[mdek]

FYI Ebay no longer owns Paypal, and hasn't for several years. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_PayPal

> September 2014 onward: It is announced that PayPal will be split off eBay. The split will be completed by the second quarter of 2015.

[Scoundreller]

EBay is actively de-integrating PayPal. E.g. sellers are being required to provide their banking info to eBay for eBay to deposit payments directly.

It was dumb to see eBay send two verification payments to “authorize” my bank account, of 1 cent and 3 cents, and after confirming, they let me know that they were going to take their 4 cents back.

[nradov]

There's nothing dumb about it. This is common practice when linking accounts throughout the financial services industry. Like my stockbroker did it when I linked my bank checking account. By verifying the amounts on two small payments you give them reasonable assurance that you actually control the account. This protects against both fraud and accidental account number data entry errors.

[Scoundreller]

It was the clawback of the hilariously low amount that I found dumb, not the verification technique.

In my experience, it’s 2x double digit amounts, not two single digit amounts. I guess if they’re clawing it back, maybe my low sums are out of randomness, or maybe they’ve really lowered the cap on the test deposits (less float/fraud loss but less security?).

[mthoms]

I suspect it’s because they want to verify they can withdraw from the account, not just deposit. Maybe they have deposit-only account links but IIRC the default is two-way. That’s because, for example, you can subscribe to various services using PayPal (if you have no funds in your PP account they will withdraw it from your bank account).

[Scoundreller]

This makes a lot of sense. Lots of advice in the early days of PayPal to have a separate account for them and keep nothing in it.

[davchana]

Capital one, when confirmed my credit union account by same method, didn't fetched the money back. Data point

[colanderman]

ACH fees almost certainly mean it's not "worth" it to pull back the 4 cents.

But I can see people being frustrated by verification payments throwing their bookkeeping off, especially by a (literally) random amount.

[Scoundreller]

I couldn’t tell if the numbers were just randomly low or decidedly low.

I’m used to the amounts being larger and thinking “hey, a free dollar almost”, but if they are random, 1 cent and 1 cent are entirely possible.

[bluGill]

random under $1 in every bank I've had do this. It better be a good random algorithm, if it isn't you can defraud a lot of people fast. (I won't say how, but I think anyone here can guess quickly)

[mianos]

2 Small payments can provide a larger range of random numbers for an account verification at lower cost to you.

Let's say you want a random number between 0 and 91, you can take up 9c times 2, for a maximum of 18c, giving a much lesser chance you can guess the number on the confirmation. Otherwise, for the same range you would take up to 91c out.