Paypal has so many things wrong with their company. The majority of employees, even in the business support department, have absolutely no clue what is going on. They will give you an answer to a question, you will call back later, get a new agent, and then you'll get a completely different answer to the same question.
Half the time the customer support is clearly just improvising, because the system is such a mess that there are no clear processes for fairly common situations. Let me give an example. A customer on our website makes an order for digital goods. We collect photo ID, check their IP, call them. The customer then opens an unauthorized claim. We call in and outline the information we have.
Half the time, the agent will tell us that the information we have collected is irrelevant to an unauthorized dispute. Let me clarify that. The photo ID documents, IP address on file, and phone number of the buyer are considered irrelevant in a claim where the buyer alleges they did not authorize a purchase. Absolutely ridiculous, right?
Then magically, if you call back and connect to the right agent, they will actually look at your evidence and use it to help determine the case. These cases can be upwards of $500, and must be extremely common. And yet, somehow, there is no clear standard for what proof we need to collect in order to win an unauthorized dispute.
The company is a headache to work with. Half our time is spent verifying and doing risk management in our business, simply due to the horror that is PayPal.
At one of my old jobs I remember Paypal closing a dispute in favor of the buyer, who had claimed the goods were never received, despite the fact that we supplied a copy of said buyer's signature from when he accepted the delivery...
Things like that would happen on a pretty regular basis.
Usually the FedEx/UPS guy asks what your name is when you sign. It goes into their system as "Delivered at 123 Address by 'John'" as a two part 'proof' that it was delivered to the correct address and by a specific person.
O.K. I'm not a huge fan of PayPal. My biggest gripe is they just got big and stupid. (Holding funds for weeks until a customer gives positive feedback on ebay? I have had mixed results on customer service.)
That said, what product are you selling that you require a picture of the customer? I see this trend popping up and don't like it.
While I have had problems with PayPal practices-- PayPal employees who don't care, etc., when I have given PayPal a receipt from UPS, or Fedex that proves the package was delivered, I did not have a problem with a dispute. (I don't trust usps when I have a gut feeling a customer will file a dispute.)
So what are you selling? I would never ask a customer for a picture ID. Maybe it's just my generation(grew up in the 70's--80's, but I see this trend of mandatory photo ID popping up lately; and don't think it's the right road to go down. Map the IP--fine. Have a gut feeling the customer won't pay ask for cash(leave it up to the customer on delivery of the cash--wire transfer?). I would not ask for their ID, unless I strongly expected fraud.
If I have to give some company, besides a bank my picture; I don't shop there. Asking for anyone picture is beyond rude these days, along with any Photographer taking my picture without my consent. This whole people picture taking thing is done, because of the Internet, and image databases like Google, and have Bing have developed. I see stores putting up "Happy" employee pictures, and it is just rude, an invasion of privacy, and should be abolished? (I have a friend at Costco who is mortified the company wouldn't take down his picture of him doing his job. It was one of those customer appreciation pictures.) Oh yea, you don't need a Costco card to use the pharmacy.
I looked into buying stoptakingmypicture.whatever
and the com is taken. I'm not sure I want to take on another cause; especially because most of you don't seem to care who snaps, asks, or posts your picture? I go on FB, and no one seems to care?
Yes--I understand the need for
ID at DMV, Airport, and passports, etc.)
To any store, or company(Home Depot comes to mind) some of us are really tired of the proliferation of cameras, and don't go to your establishment like we used to.
(Plus--most identity thiefs I have run across(just one so far), sent me a perfect scan of her Drivers license without my asking. I didn't place the order, and never heard back. It is so easy to fake an ID these days. I would be suspicious if any customer sent their ID, even if I asked for it.)
Let me start by saying that I agree with most of your points 100%. I am an advocate for privacy, and I think it's crazy that businesses need to ask people for photo ID to make fairly simple purchases.
I sell digital goods for online games. This means I do not have shipping receipts that will make me eligible for seller protection. The reality is that more and more businesses are providing services and products which are intangible. I'd imagine more than 50% of PayPal transactions these days do not involve shipping labels, yet their entire claim system revolves around them.
What I've noticed in the past 5-8 years is that Paypal has really cut down on real fraud. When I started doing business in 2007, there were kids who couldn't have been older than 15 years old buying stolen PayPal accounts on sketchy forums, and using them to buy digital products like MMO currency. We'd get hit quite regularly with real fraud.
Today, it seems that there are much less of these stolen accounts in circulation. Paypal has clearly cleaned up their act and put a bunch of security measures in place to prevent unauthorized access to people's funds. Nonetheless, unauthorized claims and chargebacks still happen. These days it's just people who spend a bunch of money, and decide later to try and get it all back, everyone else be damned.
There's not much you can do to screen for them placing those disputes. All we can do is collect as much information as possible, from all our buyers, to make sure that no real fraud gets through our systems. I do feel that if we did not have security measures in place, the stolen Paypal accounts might show up again.
But yes, long story short, I really wish there was a better way than collecting people's ID's. Unfortunately, we are in an awkward transition where it is very difficult to prove someone is who they claim to be, without requiring invasive evidence.
What is collecting pictures of photo ID supposed to do for you? Honest question.
Far as I can tell, it only means the scammer was able to copy the photo that was sitting on my computer (likely via the same malware they used to steal my other credentials to begin with). Why was it sitting on my computer to begin with? Because companies like yours demand a copy of my photo ID. Sure I could delete it but we both know most people won't. IMO its a poorly thought out policy to collect photo ID without verifying the person in the photo is in fact the person you're talking to, ala face to face conversation via Skype or similar.
I don't buy things from sites that demand photo ID without verification, I'm not saying you should change your ways, but you're losing customers like me by enforcing that policy.
In all honesty, we request a close up of the ID, as well as a picture of the buyer holding the ID up to the camera with their face in the picture, while holding a piece of paper saying they are buying from our website. It sounds ridiculous, but I know other companies who do this as well.
picture is obviously not enough. How about a short video where customer clearly pronounces the authorization and makes his/her unique "signature" dance?
Stripe isn't better. Dispute processes with digital goods are really hard. I'm fairly sure that the evidence that you submit (to paypal or stripe) is actually evaluated by the bank that the customer filed a dispute with. I don't think this kind of thing can really be held against the payment processor. Every bank probably has it's own processes and standards and every payment processor likely feels the same frustration that we do.
