I was just on a trip to Canada and had around $500 USD in my PayPal account and planned to use my Business Debit card.
I made sure to notify by calling as well as setting up the travel notification on my account, so I thought I'd have no issues.
Once I arrived, I took half of my money and exchanged it on PayPal to CAD with the assumption that the card would use it to pay for goods since...I was in Canada of course.
This didn't happen.
It instead pulled from the USD still on the account, so I just thought it preferred that for some reason and ended up exchanging all of it with hopes it would now only have the choice of using that. Money is money after all!
So, I tested it out at a store and the payment went through! However, they WERE pending for a bit but I figured it was just PayPal related.
Nope.
I arrive home with around $360 CAD still in wallet and some pending transactions. Yet I notice something odd I hadn't fully seen while away -- I go to click for more details on one of the payments and wouldn't you know it! IT HAD BEEN PULLING FROM MY EMPTY BANK ACCOUNT THE WHOLE TIME.
I had SUFFICIENT FUNDS to purchase with and yet PayPal chose to use the backup of my empty checking account instead and cause me to overdraft with $200 in fees. 🙂
It could have easily used the currency in the account -- since it was the currency of the country I was in anyhow and the card CAN be used internationally.
But nope.
What's the reason for this? Why would PayPal go AROUND the more than sufficient funds IN THE ACCOUNT ITSELF and overdraft my bank instead?
I'm beyond furious and confused. I love PayPal and have never had issues before, but this is just insane..I'm out every cent I should've come home with because it wouldn't use the money it had.
Will PayPal help me at all with this? I now have to go to my bank and pray they'll take some pity over this situation..
