Paypal A Few Helpful Tips:

[pecq]

FOUND THIS SEARCHING FOR SOMETHING SIMILAR


I used to work at PayPal in the collections department and also in fraud.


I know it’s really long but I swear there’s good info in there. If you’re wondering why things keep happening to your account, the answer is probably below.

A Few Helpful Tips:

Don’t think of PayPal as your bank...think of it as your wallet.

Inside of your wallet you may have different forms of payment: credit card, cash, debit card, etc. When you are at a physical store and it’s time to pay, you don’t give your whole wallet to the cashier in exchange for your items. You go into your wallet and pull out your funding source (where the funds are coming from). You may have many cards from different banks, maybe you have a Best Buy credit card and a Target card...but they are all kept in your wallet.

Side note..when PayPal started with eBay they were two separate products. eBay was the store that held the merchandise, not a payment processor. PayPal can process payments but doesn’t actual have goods to sell. Think of eBay like WalMart and PayPal like your wallet. It’s not like Visa.

PayPal is more like the middle man.

eBay was known for bidding, right? So when it’s down to the last second and you get the final bid..that means the seller is expecting to get paid so they can ship the item. Or at least purchase a label and provide a tracking number. Well, a bid would end and now there’s

1. A seller waiting to start the shipping process, and
2. Usually other bidders hoping the sale doesn’t finalize so they can swoop in and claim it.
The first problem they were faced with is that the winner didn’t actually have the money available just yet. Maybe he gets paid on Friday or is expecting a check to clear. There’s a million reasons as to why the payment is being delayed. It would result in many sellers loosing that sale because the other bidders went elsewhere. And the original winner actually never had the amount in the first place. So what PayPal started to do was “front the money” with the agreement (per the terms and conditions that no one reads) that PayPal would then use your primary funding source to pay themselves back. So that’s how accounts would get negative and become locked. PayPal isn’t a line of credit (BillMeLater is their credit product, still another separate company). So technically you never actually paid for the item, PayPal did and now they want you to pay them back.

WTF IS A CHARGEBACK!?

Okay....these SUCK and are actually completely out of PayPals control. Here’s what happens:
Bob wants to buy Jim’s laptop as is. Jim made sure to write in the description that it does not hold a charge, that’s why he is selling it for a cheaper price. He doesn’t have the charging cable. It’s clear in the description. Jim even messages Bob before to make sure he’s aware of the issue. Bob says ok, PalPal pays, Jim mails laptop, PalPay charges the Visa on file which Bob selected as his primary source. Now funds are in Jim’s account as his PayPal balance (which is the closest to cash in your wallet). Maybe Jim decides to withdraw the funds to his bank account, maybe he buys something using his balance, regardless, Jim spends the money. It’s no longer in his PayPal balance. Well Bob gets the laptop and he’s mad that it doesn’t hold a charge. He wants a refund. So he contacts PayPal and says “it doesn’t work, I want my money back.” After the back and forth of he said she said, the PayPal agent (in the fraud department) sides with the seller. Sorry Bob, but Jim did everything he was supposed to. Seller protection wins. Well, Bob takes it one step further. He calls up Visa and says he noticed a charge on his statement and he didn’t authorize it. Now because Visa is a credit company, they have essentially loaned Bob the money that he makes payments on each month. Let’s say his credit limit is $2,500. The laptop was $150. Bob is close to reaching his limit on that card so Visa would rather NOT make him pay $150 that he may or may not have authorized, rather than risk Bob refusing to pay back the entire loan (of $2,500). So because Visa is the actual payer (not PayPal, not Bob, it’s a Visa), they have the ability to reverse the transaction. It literally does that. The payment gets reversed and the funds get pulled from...yup...Jim’s PayPal account. Because that’s the other ‘joy’ of PayPal is no one knows what funding source was used. Visa doesn’t know Jim’s checking account number and Jim doesn’t know Bob used his Visa. So now Jim goes to log into his PayPal account, and it’s locked due to a chargeback and his account is negative. On top of that, Visa CHARGES Jim $20 for having to reverse the transaction. Now Jim is out $170 and doesn’t get his laptop back because Bob’s a d****.

Oddly enough, the employees don’t know much about other departments.


