waits for the lawyers to tell you to take it down

Oren are you really using fair and lawyers in the same thought :)

I had a customer with the same problem. He made thousands of dollars of purchases on eBay per month. He did not have a bank account attached to his paypal - just a credit card. His account got flagged and he was no longer able to make payments. IIRC if you use a bank account (which is only available in a few countries) as the source of funds you can make unlimited transactions.

For a company that charges 2.9% (USURY) + transaction fee across the board (and I imagine it is higher for forex transactions) they should be able to do better than that.

Ayende, you are completely right, you were completely respectful. Every computer system should have an override or alternate paths.

PayPal: "we are a black box and we do not know why you cannot send money"

I have exactly the same issue - I was having emails for a while, but I couldn't remember my password or some other details to logon and sort it out. After a bunch of emails they tell me I have to phone them. I don't need it that bad so I gave up and told them to stick it - the call isn't even a freephone number.

Rubbish.

Wow... it amazes me how a company can have such obtuse policies and support staff. Not only do they not have a process to help someone in your situation, but the guy you were talking to couldn't even seem to understand why this was such an unacceptable situation.

I wish I had a good suggestion for an alternative method of transferring money so you could tell PayPal to stick it, but I don't use any myself. However, I do use FreshBooks.com to manage my invoices and track time. I noticed that they support several options (including PayPal) for people to use to receive payments (I don't know what support they have for making them). Anyways, here are a few of the links in case any are a viable alternative.

http://www.itransact.com/index.html
http://www.authorize.net/
www.secondsite.biz/.../Compare/
www.firstdata.com/product_solutions/ecommerce/
http://www.psigate.com/

I am in no way recommending any of these though, I have not used any of them. They are just options I took from FreshBooks that they support in addition to PayPal.

LOL. Classic.

Try talking to Qwest. Wow. Had to clear up a $1,200.00 cell phone bill for phones never received (because they sent the wrong models). 6 months later, hours and hours of being on the phone, nobody with a clue... phew. It got so bad I finally just had to pay it to keep them from ruining my credit. I paid... received a refund check. Paid again... received a refund check. Paid again... received a refund check. At that point, I decided to keep my money.

Thankfully, it never got reported on my credit.

What is so amazing is not the bizarre PayPal policies. After all, it's a newborn company by banking standards where most establishments are centuries old. What I found really amazing is the lack of real competition, especially from regular banks, on such a massively profitable market.

Had same nightmares myself as have tons of eBay users.

You thought you were mad trying to make a payment, that's nothing, wait until a customer pays for your product, you deliver, then PayPal withholds payment to you!!

PayPal is garbage once you have been burned. You'll never use is for anything but $29.95 transactions again. That's all it's good for.

Welcome to the future :) Amounts of information and complexity of systems will soon be so far beyond human capabilities that you will HAVE TO trust the black box. If it tells you don't exist, you'll disappear.

Take a look at Cashboard: http://www.getcashboard.com/

You can accept payment via paypal or credit cards. I don't know if there are any international issues, but the people/person behind it is quite responsive.

You're right, that's of course unacceptable. What kind of business is that? You're trying to send them money and they cannot help you. I cannot imagine what happens when there's a problem with receiving money! I'll never PayPal again!

Thanks for the post.

Don't they have some sort of service agreement or some such (can't remember the TLA)?

@Ayende

If you are just having trouble with sending this one payment, but transactions with other accounts work, then one could guess that the problem is with the receiving account. If this is the case then there is certainly nothing that you, or paypal on your behalf, could do to resolve it. Privacy issues would also prevent the support personnel from discussing problems with another account with you. Seems plausible.

Hi Ayende,

Keep on fighting the good fight!

I had some troubles with PayPal about a year ago where I payed some guys for playing cards but then my account got flagged too. Took about three weeks and a lot of confusion for all parties involved to get if resolved. The worst part was explaining to those waiting for payment what was going on.

Just keep ringing them until you get someone who actually knows what he or she is talking about instead of this drone.

Best of luck!

Same problem a year ago.

Solution... no more PayPal thanks.

It's so crazy that it's funny. Those poor PayPal drones slaving away under the mighty and all-powerful security system. He sounded a bit scared. Perhaps the last guy to defy their software overlord had some particularly unpleasant punishment to teach others a lesson. Whoever wrote that system is a genius.

Well Oren I must say, my estimation of your abilities to achieve have increased dramatically. You actually got to SPEAK to someone at pay pal? A person? A real one? Wow!

PLEASE tell me how you achieved this!

Someone somehow got into my PayPal account and spent hundreds of pounds on a computer website in China. PayPal (after weeks) eventually agreed it was fraud (delivery address was over 100 miles away from my house) and refunded me.

The problem is that the refund was short by £20. They said that this is because my account is in GBP and the transaction was in USD. They refunded the amount of the transaction.

WHY SHOULD I CARE? If someone fraudulently takes money out of my account then I do not consider myself protected against fraud unless they return the EXACT amount that was taken. If they have to take a hit on the exchange rate TOUGH.

Ah, rant over. Please email me a link with a phone number on. I don't even care if it isn't in the UK. I will be happy to talk to ANYONE there :-)

www.paypalsucks.com/graphics/PPS-Cartoon1.gif

Wohooo! After a ridiculous amount of time emailing back and forth I phoned that number today and the issue was resolved in about 15 minutes.

The lady on the phone said that PayPal should in fact return the exact amount of money taken from my account in cases of fraud, she apologised and said the difference would be paid in within 2 working days.

Thanks for the phone number!

PayPal appear to be very daft, there's a paypalsucks.com website setup just for this.

And yes its hilarious that they didn't understand the problem.

Its like a door stop that doesn't keep a door open - useless.

i also have problem with paypal before. My paypal account suspended. I dont know why. Paypal want me to send Utilities bill or bank statement to proved that im the owner of that account.

I had a similar issue. I received a Notification of Limited Account Access email after some suspected fraudulent activity on my PayPal account. No problem there as I’d rather them pick these things up than not

But what I found really dissatisfying was PayPal customer services response to my questions. It’s an understatement in saying they were unhelpful in giving me any sort of details of when, by whom or where from this activity happened.

So how the hell am I supposed to protect myself from this happening again? Don't I deserve to be given some kind of information not just a lame scripted reply?

PayPal are an organisation to avoid wherever you can!