I thought PayPal had a reputation for pro-actively blocking payments for really bad reasons, and now they won't block payment when it's a clear case of fraud?
I think a big reason is that the alternatives are worse across some dimensions. Credit cards are especially bad, since they are trivial to steal (and its at best painful to address fraud, and at worst you can lose a lot of money). So, basically paypal hides your credit card. But, as the OP noted, other things now count as your credit card! In his case, his Facebook account connected to Paypal connected to his bank was, effectively, a credit card that got stolen.
And sadly there are people (on this thread) who still blame the OP. Of course the payment wasn't authorized, and the OP is very articulate about what happened. At the end of the day, money middle-men are very effective at pointing fingers at one-another, the effect being that the user will throw up their hands and give up. (This happened to me once and cost me about $15k, and I was unable to recover any of it). But what makes it even worse is how conditioned we all are to accepting blame for what is, ultimately, an authentication mistake made by the financial institution(s).
Paypal makes it two or three clicks to unsub from any reoccurring payment. No dark patterns or "call us" required. I use it whenever I can for subscription services.
I'm talking about payments to third parties. When you use PayPal to subscribe to a service you can easily unsubscribe where sometimes services make it difficult to do so otherwise.
For example the New York Times forces you to call and speak to a retention specialist if you want to cancel and you paid by credit card. With PayPal it's 3 clicks.
because 95% of the time there's no problem, but if there is one paypal is just going to give you the middle finger in most cases and say "not our problem".
And sadly there are people (on this thread) who still blame the OP. Of course the payment wasn't authorized, and the OP is very articulate about what happened. At the end of the day, money middle-men are very effective at pointing fingers at one-another, the effect being that the user will throw up their hands and give up. (This happened to me once and cost me about $15k, and I was unable to recover any of it). But what makes it even worse is how conditioned we all are to accepting blame for what is, ultimately, an authentication mistake made by the financial institution(s).