It used to really frustrate me when we would get stripe disputes. Now I have a collection of materials I go out and get, and then just send it out hoping for the best. I try to look at it more like rolling the dice than a business process. It seems to be consistent (in that sending the same materials for similar disputes yields the same result) but it is not at all transparent or an exact science.
Right, although I believe at Stripe, disputes must be initiated through the buyer's bank. The disputes I am describing are unauthorized claims placed through a Paypal account. Disputes placed directly at the bank are more difficult to initiate and usually result in temporary account closure.
They're a lot more work for the buyer. Filing an unauthorized dispute on Paypal can be done by pressing a few buttons online, and then just hoping for the best. Your bank accounts remain intact, and your Paypal account is restored within 24 hours.
To hijack my own post, there needs to be way more transparency on how these cases are decided. If merchants are given a set of rules to follow, and are told what information we must gather to prove payments are authorized, then we can go ahead and collect that information. If our customers refuse to provide that information, and we are faced with a dispute, at least we will understand why we have lost.
It's actually quite easy to get customers to provide proof of identity before completing a service. However, after a service is completed, it becomes basically impossible. If we know what to collect before delivery, we can collect it. And if we are confident that we have the appropriate information to win a dispute, then we can sell more confidently and increase our customer purchase limits through Paypal, thereby increasing the amount of revenue we accept through their service. It would be a win/win situation.
I'm definitely in agreement here. It's interesting the point you make about Paypal's dispute process being more "shoot from the hip" than a run-of-the-mill bank. I wonder if that has to do with organizational structure or exemption from some type of regulation.
I'd also appreciate clearer standards, and better due diligence from the disputer's end. It's not fun to get a "won't let me cancel my account" dispute when the 'Cancel Account' button is high visible and the customer never got in touch with anyone in the organization. It's just a mystery. Are they being dumb? Is our UI awful? Accounts are cancelled successfully every day -- what went wrong here?
It's nice to try to keep in mind that we very much live in the future, and although online banking and payments can be frustrating, I'll likely walk into a bank once a year maximum for the rest of my life.
Stripe doesn't accept every credit/debit card out there and can often cause charges to be declined for ambiguous reasons. In my experience, PayPal doesn't have this issue. PayPal is also a preferred payment option by a lot of customers and visitors, believe it or not. We still have a lot of customers who refuse to use any payment option other than PayPal, which is honestly really disappointing. Removing support for PayPal would mean losing a lot of customers.
Nowadays we have all our clients using Stripe for their CC processing, but back in the day, our clients could use anyone they want. One poor soul choose to use PayPal against our insisting he not. Three days before he had to give the security deposit to the convention center where his organization was hosting their conference, PayPal froze the account. I can't express the stress and despair this poor guy had in voice while talking to him, explaining there was nothing that I could do on my end and that he would have to contact PayPal and try to explain the situation and get the funds released. Ultimately the conference went on, but I never followed up to find out how, if he got the funds released, worked something out with the convention center or something.
I sold an iPhone on eBay once. More than three months later, I received an email from PayPal stating that I'd been charged back because the buyer was disputing her credit card transaction ("Buyer stated that they did not authorize the purchase"). Although I always pull any balance out of PayPal, I owed them the balance. I was required to find proof that I had received the order (right there on eBay), and that I had shipped it (shipping label had been created, and was also visible on eBay). They ended up reversing the chargeback, but the strange thing was how much work I had to do, when it was all systematically available to them.
I once did a chargeback against an eBay merchant who never delivered. PayPal was no help, and they strongly advised me against the chargeback. Ultimately, charge backs are part and parcel of receiving credit card payment, and as a consumer I am glad they exist.
Yes, absolutely; and this is one of the things that Bitcoin advocacy ignores. It goes in the other direction: all transfers are final, legitimate or otherwise.
The problem I have with just about every payment processor out there is something that Bitcoin does well with from a protocol perspective. Right now you can copy a credit card with a mag reader in seconds, compromising some website that accepts credit cards means no limits to how much you can spend with other merchants, even having your credit card number stored in an RFID tag that can be read from a few feet away inconspicuously!
The status quo might mean that money can be clawed back after it's sent but identity fraud (or using someone else's credentials) should not be a problem in 2015, we've had SIM cards that can provide a secure method for identifying a physical device since the 90s. Why can't any payment processor come up with a decent alternative to having a magic number that you have to give out all the time that can be used to authorize arbitrary transactions? Maybe eventually every citizen will get a smart card of some kind and we can just use that.
You should have already (or very soon be) getting new credit cards in the mail with a SIM chip in them.
After October 15, 2015 credit card companies (instead of merchants) will be liable for financial losses due to credit card fraud where the consumer is forced to use the mag stripe. (In the US of course)
Except that entire issue really boils down to the incompetence of the banks; Apple Pay itself is fine, it's the initial step of having the bank verify and confirm the payment info being loaded in that's the problem, since the bank will "verify" that a dancing bear with a party hat and a clown nose is actually you.
We're not talking about the end result, we're talking about the security of a specific method of payment.
If we were discussing how insecure IE 6 is and how it can get you hacked, then the fact that using Chrome to directly give your info to a shady site can have the same result (get you hacked), doesn't say anything for the relative security of Chrome vs IE 6.
That's right. ApplePay does nothing to mitigate the credit card fraud problem. And until banks get better at verifying a stolen card isn't being loaded into ApplePay the problem is actually much worse.
ApplePay does a huge amount to mitigate the credit card fraud problem for it's users. The fact that it can be used to process cards stolen others is irrelevant.
Reputation systems and multi-sig escrows are not substitutions for chargebacks.
There are plenty of instances where you need to refund something the day after you received it, by which point the escrow money is long gone. Then the solution becomes "Hold transactions in escrow for 30 days" which isn't a solution.
And reputation systems don't work on the internet, especially when purchasing is involved. How do you competitively solve this problem?
If you want, you can use third parties with chargeback support, or escrow with multisig. Bitcoin gives you the option to choose exactly what level of security you want.
I once ordered some things together with a few friends. The total sum ended up around $3500, much more than I usually buy for. The buy went through and the company got the message from Paypal that everything was ok and the money was on their account. Sadly they had a vacation day (small home-run company) and did not send the items directly. Two days later when they were back, Paypal had just pulled the money back from their account and left the message that the user disputes the buy or something like that. I had done no such thing. One month later I got the money back except for $20 for 'investigation charges' or some such...
