Rou

No, they've never screwed me.

But if you use them a lot, they will eventually screw you. Everyone knows it. The fact that people continue using their service amazes me.

The idea behind their operating concept is nice and simple, which is part of the reason for their success. You give them a credit card number, and you can use it to transfer money to someone else’s PayPal account. Thus, paying for something over the internet without needing to give out banking info.

The problem comes in when you link your credit card or bank account info to their service. You see, they act very much like a bank. They take money transfers and hold money in accounts and are very handy dandy. But they are NOT a bank. They offer nothing even close to FDIC protections on your money. They get hacked/ phished /scammed more often then practically any other site online. What do they do when they discover the false info? They can wipe out all the money out of your legitimate account to cover what ever “charges” they think you’re liable for without telling you, or any means of appeal. Or lock your account so you can’t get to your money. Or any number of other idiotic cases.

Take for example, the recent case of SomethingAwful. This website decided to take a collection up for Katrina victims. This money was to be tally up in the SA paypal account, and then given to the Red Cross. Simple right? 9 hours later, 2 things had happened. First, the SA crew donated 27 THOUSAND dollars. In nine hours. Impressive, right? Second thing that happened was that PayPal locked the fucking account because they thought the account was the victim of fraud.

What the fuck.

Fine, fine… this should be easy to fix. The owner of the account at SA, jumped through hoops to verify both his identity and the purpose of the account. He assured them that this wasn’t fraud and the money was being raised to be given to the Red Cross. Not good enough. A few more rounds of bullshit like that, and the only choice was to have the donations returned to the individuals. SA asked them to donate directly to the Red Cross.

This is one of hundreds of horror stories out of Paypal.

Paypal sucks. Everyone knows it. Never fucking use them.