I haven't trusted Paypal for a long time, since they repeatedly froze my account just for accessing it from a foreign IP. That wouldn't be so bad, except for their demands of things like faxes of utility bills and bank account statements just to get it unfrozen. Ridiculous.
I recently had to receive a significant payment from a client of mine. It would have been convenient--and worth the fees--for me to use Paypal to receive that money. But after all the stories of frozen accounts and my own experiences, I'm scared to use Paypal for more than a few hundred dollars. I had the client send a check instead.
I had the same experience, but even more ridiculous.
When I was trying to fill the form for the verification, I always had an error on the page that said "please try again later". I tried to get in touch with support, and at all my emails they were replying with the same copy and paste with the steps, which I could not follow. I tried to get someone on the phone, with no luck. After weeks I gave up, because the money on the account were not worth the hassle (they were around 300€).
But I will never use PayPal again, that's for sure.
I wonder how much Paypal has stolen from their former customers this way over the years. It might even account for a sizable portion of their total revenue.
It will be held in non-interest generating accounts until it can be released. Srsly, this is financial services and there's the odd regulation or two that everyone - including PayPal - have to follow.
They can't 'steal' the money - when accounts are locked they either hold onto it for six months or require you to keep a minimum balance. This is how they mitigate their massive risk profile.
Their customer services are entirely worthless, it's true, but I suspect that anyone coming to 'disrupt' PayPal will struggle with many of the same issues because they're caused by fundamental risk issues with online payments.
I had a similar experience when I accessed my personal PayPal account from another country.
In this case I was both the buyer (from my personal account) and the seller (my business paypal account - I was using my own app to register a domain).
So despite the fact that I had access to both accounts PayPal interfered and did not let either side mark the transaction as legit! Various emails to paypal later I gave up. I did everything they asked, re-verified etc
It was basically impossible to sort out either through the paypal interface, through their customer support, or by phone. At least I know what my customers go through... bye paypal.
Without wanting to justify Paypal's actions wouldn't it be easy to launder money through Paypal if they let you so easily mark a 'suspicious' transaction as legit?
True and I'm not trying to undermine the point that Paypal is a complete PITA but..
One of the properties of money is that it's value can be trusted. If money can be easily laundered then it can't be trusted and it's utility is questionable.
I understand your point, what I'm saying is that even after following all of PayPal's instructions, re-verifications and talking to customer services - as well as telling them (as the buyer) that the transaction is legit, I wasn't able to sort it out.
I recently had to receive a significant payment from a client of mine. It would have been convenient--and worth the fees--for me to use Paypal to receive that money. But after all the stories of frozen accounts and my own experiences, I'm scared to use Paypal for more than a few hundred dollars. I had the client send a check instead.