If the company would not have been on vacation at that time they would have sent the goods and we would have gotten both the things and our money back. I ended up transfering the money via the bank as normal and got the stuff about $100 cheaper than over Paypal.
You haven't said what jurisdiction you are in, but are you saying you were effectively charged for the item before it was put in shipment? For some forms of payment in some jurisdictions, that is strictly illegal.
It's just network policies that prohibit charging before shipment, so it wouldn't be problematic if this was an ACH payment.
If it was a credit card payment, most likely PayPal had just placed an authorization and was holding off on capturing. That would explain their aggressive timing -- if they let the auth hang for too long that would result in higher interchange fees, and eventually the auth would expire.
Doesn't PayPal get around that by charging your credit card to buy credit on Paypal, which is then used to purchase the item you want? Or do they only claim that when it is convenient to do so.
Huh? This story doesn't really make much sense. PayPal don't charge investigation fees, don't cancel orders after two days (how would they even know to do this?) and don't allow fees to be passed on to customers ("$100 cheaper").
Yes, how would they even cancel an order with another company? What are you talking about? I have never claimed that they canceled my order.
They do however own the money on your account as long as you keep the money on your paypal account. They had just pulled the money back from the sellers account and gave it back to me again (much later). At that time the SEK->UK pounds exchange rate was much lower and the bank transfer usually ends up a few percent cheaper that paypal too.
I haven't gotten 'investigation fees' (or at least not that I've noticed) but I would just not use them anyways for the very reason that they're so much less accessible than stripe.
I once had someone initiate a chargeback over 5 transactions of 10$ they paid via CC. It ended up costing me 100$ because on top of the 10$ they charged back, every transaction also added a 10$ fee for being charged back. So I was scammed, and then had to give paypal 50$ for it on top of that.
Are you sure those were from PayPal? I've been charged those fees, but they were passing on the fees from the credit card company that the payment came from.
Well, that could be the case. Either way, someone sent me 50$ and I ended up losing those and paying another 50$. That shouldn't really happen when you just have a private paypal account. This wasn't a commercial transaction.
Agreed, $25M is nothing and they should be slapped with a much higher penalty. PayPal is the scummiest company on Earth.
A buyer opened a dispute with them, and PayPal robbed me of $2500, tried fighting them for 2 years but eventually gave up.
PayPal has some serious issues with regards to what you say, but I used it last summer to transfer money from USA to Europe for my daughter and the fee was a fraction of what the bank wanted. Banks can be pretty scummy in their own way.
Have you ever tried TransferWise? With customers and family around the world, I'm thinking of switching to them to handle transfers instead of Paypal/Stripe. They seem to have the most honest fees around.
Disclaimer: not affiliated with them. Just genuinely curious.
About TransferWise. I checked their site based on your recommendation. However, something bothers me.
There's a form on the Top-right corner. "You send," "You Receive." I tried checking how much would be received in dollars if I sent $1000. However, the form wouldn't let me. It doesn't allow comparison between the same currency.
It felt shady to me.
I've sent this message to them already. But wow! They do support a lot of countries - far more than Stripe. I'm surprised I've never heard of them before.
The site says "transfer money abroad". If for some reason they only want the more difficult kind of transfer, it would help to make that clear.
I'm confused by you asking why when the answer is both obvious and explicitly stated in parent comments. Sending someone money in a different country, but they happen to use the same currency.
Since transfers are bank account to bank account, this would mean somebody abroad (say in Europe) would have USD denominated bank account? As far as I know TransferWise does require your recipient to have a bank account in the location where they want to receive the money, meaning usually transfers between accounts denominated in different currencies.
If its within EU there is of course no point in using TransferWise as EUR-EUR transactions are practically free.
It wasn't clear to me which is why I asked. I agree for that case the headline is a bit misleading though.
In the EU it's nearly always free to transfer funds between the same currency, even between different countries. Banks still get people with the exchange rates or high fees to make transfers between currencies. TransferWise is a UK company, so that being their primary market, they took off from European workers in the UK wanting to send money home.
Just for comparisons sake, my use case is transferring money between Ireland (EUR) and the UK (GBP) and vice versa. Compared to my bank they have both better exchange rates, lower fees, and are quicker.
I have used TransferWise for both USD and SEK/EUR transfers to INR. Works perfectly, their time estimates are spot on (usually I receive it on the day or one day early) and the exchange fees are very competitive (and I've probably compared most other forms of transfers - including Bitcoin/Localcoin).
I've used Xoom in the past as to send money to family in the UK, it's always been fast and easy.
However they charge $4.99 up to $2999, with TransferWise there's no fee and slightly better rates (0.6346 vs. 0.6262). I'm going to try them out next time, thanks for the tip!
TransferWise converts your money at the mid-market rate and matches you with people sending in the other direction. That's why it costs so little.
My understanding - after you've given the money you want to transfer to TransferWise, they find someone in your destination country who wishes to transfer money to the country where you are (kind of like a swap). This way, they cut off the banks and their fees and charge you a lower fee.
That's how I understood it, but then I thought "what if there's no one in that country?" Do they use their own funds or does the recipient wait several weeks.
I imagine it's the former, but at the time I just used SWIFT - rather expensive, but guaranteed to work everywhere.
It works by them having $90m in VC funding from people like Richard Branson and Peter Thiel which they then use to subsidise the super cheap transfers with the aim of growing big.
It works well, you initiate a bank account transfer from one country (denominated in say USD) and in a few days your recipient receives it as a deposit in their bank account in their local currency. In between TransferWise keeps you updated with status via e-mail and on the website.
I always compare with my normal bank when I'm forced to use paypal and so far they have always been slightly higher than the bank. I live in Sweden though.
My wife uses Nordea and they go out on a limb for her every time she needs something (and she lives in the US with me, so hardly can go into the bank for things).
Curiously for use abroad ICA banken (affiliated with the grocery store of the same name) turns out to be really beneficial, free withdrawals anywhere in the world and completely aligned with remote customer service (as they don't in fact have any branches that they can ask you to visit..).
I've heard good and bad things about both of them. I've been looking for a better international alternative, though.
Simple bank looks absolutely amazing (https://www.simple.com/), but sadly they are US-only. Does anyone know a similar bank to Simple that is friendlier to international travelers/EU citizens?
To add to the anti-PayPal anecdotes: I once used it to checkout from a merchant that I hadn't used before and didn't trust; there was no shipping charge added until I completed the order. Given the merchant didn't respond to emails, I contacted PayPal. They couldn't do anything until the order was shipped, then after it did they didn't care because the guarantee only covers receiving the item that was promised.
