About 3 or 4 years ago PayPal added the option to buy cryptocurrency, which I thought I’d try. (Dumb idea 🙄)
Part of the sign up process was glitched. I retried and clicked submit one too many times, I guess. Now I’ve been unable to use PayPal for years. They blocked me because THEIR SITE was broken, but the web page essentially accuses me of being a criminal and asks for my bank records. No way in hell.
This was just for me to pay others. I can only imagine how awful PayPal is if you are a vendor.
Fuck PayPal.
Someone in Norway has the same name as me, and they made a PayPal account. They accidentally used my email during signup and I got some weird emails in Norwegian. So I called PayPal. I asked them to change the email. “You can’t, because it’s not your account, you just admitted”. Uh, ok. Can you close the account? “It’s not your account”. Can you contact the account owner and tell them to fix it? “We don’t have their email”. Can I use account recovery and close it? “Then you would be breaking into someone else’s account”.
So what should I do? PayPal put a notice on the account in case they log in, and told me to just ignore the emails. I was baffled. Just ignore the emails? Stop sending them then! But there really isn’t anything I can do. I tried account recovery anyway, but it didn’t work.
They never logged in I think. They probably made another account with the correct details and never thought about this one. So I’ve been getting the “our terms and conditions have changed” email once or twice a year and ignoring them. They’re still in Norwegian.
I just looked it up, this has been going on since 2015. Maybe I should contact PayPal again and tell them how ridiculous they’ve been.
Report them to the CFPB. They’re forced to have an actual human review and respond.
I just wanted to share the story.
Oh, gotcha. Yeah they are shitheads. It honestly should be illegal to make an account for someone using an unverified email.
It may not be your account, but it is your email.
Dumb of them that they didn’t just remove the email address.
Got locked out of my PayPal account but I apparently can’t close it.
A couple of years ago I was running a growing loans business on r/loans and the other one. One day, I got scammed. Loaned someone money and when it came to pay day, they reported me to welch out of the deal.
It took 180 days to get the money I had on my account. I tried closing the account and PayPal would not let me. It’s been years and all I get are notices of terms and marketing stuff. I try to unsubscribe and it keeps coming so I mark it as spam but Gmail does not care.
I remember during the GPU shortage I managed to get a new graphics card from waiting outside a best buy for it to open. So I tried to sell my old one on eBay. Gave good pictures and followed all the rules as far as I could tell but because I had never sold anything on their platform before I was instantly banned with no way to appeal. I get they were probably having to deal with lots of scammers but if I could appeal or talk to support I could literally prove I had the GPU I was selling but as far as I could tell there was no option for that. So now I can’t sell anything on eBay unless I get someone else to sell it for me.
Paying anything bought through PayPal credit. Wow.
Me too, for receiving a $5 refund from Digital Ocean.
Amazon blocked my account while trying to purchase a gift card and are now demanding proof of ownership of the gift card they just refused to sell to me???
Aren’t they regulated in some way or other? I had problems with them in Europe (travel a lot for work, including some African and Central Asian countries) and they blocked me when I tried to buy something while in Nigeria. Fair play, common scam hotspot.
But no matter what I did to prove my identity after returning, they wouldn’t unblock my account. So instead I sent a complaint to the CSSF (the FED of Luxembourg, where they got their European banking license) and within days I had the head of compliance from their HQ in Ireland on the phone telling me that my account was open again and practically begging me to drop the complaint.
I haven’t used PayPal in over 10 years. Why don’t you just leave the service?
Because it’s convenient for paying online (one login instead of having to search my debit card and also, if I got scammed, there’d be another layer of protection for me) and it’s convenient for sending money to friends when we order pizza together or sth like that. What’s the alternative?
Bitcoin? Ether?
Really? Crypto? For one, I know almost no online shop that takes crypto, almost no person I’d send money to has crypto and I don’t want to own crypto either since it’s rather unstable…
Venmo, Google pay, apple pay
Venmo is owned by PayPal, so that might not solve anything
Does anyone know of an alternative to paypal other than stripe ( same shenanigans) , for getting paid for freelance work that is available in Europe or Asia ??
getting paid for freelance work that is available in Europe
Banktransfers are free…
Not really. They have a minuscule fee of around 40cents if I remember right
Depends on the country and the context. For private people in the Netherlands, it’s free. On my business account I pay something like 12 cents, plus 2 bucks per batch (which is why most companies only do payments every so often)…
In the US it very much isn’t free. I realize the original commenter was asking about Europe and Asia, but something to be aware of if you want to visit this country. Here at least, you’re much better off using traveler’s cheques, rather than trying to rely on cash from ATMs and bank transfers.
I have no idea why, but I swear to god that we have the most bass-ackwards banking system in the world. They still use COBOL for fuck’s sake.
Zelle is free. It sucks, but it’s there.
No problem, just buy crypto with PayPal.
What is the use case for PayPal in the US? Here in Brazil we pay everything with credit card or bank transfer with a QR code. People can transfer money to you from any bank 24/7 instantaneously with just your email or phone number without any fees. Is that different in the US?
In my experience, their consumer protection is great.
PayPal has been absolutely instrumental for me in issuing refunds with obstinate vendors. Once or twice they’ve issued me a refund after being refused a return/refund when an Aliexpress vendor either sent the wrong item or nothing at all.
I even got them to secure me a refund against the Australian government after they refused to issue a refund after directing me to apply for a tourist visa with the wrong visa process.
The banking system in the US is a legacy mess. Transfers still take business days to go through and making your bank account # and routing information available is actually a security concern, honestly I don’t even know why that’s still a thing.
Products like PayPal and Plaid try to provide something that is slightly more usable, but with this underlying obsolescence their functionality is very limited.
When paying for services, credit cards are still the way to do it. For P2P payments, people use PayPal, Venmo, Cash App, and others. Nothing even close to a unified system like Pix in Brazil.
There is Zelle, which is instant bank to bank. It’s fairly widely available from one’s financial institution, and it doesn’t cost anything, but it’s not terribly well known yet for some reason
Zelle blacklisted me for similar reasons as this guy lol
Aussie here. One reason I use PayPal is for subscriptions (streaming services etc) to avoid the headache of updating credit card details in multiple places when I change bank, credit card renews, etc. just change it in PayPal once and every subscription keeps working.
Why would any one use bank details that can’t be cancelled for online services? Pay pal is worse. Will hold your money ransom. Being able to cancel payment method is very important, best is unique payment method for each service.
It’s used for Internet purchases, so you don’t have to give your billing information some random site that might get hacked.
PayPal passes most billing information to the store where you purchased from. Card info is excluded, but in most cases PCI compliance checks ensure that card info is stored securely (or not at all).