I had certain things I could do in collections and other things I just didn’t have a button for. In collections I could charge one of your other funding sources (after getting your approval of course) and if it was a credit card, I’d get an instant approval or decline. If it was approved, I could lift the restriction and unlink the accounts (if that was an issue). I could also post date a payment for another day, but the lift wouldn’t be able to come off unless the payment posts. Now, when I went to go work in the fraud department, I could actually limit the account, link an account to another, and also remove the restriction without taking a payment. I actually didn’t have the software for payments, that would be another department....but being in collections I legitimately thought people made their account negative by their own mistake. I didn’t know people would be hacking their account, adding banks and changing addresses.

Speaking of linked accounts...

The things that we would look for is first and last name, date of birth, addresses on file, phone numbers, bank accounts, funding sources, and IP address. In order to link two account together the names would have to be the same (or close enough...Mike is still Michael is still Mikey) with the same last name, phone number, address, and date of birth. Those 4 things HAD to be the same on both (or all) accounts in question. If we still weren’t too sure, we looked at IP address, MAC address, and other (I can’t remember exactly what the numbers were) things that show what device is used. So if I saw 3 accounts for Mike Smith, same address, same phone numbers, but 2 had his bday as July and one said his bday was March, I would look at the devices. Well, all 3 accounts use the same IP address (consistently) and sometimes this number is different (I think for the browser) which would just tell me that sometimes he used FireFox and sometimes he used Chrome, but I knew it was done on the same computer. I would personally dig a little more into it by putting the address in maps, is it a house or just a plot of land? Oh he’s buying a bunch of really expensive jewelry, his house is huge...ok that adds up. His transaction history is the same on all 3 accounts and I can see that as soon as one account is locked, he never logs back in, he opens a new account the same day and does the whole thing over. That’s how I would determine if an account should be locked and/or linked to another one. I could also read the messages between buyers and sellers so I really had more than enough info to do what was honest. I was apparently the only one spending that much time on accounts and I was told to rush through them. I wasn’t okay with that which was the reason I quit.

This is a the best way to get your account unlocked without having to pay the balance.


You call customer service maybe 30 minutes before closing. And you are going to yell. I mean as soon as they answer the phone just start demanding that they lift the restriction. If they transfer you, hang up and call again. You’re probably not going to get the same person. Repeat. If they say they can’t do that, hang up and call again. New person, same routine. Customer service has the highest turnover rate. Meaning people are hired and they quit all the time. They hire students right out of high school who just need to work a little bit. There’s no bonus for them, they don’t have a certain amount of calls to make, they literally DO NOT care about their job. They just don’t. So what’s going to happen is you are going to get that one employee who’s just about the clock out and then beep....it’s you. And you’re mad as hell for some reason. They don’t care, they want to go home and not listen to you bitch for 30 minutes about this and that...so with a click of a button ( that they have for some reason) they will unlock your account. Just to get you off the phone so they can go home. Because their shift may end at 10pm but they get a call at 9:58...they have to stay until that call is done. You can’t hang up on them. THAT would get you fired. Lifting one ban from one account will never get noticed. By the time it does, they no longer work there. So. Hold the phone away from your ear and just yell “My car is about to get towed if I don’t pay the mechanic AND YOU GUYS ARE HOLDING MY MONEY!!! I NEED MY MONEY NOW” or whatever. You will never get a manger. Even if you ask.

If there has been a negative balance for 7 years or more, use these words verbatim:

Statue of limitations those three words will wipe the balance off your account, no questions asked. You’re good. It’s lawyer talk that means “I’ll take this court and you guys will loose”. You have to quote the actual law statue of limitations you can’t just say “oh that law about 7 years or something” no. Look up your states statue of limitations but most are 7 years.

I think those are the “main” issues. Oh yeah, if you have your bank account as your primary source, it will keep trying to hit your checking account to pull out the money. This is going to result in a lot of overdawn accounts with a lot of bank fees. Best thing to do is contact your bank and tell them to put a stop payment on whoever keeps trying to charge the account. At least it will protect any funds you might have in your bank account and definitely stop your bank from charging you overdraft fees.

[Jim Moriarty]

thanks for this.

[yeskoma10]

Hi Bro, how do we avoid accounts hold? I've heard that Paypal business get less holds than personal. Should I upgrade?

[Razmataz13]

pecq - Interesting read. +Reps!