It's a combination of a bad UX that won't confirm the price of the order until you've confirmed and service that's lacking compared to using a credit card.
This is something I've seen as well - PayPal does not like the idea (for some reason) of people using their service for events. I'm personally aware of two event coordinators who had large sums of money tied up by PayPal at the last minute (around $10k and $20k) so that I never used them for my own events. Stripe all the way, never a problem.
I gather that PayPal's secret to success is strong anti-fraud measures (and not caring about false positives), and one of them is freezing accounts that get a flood of money all at once. That also is a pattern you see in events and charities set up for a new disaster.
PayPal does not consider conferences a "false positive". Small events often fail: the speakers cancel, the venue falls through, not enough people buy tickets to cover costs... if you are using incoming ticket money today for things, you are essentially taking investments, not payments. PayPal's response to this is to hold most of the money until one day after the conference, as otherwise, when your conference fails, and the attendees make a ton of chargebacks, they know they are going to not be able to get their money back and they will be out thousands of dollars.
This is not unreasonable behavior on their part, and is part of a very consistent pattern of response: they don't let you use their service to sell promises of any kind. This actually leads to PayPal being very user-focussed--essentially always protecting users from even having to think about whether something might end up stealing their money--which is actually good for those for users, and by proxy, good for those of us who use PayPal to sell legitimate products.
(FWIW, you can use PayPal to sell event tickets, but be prepared to appreciate what is happening in the mind of PayPal--which should hopefully cause you to not being unreasonable or abrasive in your communication, though even if they were being bad that isn't an excuse to get angry at them--and reach out to their underwriting department to prove you are financially solvent in a way that doesn't rely on the success of the event, and preferably also provide evidence that your event will also work.)
> be prepared to appreciate what is happening in the mind of PayPal--which should hopefully cause you to not being unreasonable or abrasive in your communication, though even if they were being bad that isn't an excuse to get angry at them--and reach out to their underwriting department to prove you are financially solvent in a way that doesn't rely on the success of the event, and preferably also provide evidence that your event will also work.
The problem with this is that people do jump through all of these hoops (and more) and still wind up with their money frozen for interminable periods of time. That is the source of frustration and anger with PayPal - legitimate businesses jumping through every hoop and still winding up with frozen funds, held for at least 6 months.
> This actually leads to PayPal being very user-focussed
For s/user/buyer/: I'll add the notable exception that is the root of this complaint, virtually everything about the Buy It Now business. There are the parts of the complaint, and then there's the fact that they've been badgering desktop users for long years to sign up for their credit service by making the Paypal user experience suck every single time you interact with them. It's almost amazing to me that it was actually worse for anyone who ever clicked "Yes" on one of those infernal dialogues.
I have rarely found a company's user experience so systemically hateful as Paypal. To the point where, if there is virtually any other option for payment, I'll take it.
On the other hand, that's the normal way of running small events. There are a number of annual events that don't have a limited company organizing the thing and can't raise a 10k-100k float from those organising it; they have to operate in this manner.
You have however confirmed the value of having a "sweep paypal money into an unconnected bank account ASAP" operations rule.
I do wonder whether anyone's ever taken them to small claims court over an event like this and won, possibly by default.
(The original article is a straightforward violation of the Consumer Credit Act, I believe)
If the event 'has' to operate in this manner, how will the event organizer provide refunds should something happen and they have to cancel their event?
I ask because planning an event in my 2nd hand experience of weddings and such usually involves more than a few non-refundable expenses, which seem like they would prevent them from being able to provide a refund to everyone in the event of a cancellation.
I mean it just seems like Paypal's established practice, of tying up event money unless it is proven that the money isn't actually needed and will remain available in case of a charge back, is a pretty reasonable one. I mean I have been written bad checks by roommates for rent before, it is pretty damn hard to get money from people who don't have it so despite taking legal action I still haven't seen any of the money, I feel like Paypal is potentially preventing many instances of this.
Edit: Thinking back on it many of the small events I have attended ask for a $X donation from people, who in return will receive a ticket. This seems like it would get around the issue in the same way Kickstarters which don't deliver avoid the issue.
> If the event 'has' to operate in this manner, how will the event organizer provide refunds should something happen and they have to cancel their event?
One method would be for one of the things purchased with the current payments being insurance.
Did not know such a thing existed, thanks. However as a minor clarification on what you said, after reading over a few descriptions by various providers it is clear however that the insurance itself would have to be purchased by the event organizer and reimbursed through the current payments, as the event insurance cost itself is not covered by event insurance. At least not in any of the lists of nonrefundable reimbursements I am looking at, so it would represent a small amount of money risked by event organizer.
So as long as an event organizer has bought event insurance already, and proves that to Paypal, then yes they should release the money.
This all makes perfect sense. My only problem is that this is not communicated with the seller clearly. If it is a stated policy that Paypal will hold the host of a conference's money until the event materializes to cover their costs then no party involved has a right to feel cheated. Instead Paypal is classifying this risk which is inherent to their business, which is the risk of the conference materializing, as fraud. This, in my opinion, is diseptive
>though even if they were being bad that isn't an excuse to get angry at them--and reach out to their underwriting department to prove you are financially solvent in a way that doesn't rely on the success of the event, and preferably also provide evidence that your event will also work.)
This works well for only the paying side of the user base. Yes, PayPal is a very convenient way to pay, e.g. in an Internet store.
Those who receive the money have much harder time, though. All complains I saw were from guys having their accounts frozen when money pour in too fast.
Most likely, the other providers have not achieved the same level of "success" that Paypal have, and therefore haven't reached steady state in terms of risk losses. Or, they have painted themselves in a corner by advertising that they are much more business-friendly than PayPal, and are taking losses on the chin in the hopes of growing/inventing their way out of the problem.
Why has PayPal not started some sort of program (extra verification, etc) so that legit people attempting to do these things can use them without running into anti-fraud?
As long as we're accumulating anecdotes: I run the website for an organization that puts on shows every month. We sell tickets through Paypal and have never had a problem. We're talking hundreds of $s rather than thousands, though.
I am beginning to think that probably a good comparison of PayPal would be a firewall where people report packets to be looked at manually. Braintree works differently and should not have the same problems.
