Questions about PaypalSucks.com and Paypal

(I don't know if this belongs here or not. It can be moved if necessary.)

Here is my story. I will try to make this as short as possible...

Someone told me today that paypal.com was a bad service. I did see that paypal lost a class action suit about a month ago, but I didn't really put much thought into it because I've been a part of serveral class action suits with businesses in the past (Sears, capital one, etc) and I always get a check for about 1 dollar because of them. Anyway, I asked this guy why paypal was bad and of course this guy didn't really give me a straight answer � he just said that they rip a lot of people off but never he personally never had a problem. I told him I have been using paypal since 1998 and he directly me to a website called paypalsucks.com. He told me that I should read that site and after I did then I would rush to cancel my paypal account.

So, I go to Paypalsucks.com and I read some of this website's forums today. My questions are does anyone know if this site is valid? It seems to be all anonymous posters posting their hate for paypal.com because they were allegedly ripped off in some way. I definitely do not believe everything I read on the Internet (This site has taught me that rule ).

For me a red light went off right away...I read the first sticky post and it was about how paypal is going to start fining merchants who use their system to sell Adult Material, Gambling or prescription drugs. An interesting article but the posters on paypalsucks make the whole argument that Paypal does not have to right to tell people what they can or cannot use the paypal system for in the first place, which seems like an asinine argument to a business major. A business, in this case a financial institution, always has the right to designate how their money system will work. The owners paypalsucks rant on and on like crazy people in just about every thread. It seems like many of them are operating adult sites. www.paypalsucks.com...

There are supposedly thousands of people that are being ripped off by paypal but when I go to the BBB.org (Better Business Bureau) and look up paypal I see that they have 3225 complaints. I don't really figured that is a high number seeing how paypal has 50 million users. The BBB did not warn about the company having high complaints or anything.

I want the truth about paypal so I guess my questions is how valid is this website (paypalsucks.com)? Should anything on this site be believed? Anyone have information on this site. I was going to post in their forum but I figured why bother because it is 99% one sided. I don�t think I will get an honest answer on their forum.

Any insight on this topic is appreciated!





[edit on 20-9-2004 by zerotime]

Well, I dont use it myself, but I am inclined to think that with a name like "paypalsucks.com" its not to serious. I know plenty of people who use it and never had a problem. It would seem that out of the 50 million users, you can safely expect few thousand crazies who want to blame pay pal cuz some hick on ebay ripped him off, or their wives found some porn subscribition, and these guys are playing stupid and sayin that somehow paypal is responsible for some fraudulant misdeeds.

Be especially suspect of all anonymous posts. Could be the same person over and over.

Paypal is just a middle-man for transaction so people don't have to physicaly travel across the globe to conduct business. It is not the fault of Paypal if a person does not recive product or funds from one end user. After all who will you blame if you meet someone in a flea market that was selling electronics one day and when you get home it doesn't work but that person is no longer located there. It is not the fault of the flea-market, they cannot screen a person's morals. Same applies to this.

That being said I do believe that a financial institute does have an obligation to report any fraud complains to the authorites of one of their subscribers local area law enforcement agencies. When people write alot of bad checks they get punished for that, why shouldnt that apply to online transactions?

The biggest problem with paypal is that sometimes its antifraud measures are too severe, which I think is what was behind the last class action suit if i'm not mistaken. Here's my story:

I opened a paypal account about 3 years ago and used it for a few months pretty reliably while I was selling a lot of things on ebay. During that time I kept my money at bank X and thus my "default" card was a debit card linked to my checking account at bank X. After a few months of using the service I didn't use it for like a year and a half -- I'd sold everything I wanted to get rid of, and everything I needed to buy online had their own (ie, not-paypal) credit card verification service -- and then after that year and a half of not using paypal I was trying to buy something over ebay and the seller wanted me to pay through paypal.

When I logged back in to paypal, etc., to pay, I was in a bit of a hurry and forgot to switch from using my "default card" to using something more current; that's where my problems began:

I had moved across the country between when I'd opened paypal and setup my account and when I tried to make that transaction; since my former bank was local and had no branches on the other side of the country all my money was in a different account by that point. When the transaction finished processing, I was told my account was being "locked" under suspicion of fraud -- after all, by mistake I'd tried to use a no-longer existant card -- but unlike any other service I've dealt with I couldn't get them to reopen my account.

If you use a wrong credit card # on most e-commerce sites, you get told the card didn't go through, or has expired, or what have you, and you get a second chance; in this case, paypal's fraud monitoring software decided I was trying to scam them, and so before I could to anything with my paypal account I'd have to prove I wasn't trying to pull any kind of fraud. Their automated help service told me I'd have to provide recent statements for the card -- which of course I couldn't do, because it'd been closed for almost a year at that point -- and dealing with their live customer service system wasn't any more productive, either.

Thus, I've been locked out of paypal for almost 2 years at this point. In my case I had no money in my paypal account, anyways, but I think the class action suit was for people in situations like mine -- locked out of their own accounts by mistake, and unable to get back in -- who had significant amounts of money in their paypal accounts that they could no longer get access to. For those who don't know, a paypal account does these things:

a) lets you transer money to other paypal accounts, either directly from yours or by way of a credit card/debit card
b) lets you hold money in your "paypal" account like a virtual bank account
c) lets you link actual bank accounts to your paypal account so you can transfer money back and forth

so the class action suit was -- I think -- about people with lots of money in the paypal account who got locked out and thus weren't able to use c) to move that money back into their real bank accounts.

So for me, paypal does suck, because its fraud-prevention program is overprotective and can be very difficult to correct when it makes a mistake. When it was working for me it was a great convenience, and if I could get it working again I'd have no complaints; for now, though, it's like a credit card company that responded to your "i've lost my card" call with a) cancelling your account and b) tanking your credit record, instead of just sending you along a new card.

I've also heard some accounts of paypal enacting "censorship" in the form of closing off the "donate by paypal" on sites that it deems hateful/offensive/hate speech, etc.; I'm not sure what the extent of their actions like that are, but if so it's another reason someone might start a "paypalsucks.com" site.