PayPal's Insensitivity to It's Customers

Sometime in May, my PayPal account was marked for 'limited account access' - a nice way of saying that they will happily collect money for you but will not disburse it to you. This, they say, is done for the greater good of assuring that one's account is indeed secure. I wrote through their email portal on their site and explained the recurring costs I have to Linden Lab (I am Nobody Fugazi in Second Life), and they cleared that up for me. In May.

But then, in June, this limited account access came back with a vengeance. The case is PP-490-015-326, so they say, and the reasoning of the limited access is:

Jun. 11, 2008: Our system detected unusual activity on a credit card linked to your PayPal account.

I held off on writing this in the hope that they would prove what I thought wrong. And yet, almost a month later, here we are.

So I went to my bank's website, and there is no activity that was not normal. There was no 'unusual activity'; what had happened was that my old debit card from the bank had expired and I was issued a new one. I attempted to change the date, but then PayPal found that my address had changed as well - it is no longer in Florida, but now in Trinidad and Tobago. No secret, that. And their system does not permit for the change of address to Trinidad and Tobago because the alleged industry leaders in internet financial transactions have not realized that one can have a legitimate bank account in one country while residing in another. It appears to be magic to them that this could happen, as their system cannot cope.

Being a legitimate person with a legitimate bank account and so forth, I decided to play their game of 'show that you really are where you say you are'. This included sending electronic copies of bank statements, which I get in PDF format. Oddly, PayPal doesn't accept PDF uploads. A screenshot of the PDF upload was too large for their meager system to handle. They want me to fax them information to prove I am where I am - utility bills and such - but guess what? I just had to move, and the bills are not in my name. Further, why the heck should I have to fax something to them if they allegedly have an upload facility? Why should I continue to spend more money to try to get the money back from them which they are withholding with seemingly no reason? In most parts of the world, this is called theft.

I have no doubt that their terms of service legitimize their actions, but those terms of service must assume that their infrastructure for handling such issues works. It does not. Granted, my circumstances are not what some would consider to be normal - but they are legitimate circumstances and have left me with a PayPal account that is not only unusable - it has funds that I deposited to PayPal in good faith.

In the interim, I demanded an email address to actually correspond with someone at PayPal. This has not been realized; the web form submits to the Customer Service department who then cheerfully sends me a message that they have forwarded my message to the appropriate department. The only response I got out of that department is that they would not restore my account access - and that was basically the end of the 'discussion'. There was no return email address that I could respond to, just a message from 'on high'.

What sort of company treats people like that?

In the interim, I saw that I would lose my islands in Second Life should this continue - and it has - so a friend, Sarah Nerd, intervened and took the islands off of my hands to assure that the people who are tenants on Second Life servers do not lose what they were paying for. That, thankfully, took - and oddly, this required Linden Lab straightening out my billing information which they did in less than 3 days. The only reason that I had been using PayPal was because Linden Lab had not been able to straighten out my account - but, lo! Linden Lab came through where PayPal was unable to.

Maybe Linden Lab should take over PayPal. Or PayMal, as the case may be.

I have money in an account that PayPal arbitrarily stole. It's methods of redress do not work. This is theft. And if it can happen to me, someone who only moved small amounts of money back and forth from Linden Lab, then it can happen to you. Indeed, PayPal reminds me of former banking institutions in Second Life such as Ginko Financial. After all, because of their action and inaction I have lost two simulators in Second Life, a full simulator and an Open Simulator.

What can I say? I'm just a little guy and the big bad corporation says it needs my money more than I do. An army of lawyers at their side and no way to actually communicate with a human being demonstrates why it is folly to use PayPal for anything.

Drop your PayPal account if you can. Or if you must, keep as small of a balance as you can despite the lure of their Money Market interest. The second they can get their hands on your funds, they will steal it from you and send you all sorts of messages you cannot respond to.

Thieves. To me, they are thieves and they have a long way in making me happy.

A start would be giving me a money back. Even treating me as a human being and allowing me to discuss with someone instead of typing in a web form to have information forwarded to another department would be better. But they have demonstrated their own unreliability.