Posted on 12/17/2001 8:27:13 AM PST by struwwelpeter
First I was a Paypal cheerleader. Personally, I never had a problem with their service. But others, and even people I knew personally, did. As the complaints mounted and the stories became more egregious, I started seeing the other side. After all, basing my opinion on only my personal experience wouldn't be accurate. I never had a problem with Billpoint, Paydirect, Exchangepath and even the infamous Paymentalt. I know people who smoke and don't have lung cancer (yet). Does that mean I should recommend smoking?
So I set up my payment service ratings to present a more balance picture of what a payment service user can expect. I frequented the bulletin boards where people reported their experiences. I chimed in where I could, at times blaming Paypal and at times blaming the poster for contributing to his own problem. I discovered that posting on the boards was a waste of time. The Paypal bashers blamed everything on Paypal and anyone who suggested PP wasn't at fault was branded a cheerleader. The cheerleaders blamed everything on the poster and anyone who suggested that PP's own policies were at fault was a basher. I tried to stay "middle of the road," judging each case on its own merits. When Paypal has numerous customer service issues, I recommended against using them. When it appeared that they were working to resolve these issues, I changed the rating to "recommended with caution." At this point I can only conclude: "recommended for sellers with personal accounts where credit cards will not be used. recommended for buyers only if a credit card is used."
The problem is the Paypal's "protection plan," though probably set up with the best of intentions, has the exact opposite result than what was intended. It protects the guilty and harms the innocent. Because Paypal is run by a bunch of young and arrogant managers, they refuse to admit that there is a problem. So the fraud continues and the number of scammed buyers and sellers continues to mount. Many have found that there are ways to leave Paypal stuck with the bill. So Paypal now has millions in losses to recover. Could this be the reason for the new trend that I am seeing?
I used to get one or two complaint letters a day. In the past week, I am getting a dozen a day. The letters used to be "run-of-the-mill." Someone paid a seller and got cheated. Someone sold an item and the buyer charged it back for no good reason. They were issues between buyer and seller with Paypal bearing only tangential responsibility. But these current problems are far more serious and has Paypal taking an active hand in creating the problem. There has been an increase in accounts restricted by Paypal due to the possibility of fraud. This would be fine if there was a mechanism by which the account holder could contact Paypal and have the matter quickly resolved. But it appears that once Paypal has decided to restrict an account, it takes nothing short of an act of Congress to get them to change their mind. But even as the account stays restricted, Paypal continues to accept money into it. In my eyes this is theft. If the money does not belong to the seller, then it belongs to the buyer. We know for a FACT it does NOT belong to Paypal. There have been a few complaints of possible hacked accounts or credit cards where the writer says he contacted Paypal numerous times about transactions on his account that he did not make and they have refused to do anything about it. We saw a post on Auctionwatch where a buyer says three transactions of over $6,000 each were made from his account in under one minute, hitting his credit card and two bank accounts and we saw Paypal's rep answer that somehow the buyer must have done this accidentally. I defy any of the cheerleaders to enter three transactions into Paypal, have them funded from three different sources and complete the entry in under a minute. You can't do this deliberately but we are supposed to believe that someone did this accidentally?
There have been complaints about Paypal retrieving money from a seller's account that was paid from existing paypal funds because the payer received a fraudulent payment from another party. What kind of nonsense is this? Someone receiving a credit card payment will be careful to validate the source of the payment, but how vigilant can you be when receiving the equivalent of cash? Paypal won't even reveal a scammer's name and address to another party. How can the seller know where the buyer got his money? Can you imagine depositing a money order into your bank account and having your bank confiscate it, telling you "the guy who gave you that money order got cheated by someone else so we're taking it from you"?
What's amazing is that when a buyer gets scammed and files a complaint, Paypal's usual response is, "Yes, you were cheated but the seller emptied his Paypal account so there is nothing we can do." Yet when it is Paypal who gets scammed, they manage to track that money across several accounts and find a way to recover, even if it is from an innocent third party.
There are many policies at Paypal that I believe will not stand up to legal scrutiny. There are currently lawsuits in process which will test these policies. Until the courts speak, the only guarantee with Paypal is that there is a good protection plan in place to protect Paypal and no one else.
The definition of a Paypal cheerleader is someone who hasn't been scammed yet.
| Prime Mover | |
Peter Thiel |
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Age: 33 |
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Company: PayPal |
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Title: Co-founder, CEO |
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Launched: October 1999 |
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Employees: 570 |
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Revenue: $1 million a week and growing |
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Distinctions: National master in the U.S. Chess Federation, speechwriter for Secretary of Education William Bennett |
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Author, The Diversity Myth |
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Thank you for contacting PayPal.
I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience caused. The PayPal system is so designed that it does not allow you to claim a payment that is sent to a misspelled or incorrect email address. Your ISP server may allow you to receive the notification but the funds will not settle in your PayPal Account. Please contact the sender and ask them to cancel the unclaimed transaction in their account and resend it to you, using the correctly spelled email address.
Please note that an email address that ends in a period, such as "silentbob@msn.com." has an extra period at the end of it, and will cause the funds to remain unclaimed. There should not be a period at the end of the email address.
We cannot change our security policy to allow the payments to be claimed at a wrong email address. We hope you understand our concern about the security measure.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to contact us again.
Sincerely, Susan PayPal Customer Service
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If this email exceeded your expectations: mailto:expectationsexceeded@paypal.com
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1. Money order
2. Money order
3. Money order
The bad thing was how this story was knocked off the radar....the new terror attack by anthrax. The news media prepared us to anticipate it, then to assure hysteria the first round of anthrax was sent to the talking heads. Isn't interesting that the anthrax was home grown?
Since there has been much embarrassing news revealed this week regarding Israel conducting aggressive espionage against the US and JDL terrorism, I fear that if the media spin does not negate these charges we may see another 'terrorism' attack.
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