to buy something, then make the automatic payments at the rate that they suggest...
You will end up missing the time frame for 0%. They will charge you the full interest.
It's sounds like something really illegal.
Are there any decent alternatives that are viable competitors to PayPal that one might want to move to if their terms become unacceptable? If not, I guess there's always the notion of refusing to do business with those who use PayPal as their one and only payment processor.
I guess this lack of competition is the exact reason why PayPal can behave as such. I'm writing this as a very happy 10+ years PayPal user, however the number of complaints and horror stories I've read during all those years is so large that it probably means I'm rather the exception than the rule, for now (touches various things).
I'd say it's not the lack of competition that allows PayPal to have the user agreement they do.
It's the fact that PayPal's user agreement is as liberal as running a successful money transmitter business can allow.
Deleted Comment
Definition of Europe seems to be EU, EFTA (ex. Switzerland which is governed by PayPal Pte. Ltd.), and UK.
Original comment follows:
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Seems not applicable to PayPal Singapore (not just for Singapore, it handles much of Asia, Africa, Middle East and Latin America and certain European countries like Switzerland): https://www.paypalobjects.com/marketing/ua/pdf/SG/en/ua-1031...
Edit: And PayPal Inc. (US): https://www.paypalobjects.com/marketing/ua/pdf/US/en/ua-1107....
Is it something that Luxembourg or EU required to PayPal (Europe) Sàrl (et Cie, SCA) (https://www.paypalobjects.com/marketing/ua/pdf/LU/en/ua-1031...) clients?
PayPal Canada Co.: https://www.paypalobjects.com/marketing/ua/pdf/CA/en/ua-0919...
This is likely because it’s the EEA, which is the EU+EFTA-CH.
I guess PayPal not setting up a UK subsidiary is mainly due to FCA being a decent institution (Britons might disagree, but have you tried complaining to the Luxembourg CSSF?)
A few years ago I played a browser game, Game of Thrones Winter is Coming. Chinese company. I'm in the EU. In the EU we have laws and regulations, if someone tries to scam you, you usually get your money or the product. The US has less support for the customer, aka the customer is in a worse place. In China you as a foreigner have no support. I bought a 20 eur package of Margery Tyrell, because I like the way she looks. I thought when I buy I, I would have her in my collection and could use her as my avatar. I bought it, but what I bought was 5 out of 10 requires tokens to unlock the base version of her. So I paid 20 eur for effectively nothing. It wasn't mentioned anywhere that I would need 10 tokens. The next 5 tokens would cost 70 eur! I wrote PayPal that this was a scam and that I wanted my money back. The response was that I have no proof and the case was closed with no way of appealing. I closed my PayPal account and will never return. I will also never spend money on a Chinese game.