Weird message from PayPal after purchasing an item

[mhowie]

I have used PayPal for many years and conducted hundreds and hundreds of transactions. This evening I bought an item from a private seller and sent PayPal (funds from my PayPal account- not from a checking account or credit card). I subsequently received the following message from PayPal:

"Regulations require us to take a closer look at some transactions. Your payment is temporarily pending while we review it."

Can anyone who has suffered  the same kind of delay provide some clarity around what is going on and what may have prompted this "review"?

Thanks.

[snowshoe]

Sounds like a random security check.  

[ktamas77]

How long did it take for you to pass this security check?

[SadCustomer]

I got one of these, and from what I can tell, Paypal's "security check" algorithm is broken.

It was a payment to a vendor that we literally make at least 4 times a day, for the past 7 years or more.  It's a vendor that fulfills orders for us.  We pay for each order as it's passed on.

It was not the smallest payment we've made to them.   It's not the largest.   It was less than $300. None of the thousands of transactions we've paid the vendor before got marked like this...again over thousands of payments over a 7 year period.

The only thing that's different...was the subject line in the "email to recipient" field.  We use the same format every time:

    "INVOICE #12345 CUSTOMER:  JOHN DOE"

For each order, there's a different invoice number, and customer name.

So, my guess is that this customer's name set off some alarm bell.   Why?  No idea.   I'm guessing an overly simplistic keyword filter list that's supplied to them by FINRA or some other such agency.   

As if the kind of folks they are after put juicy keywords and "person of interest" names into paypal transactions.  Heh.

A day later, the transaction was "cleared".