Anyone had any bad experience with PayPal?

Paypal is an eBay company. While they are convenient and nice for certain things, like you said their policies are a bit up and down. They can actually hold your funds in some situations for a long time 6–12 months. If you are a business operating and using Paypal, I wouldn’t advise it. Especially not in this economy.

@johnny0313x

Yeah, I had numerous ridiculous run-ins with them going back as far as 2001, and have to say I wouldn’t p*** on them if they stood in flames. Back then they were flat-out criminal.

Just trying to get the feel how bad it still is.

yeah I’ve had a few mishaps. For some reason, whenever I update my account with a new address, or new card information for payments. The default will never change even if I tell it to. So as a result I end up getting items sent to addresses I lived at 4–6 years ago, or charging my wrong card and throwing off my checking account balance.

I had them charge me $1 for a service fee, unannounced.

Get a load of this one:

I just sold a 30” Apple Cinema Display for 1199.00 on ebay, someone took it using “buy it now”.

So I get this email from them stating something to the effect:

money received – high-risk item money on hold for 21 days – ship now

Shipping on a 30” is huge, so I contact the buyer asking him if it’s okay to refund and pay by other means, he is okay with it.

Now comes what really cracks me up. I issue the refund, the only thing I could do on the PayPal website, but now (here it comes), despite the fact that I never had access to the funds they put a 5-day “Hold” on his account, to “ensure” that funds were available.

Get the point? I never got the money released to me, issued a refund, yet they have to “verify” available funds which of course takes a whole business week.

This is just ridiculous…

Thank the powers that be the buyer was really cool about it, and is now proud and happy owner of a 30” display.

I think they try to hold on to money for interest purposes…I don’t know that for a fact though, all I know is they are ridiculous and should really reorganize their business practices.

I tried to get a PayPal account years and years ago, but they wouldn’t let me have one and wouldn’t tell me exactly why or what to do about it when I asked (or they said I should do something I wasn’t willing to do), so I decided to not try again, and still haven’t.