I have a friend who's small business was killed by Paypal. He had a board game shop (about five employees), but most of his business was online. He used Paypal as his bank account (dumb idea, I know.) During a christmas rush Paypal suddenly froze the account. I don't remember the exact reasons they gave, but it was something like he had too much money or was receiving money too fast.
What if you just need a page (the page can be external to your own site) that accepts payment and emails you a receipt, and you don't want to write any server-side code? Can Stripe do that the way PayPal can?
But all of these just hand you back a token which you then have to pass to your server for actually processing the charge. What if you don't want to set up any server-side code? Or am I missing something...
I once made a major purchase off eBay and received merchandise that was substantially different than what I ordered.
It took 4 months, many exchanges with PayPal via their "dispute center" and many phone calls to have my purchase refunded. They even closed my dispute at one point claiming that I hadn't returned the merchandise because their support staff was too incompetent to check the DHL tracking # on DHL's web site to verify that I had indeed returned the merchandise (at my expense).
I will never make a major purchase with PayPal again.
you're supposed to handle disputes for ebay merchandise through ebay channels, not directly with paypal. This may have been part of the cause of difficulty.
Sorry, but you are incorrect. I followed the exact instructions that were provided to me at the time (circa 2009) on eBay's own web site for opening a dispute case with the eBay seller.
I've noticed and felt uneasy about their UX around Paypal credit. When checking out, the option is "Use Paypal Credit" or "Use Paypal Balance" -- in standard jargon, of having 'credit' or 'credits' at a payment site, to me those mean roughly the same thing. I've almost made the mistake a couple times, but caught myself. To others it surely could be deceptive, and probably did cause errors. Totally scammy.
It's really bad. I complained but got no response, and it's not a surprise. I'm glad that this (among other things) didn't fly.
That's rich. PayPal's business has primarily been based on obfuscating the difference between card payments and bank drafts, and steering consumers to a choice that is not in their best interests.
Bank drafts (ACH) are almost all profit for PayPal but much worse for customers, as the consumer protections are weaker, reward programs are nonexistent and there is a risk of overdraft and associated bank penalties. But every time you sign into your PayPal account that you've linked to your bank account, it defaults to paying by bank draft. Every time. There is no preference.
They are just hoping that a percentage of their customer base won't notice or bother to switch to paying by card (which is not as easy as it could be).
At one point PayPal's website was so broken in the web browsers I used that it refused to let me log in. This had the brilliant side effect that I was able to use my credit card through them; I never could figure out how not to use ACH when I was logged in.
> The proposed settlement states that the company will set up a $15m fund to compensate affected customers and pay a further $10m fine to the bureau.
Why must there be a fund? Paypal knows exactly who they gave the service to by default, and exactly what interest and other charges they received from them. So why can't they just be ordered to immediately return the full amount to each affected user?
That may be possible in this case, but the laws are written for the general case. The fund is an approach that allows users with grievances to get relief over a variety of mediums and timescales.
Even here, who knows what data paypal has retained about who used the feature and when?
> Even here, who knows what data paypal has retained about who used the feature and when?
They will have records of how they get their income for accounting and tax purposes. If they don't, I expect they'd be in far more trouble with the tax authorities.
They still try to trick me into using back account instead of credit card, even though I've set credit card as default... I know CC processing costs them more, but It's so annoying.
This is typical of them. To do my best to take a jab at them every time I can, when I am forced to pay with PayPal, I specifically select my AMEX to pay because it has the highest transaction fees for them.
It's ridiculous that Paypal is literally a bank at this point, yet somehow subject to none of the same regulations and consumer (or merchant) protections as one.
> PayPal is accused of making the service the default option for new sign-ups without making clear that it was doing so.
Different but related: No matter how many times I tell them that I want to pay with my real credit card instead of "direct bank transfer", it never persists. I must have set this as the default in my settings a hundred times. No luck.
Funny, I had it the other way round. I wanted paypal to pull the money from my bank account, but the UI would insist on using my credit card (it would always jump back to credit card).
!@(*#& I was one of those tricked by this scheme which is 5,000% obviously deceptive. There is ZERO chance that Paypal folks were unaware that people would accidentally use the credit product.
I wrote them a complaint and changed the default but never heard back. FUCK YOU Paypal, you MUGGED me and stole money from me.
I am CERTAIN they end up getting more than $25m out of this scheme. This settlement just means they have to share the profit with the UK Gov.
We need a class action suit in the U.S. demanding they return the late fees they criminally charged people like me.
While I don't share your level of rage, I've used "Paypal Credit" and BillMeLater (before it became Paypal Credit) accidentally several times.
For a long time I refused to add a bank account to my PayPal account simply so my credit card would be my default payment option. Then BillMeLater had an attractive promotion, so I used it 1x and paid off my balance before it accrued any interest.
Since then, BillMeLater and now PayPal Credit are my default payment options. There's no way to change this, and it's a very consumer-unfriendly practice.
I'm glad they're getting fined, and I sincerely hope this results in their allowing user-defined default payment settings.
The fact that "Paypal Credit" is my default payment choice bothers me to no end. If you explicitly select anything else, it demands you log in even after logging in on most sites.
I never thought I'd be on the receiving end of the Paypal horror-stick, as I am a consumer and not a merchant, but wow.
Actually not the UK govt. The fine was levied by the CFPB:
"The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) is an independent agency of the United States government responsible for consumer protection in the financial sector."
When I signed up they gave me an option for it to not become the default, but then gave me at least one other page trying to trick me into setting it as the default.
To be clear: it is stupidly obvious that when nobody has even heard of a thing called "Paypal Credit" and you see "pay with Paypal Credit" it sounds exactly like "pay with Paypal Balance" if you already have a balance.
Why the hell would anyone ever use credit when they have funds in their Paypal balance‽ Because they were tricked into it and then assume that they are done… until they get the late fee.
When I was much younger I was doing freelance work for some guy I was referred. He said he was using his girlfriends account because he doesn't use Paypal himself and this was a one off job. I thought, "yeah, that's fine, cool."
Anyway, a while later he disputes that I didn't do the work for him (I did, with evidence) and Paypal take the money back, freeze both mine and his and that's that. They won't re-open my account because it's been associated with a fraudulent account.
They tell me that this guy had been using someone else's account and that I should go to the police. The police say that the guy doesn't live at the registered address, never has. And that was the end of it. Even though Paypal knew it wasn't my fault they wouldn't unfreeze my account.
That was about 8 years ago and it's only recently I've setup a new account to accept donations for my project. And I did that begrudgingly...
