[hombre_fatal]

Yet they offer this critical feature that neither my bank nor credit card offer.

Nobody in the space is batting for you, btw. Just pick your poison. I once used a bank that would reorder by purchases to maximize their $35 overdraft fees.

> A Pew Charitable Trusts report from December 2016 said that, at that time, more than 40 percent of banks in the U.S. shuffle transactions to maximize overdraft fees.

The fact that you and I both can come up with examples where Paypal sucks (like account freezing) is only evidence for how bad US financial services are where people like me still gleefully use Paypal.

And the authorized billing system is one thing Paypal got right.

[giancarlostoro]

Privacy.com offers an alternative where you generate a new VISA card and they lock it down to a vendor. You can set limits. Once it gets leaked they notify you. Someone here on HN mentioned they were able to report it to their water company that their card was compromised on their site.

[Something1234]

As an aside wouldn't the way to maximize overdraft fees be to apply transactions in sorted highest debit to lowest, and only then start to apply deposits. It wouldn't be so dark if they just mention it as how they do the fee charging.

[mindslight]

Yes, that is exactly what Bank of America used to do, including putting an overnight hold on cash given to a teller. Regardless of what the fine-print-nobody-reads said, it was "dark" and illegal and eventually stopped due to a class action lawsuit.

(One of) their current scam(s) has gotten a bit cleverer in that they don't actually break the law themselves but rather just induce their customers to commit check fraud - if you receive a check drawn on Bank of America and present it in person at one of their branches, they won't honor it for the full amount!