[sabslaurent]

Paypal prides itself on being the safest payment solution online, they have easy integrations with Shopify. I don't breach their terms or perform any fraud so had no reason to suspect I'd be treated like a criminal and given inconsistency and lies by a multi billion dollar corporation I've paid thousands of dollars in fees too!

[pgaddict]

The fact that PayPal claims to be the safest payment solution is pretty irrelevant, especially if it's meant to be safest for the buyers and you're the seller. This is not the first story of PayPal freezing accounts with substantial amounts of money and not talking to the account owner.

Also, their ToS are pretty clear that they can do whatever they want, based on their beliefs, and there are no explicit limits how long they can keep your funds, or even obligations to talk to you. It might work differently in the EU, where they are registered as a bank (and so are regulated as a bank), but in US that's not the case IIRC.

The behavior is not all that unexpected - it's easier and cheaper to loose a customer receiving a lot of complaints than to inspect each of the complaints. So while I understand this is pretty damaging and dislike what PayPal does, I'm surprised that people are surprised.

[99129371891]

Corporations still manage to maintain the illusion of decency and customer service. Their real behavior is surprising to a) people who were lucky and have never encountered it and b) people who suffer from some corporate equivalent of Gell-Mann amnesia.

I belong to the second category. Also, it becomes harder to avoid such companies at all, for example cell phone operators in Europe universally view their "customers" as billable addresses; some find it cheaper to settle billing disputes in court (and lose a great percentage of the cases) than to maintain a "customer" service.

With mobile the solution is to go prepaid.

[jseliger]

Corporations still manage to maintain the illusion of decency and customer service

I'm baffled by this. Paypal does not. 28 days ago I wrote this comment on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13624393. I'm sure that in the future I'll be reading another Paypal horror story from someone like you, who somehow thought, "It won't happen to me!"

[tajen]

Same here. Most people tend to downplay risks "because they're big", but there are alternatives and it's worth missing a few opportunities for a lower risk.

E.g., I don't go to USA conferences because of the TSA risk, people find it funny, yet I keep hearing horror story after horror story. For Paypal, though, people take the risk unknowingly because they aren't aware of Paypal's reputation, which is more understandable.

[pgaddict]

Well, people don't realize a lot of the bad stuff actually makes business sense. It's not that the companies are meant to be evil, but once you are a customer, they have little to gain from treating you as well as potential customers.

For example, once you subscribe to a cable TV / cell phone operator / whatever, they'll keep you on that subscription until the contract ends, even if new customers can sign up for half the price. And even then it's a matter of how much you spend with them and if it's worth negotiating a better contract.

This has little to do with the corporations being intentionally 'evil', it's more about insufficient competition or even monopoly (how many cable TV operators / ISPs are in your area?). We have multiple cell phone operators over here, but they have little incentive to compete - the number of people leaving/joining each operator is about the same, and if one operator decreases the prices the others will do the same, eliminating any advantage.

[pharrlax]

>Paypal prides itself on being the safest payment solution online

Sure, and bottom-shelf plastic-bottle vodka says "PREMIUM QUALITY" on the label

[sandworm101]

Paypal also has a reputation for unpredictability and politically-motivated action against users. The rise of cryptocurrencies in recent years was largely a result of how paypal and credit card companies reacted to US government "requests" (ie the blacklisting of wikileaks and vpn providers). Nobody can stop or confiscate a bitcoin transaction.

Given the regs that paypal thinks it must abide, specifically the many vague US antiterror rules, anyone getting into bed with them runs massive risk. The internet is full of stories exactly like this. The only hope is to rally enough of social media, or a tv show, that a human being at paypal takes pitty in you.

[stingraycharles]

That isn't really an answer to the question OP was raising, although I do sympathise with you. Having said that, Paypal is known to be very evil, and because of this I do expect people whom are still using Paypal consider this behaviour a calculated risk, rather than a surprise.

[makemoniesonlin]

'who', not 'whom'

[stingraycharles]

Thanks -- as an ESL'er, this is one of the more tricky aspects of the language to me.

[nitwit005]

The company has been successfully sued over "improper account holds" (See Zepeda v. PayPal) and the internet is utterly jam packed full of stories like yours. I don't see why people find it surprising at this point.