I NEVER use Paypal for accepting payments online, it's always Stripe.
That's how these things work though. If you ran a brick & mortar store and some guy bought $1000 of items from you with his "girlfriend's" credit card (which turns out later was a stolen card), you'll eat the chargeback AND not get your product returned to you.
Anyone who accepts payments of any kind is taking that risk. Stripe/Square/whoever operates the same way. Even cash is a risk - if you get passed counterfeits and don't catch them at first, the secret service will confiscate them and you won't be compensated.
Any settlement which allows the company to only pay a fine and not admit wrongdoing is not a deterrent against future wrongdoing. The fine nearly always is far outweighed by the profit. It wouldn't surprise me to discover that the potential for fines are part of the product planning process.
I've been very wary of PayPal given the vocality of those who've had issues, but I've used it a couple of times, in a couple of different ways, and have seen no issues.
I've used PayPal to:
* Buy/sell things from eBay (~$2k in transactions)
* Send money/receive money from friends (~$5k in transactions)
* Use their PayPal card abroad as a pair of primary cards
(one in my name, on in my girlfriend's name) ($~2k in
transactions in various foreign countries)
I even had to settle a disputed transaction from eBay on a sale I made, and though they returned the ~$140 USD to the buyer, since I provided proof of delivery in the form of a tracking number, I was "covered" under their sellers protection policy, and didn't lose any of my money.
Maybe so. On the flip-side, let's not pretend PayPal was this once benevolent entity that's been corrupted since Musk departed. It has always been sketchy and the subject of much complaint.
Sometime in 2002: PayPal was acquired in September of that year, and he'd already founded SpaceX in June. So, more than a decade, which is pretty "forever" in this industry.
Elon Musk seems like a sympathetic guy, but when I'm reminded that he made his money from PayPal, I sort of hope he gets hurt, just a little, in an electric-propelled rocket accident.
I think PayPal has been instrumental in illustrating to people that their money once it is in the paypal system is no longer THEIR money
I had trouble before with paypal holding onto funds for months nearly killing my business, when I contacted the Financial Services Ombudsman, their reply was along the lines of "they are a private limited company in this country, they can do what they want"
PayPal is not a bank, although people seem to think it is, and they seem to be more than happy to let people think that. It's long overdue for some serious regulatory oversight.
PayPal is a fully licensed and regulated bank in some regions including all of the EU, and is licensed and regulated by each US state it operates in.
Many of the startup alternatives people recommend seem to be operating on a "try to grow fast enough that we can afford to operate legally when states start suing us" basis, as they aren't similarly licensed.
In Europe, paypal registered as an actual bank (in luxembourg). Incidentally, i haven't had problems with them as a merchant through the years other than the fact that they ask for too much documentation in order to accept payments more than a few thousand, and don't have enough withdrawal options sometimes. If i used a bank instead i m sure it would incur much higher fees and bureaucracy.
Because federal regulators said so over 10 years ago. They don't accept deposits as defined by FDIC, engage in fractional reserve banking, or otherwise meet the definitions of a bank in the US. They're more like an escrow service, holding funds on your behalf in accounts at actual banks. They are a money transmitting entity, which means obtaining 54 state/territory licenses to operate in the entire US, and they hold all of those.
This is the product PayPal advertises in every single purchase customers make online. I don't understand why any serious business uses PayPal for payments when the company is injecting an extra step (or two) into the purchase workflow. How many sales do merchants lose because of the interruption?
I sell a software production online. The purchase page has a simple credit card payment form, and off the side is a small "PayPal" button an an alternative payment method.
Despite the fact that the PayPal button is tiny compared to the credit card form, a full 2/3 of customers use PayPal to complete the purchase.
That's why people use PayPal, because a large percentage of customers prefer it over credit card payments.
Also, I prefer PayPal disputes because they don't charge a chargeback fee like credit cards.
For me, it's not that I prefer PayPal, it's that I don't want to give my credit card details to a business if I'm not sure they can keep it reasonably secure.
And the fewer places I have my card the better. You might get the same results with Amazon Payments, unless you have an international audience.
> For me, it's not that I prefer PayPal, it's that I don't want to give my credit card details to a business if I'm not sure they can keep it reasonably secure.
This is exactly why I use PayPal. I would far rather use a more reputable interface system, but I am NOT keen on handing my CC info out to every shop online.
First you have to figure out how to use the webpage / app to get the virtual credit card number. Once you know, you still have to log into a separate service and click a few buttons. With PayPal or Amazon Payments you just click your password manager's button to log you in right in the checkout process on the same webpage.
Some banks will issue one-time use numbers for your cards, limited to a certain transaction amount and then they're gone. A pretty cool idea, but until they have an app that generates these numbers at the push of a button nobody really uses them. Too much of a hassle.
Well, here in Germany, maybe europe in general, you can't assume that your customers own a credit card. I like Stripe a lot, but using it as the only payment option wouldn't work for us.
Credit cards have become more common here recently but for a long time it was either Paypal connected to the customers bank account or plain old bank wire transfer. Sure, there are some niche services like Sofortüberweisung, but they never gained the status of Paypal.
Right now, any other payment company could hold your money, kill your cat, fill your car with stinky waste, spoof rude emails to your friends and family, and finally blow raspberries at you, and it would still be heads and shoulders above the stinkfest of paypal.
I am paying my payment processor 10% - 15% of each transaction in processing and cross border fee, because, I am told:
1. They are small, and don't get good exchange rates
2. My location makes for a long money route, so I pay between 4% - 8% in cross border fee on every transaction
The above fee doesn't even include the final transaction and conversion fee when I withdraw the USD balance to my home currency.
From where I stand, I would be saving 3% - 5%, or more with PayPal, on every transaction. I am willing to take the risk.
> Wish normal people could just pay off the government to avoid facing consequences for their actions...
Paying money is a consequence for the actions, and "normal people" enter into civil settlements or criminal plea bargains where the only consequence is a cash penalty/damage payment/fine, sometimes, in the criminal case, taking a lesser charge (that admits such a fine) than the original charge (which may not allow a fine instead of imprisonment) in the course of such a settlement.
In the case of civil offenses, settlements without admission of guilt are fairly normal; this is not possible in the case of criminal charges, where the imposition of a penalty (even as a plea bargain) requires a plea of guilty. However, when both civil and criminal offenses are potentially chargeable, settling the civil charges and the government dropping the criminal charges is, again, not unheard of.
