Raped by Paypal



Paypal took my dye and lipstick money!
 I want to throw this pony at its collective face.



So...two years ago I had someone hack my eBay account and post a bunch of expensive items. EBay immediately realized from my user history this was probably not me, froze the account and informed me of the issue. They cleared up all the fraud quickly and efficiently. Tell me why then, with Paypal being an eBay company, Paypal lacks any similar alert system? I logged into my email on 1/15/12 to find six emails from Paypal stating I had transferred 500 euros each to a European party via their service. This came to nearly $4000 US! I had never made or received a transaction of more than $50 and hadn't used the account in nearly a year - big flashing red lights that this wasn't me, Paypal. Not only did Paypal fail to stop the transfers from going through my bank account, even though they were informed immediately of the fraud, but after my bank rejected them for insufficient funds (the bank suggested I remove all my cash just in case the transfers went through...thank you bank lady!) they took them out THREE MORE TIMES! This is not only ridiculous when a fraud case has been opened but also goes against their own policy to try to obtain the cash twice. No one at Paypal could explain to me why they broke their own policy and pursued taking the money out more than twice. Each time my bank would reject the transactions and recall the money I would call Paypal AGAIN to figure out what was going on; I was told something different every single time. At one point I was told that filing a fraud claim with my bank meant that Paypal would no longer pursue the matter and would not refund me any money directly. This turned out to be wrong, like many, many other things Paypal employees told me. The bank AND Paypal refunded me the money. Now I have to go through the hassle of giving money BACK to Paypal! So, 22 days after this started it's STILL not cleared up. To top it off I can't deposit my paychecks in the new bank account I opened either, as some department at my bank doesn't seem to get the old account is overdrawn due to fraud and has taken money out of my new account to pay for some of the overdraft charges. My bank can't tell me why this is happening, and while they have pursued the issue and given me back the money they can't promise it won't happen again. So yah, try paying bills with cash in the 21st century. Most of my bills can't even be paid in person, including my mortgage, student loan, and internet bill. I had to give a friend cash and have them mail checks out to pay my own bills. Total nightmare. Even after procedures are started to close the old bank account any transaction on it for 30 days will reopen the account. Boo! This did not, however, stop me from getting all my bills paid on time and going thrifting recently to find some adorable shoes : ) So it's not all bad.