My PayPal Experience

A few years I opened an account with PayPal. I thought this would be very good for me as I see it advertised over the web as a fast, convenient form of payment, so I went to their website and tried.

It was easy, it took 5 minutes to sign up just like they said. I told my customers they could pay by PayPal and immediately 3 people did, putting just over $1000 into my account. When I tried to put this money into my bank account they said I couldn't because I was restricted, meaning I had to send them all sorts of fax documentation, id, utility bill and a copy of my bank statement. I sent them what I could and explained why I didn't have the rest. I was told this was insufficient so I started calling them.

For a month I kept calling them, talking to someone different, sending faxes after being told that I would be unrestricted if I sent exactly that. I asked one guy what I could do to refund the people's money and he said it couldn't be done. I asked another person and they said it would take 90 days for people's money to be returned. Finally after about a month of phone calls, sending faxes and getting nothing out of it, I decided I definately want my customers refunded. After giving me a vague idea of what to do, I emailed the people who's money paypal was holding, explained the situation and asked them to request a refund. Two of them did and I was sent a link from which I could refund the money to them, and it went through almost immediately.

I didn't hear anything from the third person though I emailed a few times, then I looked on my ebay account and found I had a -1 feedback. I read it and this person said I'd ripped them for $415. I tried to post a reply to it but they don't give you anywhere near enough room to explain yourself. I hadn't been on ebay for long and it's my only feedback so you can imagine it looked very bad. So I emailed the customer and asked why they left this as I told them to request a refund and they did nothing. They said they'd tried 5 times. So I called PayPal again. They told me the money couldn't be refunded to the person as I had insufficient funds, due to some charge of theirs. After arguing with the woman on the phone for 10 minutes and saying I would report them to the FBI internet fraud department she said she would do the refund, and it was actually done.

Neither I or the customer had received an email explaining that I had insufficient funds, paypal just led them to believe I was in fact ripping them off. I emailed again and asked if they could remove the feedback as they'd been refunded. It finally got removed after about 6 weeks, and since then I've started another ebay account which I don't have these problems with.

So I'll never use PayPal again, after waiting more than a month for nothing I get bad feedback because of their dishonesty and lack of providing necessary information. I have been let off very easily however compared to some of the people who's stories I have read. For further reading, check out these websites:

Paypal Warning - General info, includes a Wall of Shame where disgruntled customers share their stories.

About Paypal - One man's personal information source, also offers help to people with their paypal problems.

PCWorld.com - Consumer Alert - Article about problems with customer service and some of PayPal's pending lawsuits.