So, really, there's nothing out of the realm of what is possible for normal people here.
Yeah but you're still charged with something and it's still on your record. It would be more like if you could write the gov't a check to 'pretend this never happened', with nothing on your record, and probably a written promise from the gov't that they'll never say anything bad about you.
> Yeah but you're still charged with something and it's still on your record.
Not if its a civil settlement.
> It would be more like if you could write the gov't a check to 'pretend this never happened', with nothing on your record, and probably a written promise from the gov't that they'll never say anything bad about you.
The government says negative things about firms that enter into a settlement without admitting to guilt all the time, including about the specific conduct that led to the investigation that was settled.
In fact, in this specific case, the CFPB said all kinds of negative things about PayPal and the actions that led to this settlement in the press release announcing the settlement. [0]
So, its hardly at all analogous to "a written promise from the gov't that they'll never say anything bad about you".
The consent decree also includes additional restrictions (beyond those in the law) on and oversight of PayPal's behavior going forward, so its also very much not analogous to "pretend this never happened".
This is only an anecdote, but I use PP to process payments for my side-business, selling a small gadget for a fairly specialized market. My experience has been overwhelmingly positive. And I closely monitor traffic on web forums for comments from customers, which are fairly frequent, so I think I'd know if PP had negatively affected their experience, or if they were hesitant to buy my product due to PP.
Most of the complaints that I've read about, concerning PP, have to do with the eBay side of the equation. And it probably helps in my case that I sell a tangible good at a pretty modest price. I don't have an eBay store, but sell through my personal web page and hand-crafted web order form. Simply based on the my little corner of the market, it wouldn't break my heart if eBay and PP split up.
Two benefits of PP for me, both are kinda weird:
1. I can just download the entire year's list of transactions, dump it into a spreadsheet, add some more columns, and it becomes my ledger. I spend no more than a few hours a year on accounting.
2. PP has a deal with the post office. You can generate a first class shipping label from your transaction, whereas the post office website only offers priority mail and above, so PP reduces my shipping costs. And I've also had fabulous service from the post office, so maybe I'm just a freak. ;-)
With all this said, I can't discount the horror stories. It's useful information, since I certainly wouldn't want a decline in PP's reputation to affect the trust that people put into my own business.
Things like this amaze me. I really would like to be a fly on the wall just to see if this is incompetence or if they actively choose to deceive people. I would love to hear the conversations that occur around this.
I've never worked for a company that was shady, so this really does fascinate me that companies do this and think they can get away with it (assuming, of course, that this simply was not incompetence).
This has been a long time coming in my opinion, but $25m is nothing for Paypal. I have had my fair share of troubles over the years, but none worse than the time I got paid for doing some freelance work into my Paypal account, I ended up with a balance of around $8k and it took me 3 months to get it released. I went through their ID process, sent them stuff and would wait a week only to be told to send it again.
The problem with Paypal is they are too big to care. They've essentially become a bank, nobody knows what is going on, you get passed on from department to department when you need answers and they are always quick to freeze your Paypal balance when they want you to do something or want to insinuate you have done something wrong.
I would have slapped them with a $100m penalty, $25m is just too little to make any kind of impact or different to Paypal.
Many years ago I tried to sell a World of Warcraft account via. Paypal. I got lots of buyers -- all of whom tried to pay with stolen paypal accounts.
After they made a payment I would ask for a photo-copy of their ID, or to wait 3-days to make sure the payment went through properly (Paypal's normalized way of handling this was to mark the Payment as confirmed leaving the seller thinking everything was okay only to reverse it say 3 days later, screwing the seller). If I recall one of the buyers even offered to try a different account when I told them the payment got flagged.
In about a week's time I had received $5000 or so worth of transfers (all of them from stolen accounts!) Subsequently Paypal froze my account. I never was able to sell that World of Warcraft account either.
I am no fan of Paypal.
That said, I've sold 6 figures worth of virtual MMO goods on Paypal over last 15 years. There have been a few fraud cases, but with proper security precautions they have been few. Then again I mostly dealt with EQ not WoW.
Paypal did freeze my account some time around 2003, it took major faxing to get it to unfreeze.
Paypal is more convenient/safer for casual buyers than most other payment options starting from CC ending with Bitcoin(I use/own BTC). I don't mind paying with Paypal for some small item from China but would be hesitant to use a CC.
At least that is the perception that Paypal has worked hard to cultivate.
PayPal isn't a merchant platform -- it's a payment service so yes you can accept personal payments, it might not be covered by seller protection if that's what you mean. That's no excuse for terrible security policies though. I mean literally every buyer had a stolen account!
> How were you determining the accounts were stolen?
About 3-5 days after each payment was confirmed Paypal would reverse it due to it being unauthorized. More so the payment would show up as confirmed/valid initially, at no point during the process did Paypal make you aware of the possibility of the payment being reversed nor to help you confirm/validate that it was in fact authorized by the account holder.
> Also, as much as we would love to say companies are responsible for the security of our accounts, losing credentials is also a user issue.
Of course it's a user issue at a certain scale, but when it's that prevalent I am inclined to say that company is primarily at fault.
It was just a WoW account, so not a big deal for me, but I'd really hate to be a merchant or someone otherwise relying on Paypal day-to-day, that sounds absolutely horrible.
In theory, they shouldn't. Its not allowed by Blizzard, and if memory serves, Blizzard considers it a breach of EULA and takes the account down as a whole. PayPal was supposed to be cracking down when this was rampant, because essentially its an illegal product.
Though really, paying for crap is different than selling it. More of an eBay domain problem than PayPal. Two totally different businesses.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but breaking the EULA does NOT make an action illegal. It puts you in breach with an agreement you had with Blizzard, so they could terminate your account. But that doesn't make it a law. Blizzard may have some means to enforce the "contract" in civil court, though.
The difficulty comes in when the only use of the account, which would consist of the username and password, would be to log into Blizzard's servers, and since the account has been sold, it would be doing so in violation of the EULA and thus accessing their servers and circumventing a login without protection. This can possibly be a federal crime (there are a few cases tried as such, though it is rare).
So while the item being sold isn't illegal, it is pretty close to have no legal uses.
That said, I rather paypal (or any other business) not be the arbiter of law.
My account was permanently frozen a few weeks ago with no (valid) explanation. I have $2k sitting in their that I cannot retrieve for 180 days.
I also bought an iPhone on Ebay using PayPal weeks before. It turned out to be stolen (i.e. it was killed) and returned it back to the seller immediately. The seller issued me a refund via PayPal using an e-check that not surprisingly bounced. Took me hours on the phone over a few weeks, being transferred back and forth between PayPal and eBay (both parties told me to take it up with the other), in order for PayPal to finally open a ticket to dispute the transaction and force a refund to me.
People's lives have been seriously damaged because of this -- why no criminal charges??
This is no difference than being caught with $100MM bag of heist outside the bank and giving cops $1.5MM as a form of penalty.
What is also very interesting, is that, yes PayPal is probably one of the most hated tech company in the world, right after Comcast, which I don't believe offers anything outside US. Then why we glorify those like Musk that made its initial fortune off of PayPal sale?? I never heard pointing fingers at PayPal founder, but ultimately should't those in charge be accountable??
PayPal's evil ways predate that acquisition. My own bad experience happened before it was owned by eBay. It was the usual - arbitrary freezing of account due to unspecified suspicious activity that they would provide no response about and was going to take six months to resolve. I eventually got my funds out and never kept a balance there again.
The "PayPal mafia" is such an ironically apt title for the group that founded it. So proud of their anti-fraud tech which is actually horrid - just sweep up anyone's account for whatever reason and call it successful fraud prevention.
I closed my PP account 2 years ago and would never consider using the service again. Once upon a time it was a necessary evil, now it is no longer necessary (just evil).
Amazon marketplace is significantly cheaper and cleaner. Here in Europe a lot of eBay sellers are 100% not paying any VAT either it is only a matter of time before they or ebay endup in serious trouble over that.
eBay's gotten pretty awful, too. Fees, awful CS... I've not used the site seriously since the asinine decision to not allow feedback for buyers. They've become downright hostile to people who don't intend to make a living on the site.
PayPal said I can't change the country on the account but instead have to close it and open a new one. I closed the account and let them know I'm not opening a new and it's not (only) because of that inconvenience, but for all the crap that I keep reading they do to other users. It my mind it's a crappy company and the only impactful way you can express that is by not using it.
Hm paypal. I used my account last month. I used paypal regularly to make online payments (never in order to receive money). I had no major problem, only strange thing is that... In order to un-subscribe from services (e.g. like the NBA league pass, which I wanted for a month, not lifetime) I need to follow a step-by-step tutorial because the subscriptions listing is literally hidden.
The issue that they've been nailed with isn't so much that they over charged people, its that they signed people up without notifying them.
If you are using the service intentionally, then you aren't affected.
On another note, I have been using PayPal for years and haven't had any real issues with it. I mean it takes a while for eBay to get the money to me after a sale, but other than that its not bad. Have I just been lucky? Or is anyone else not experiencing problems that others are?
The main issue is that "PayPal Credit" and "PayPal Balance" are nearly indiscernible concepts to the end user, and could cause you to sign up for the "credit" when you really just meant to use your "credits."
I had a missed payment on a less than $10 balance and was hit with a $25 overage. I complained, had the overage removed, paid my bill and since then have never used their service again.
Maybe a lot of these issues will be resolved when eBay spins PayPal off? Most of these issues seemed to have really started right around the same time they were acquired.
They run consistently obviously illegal spam/marketing practices. Why do they get a free pass? Is the "mafia" part of PayPal mafia too strong? Too many cross-bred investor attachments all the way down making some services "untouchable" no matter what they do?
We need something like the EFF but for out of control tech companies needing to be denounced for the public good.
I'm missing the LinkedIn comparison. PayPal handles money. Their track record of horrible customer service has caused a lot of financial trouble for people and institutions.
What are the complaints with LinkedIn? As far as I know, it's more of spammy contacting behavior. Which I get that's annoying, but not even in the same ballpark as PayPal.
The claim I heard is (from the perspective of the complaint), that they "use your gmail account [with your nominal permission] and get the names of your contacts, to whom they then 'impersonate' you." (scare quotes because I don't view it this way.) i.e. your contacts will get a message "from you" as though you were asking them to do something. Even though you have not actually taken that action.
Personally this is not my perspective, and it doesn't bother me because when I receive these messages it's pretty obviously automated mail from linkedin, and it's pretty obvious that LinkedIn got it from the person's email contacts. It doesn't cause me to think the person actually necessarily took any action or sent that to me themselves. I also haven't been bothered by the volume of it. To me, it's the kind of thing that's a small price to pay for hacking a network of connections together, which is probably a benefit to everyone in it. we need more social networks, not fewer.
> they use your password to log in to your gmail account
and that is a federal crime. Why do they go unpunished?
There sure are a lot of products and services I'd like to create if I knew laws were just suggestions. Every massive-growth startup seems to have some underlying "we did these five illegal things to get started" backstory.
Almost every garbage social media company either directly tries that (password-proxy to other services for scraping) or they use a scam to trick you into "consent" by offering so many forced options to click through you eventually accidentally hit a "yes don't not contact my un-friends with not my unconsent" button. (Or the super jerk version: "If you don't opt-out of this feature within two days of creating your account, we will take actions X, Y, Z on your behalf" in fine print.)
Apparently they ask for permission to log in which is not a crime. There is a class action suit going on saying they only ask for permission to do it once but then repeat it:
so I don't know why I was downvoted, I pretty much reported the exact claim. it's worth pointing out that linkedin hardly has a reputation here and other tech places as scammy spammers, people seem okay with it, again, probably due to the benefits. (compare the tech reaction to uber's practices regarding lyft, or when people disliked paypal's freezing of accounts.)
Half the time the customer support is clearly just improvising, because the system is such a mess that there are no clear processes for fairly common situations. Let me give an example. A customer on our website makes an order for digital goods. We collect photo ID, check their IP, call them. The customer then opens an unauthorized claim. We call in and outline the information we have.
Half the time, the agent will tell us that the information we have collected is irrelevant to an unauthorized dispute. Let me clarify that. The photo ID documents, IP address on file, and phone number of the buyer are considered irrelevant in a claim where the buyer alleges they did not authorize a purchase. Absolutely ridiculous, right?
Then magically, if you call back and connect to the right agent, they will actually look at your evidence and use it to help determine the case. These cases can be upwards of $500, and must be extremely common. And yet, somehow, there is no clear standard for what proof we need to collect in order to win an unauthorized dispute.
The company is a headache to work with. Half our time is spent verifying and doing risk management in our business, simply due to the horror that is PayPal.