I have been a PayPal customer since 2000 and a Bill Me Later Customer for since way before PayPal took it over. I only occasionally use my PayPal credit (Formerly Bill Me Later) account. A couple of weeks ago I saw something I wanted to buy online for under $100 so rather than give the merchant my payment info I was going to use my PayPal Credit account and then pay PayPal directly. But my purchase was declined and a note came up saying to have the customer contact Paypal. That seemed strange to me because I was no where near my credit limit, plus I had just received a notice a few days earlier that my PP balance had been increased and I hadn't used it since then.
Wondering why my PP Credit purchase was declined I went to my PP account and upon logging in I saw nothing out of the ordinary in my regular PP summary, but where they list your available credit balance it said 0 available. I clicked on the Paypal credit link in my account and saw 7 transactions from the previous 3 days, all to a merchant I have never shopped at. The transactions ranged from a couple hundred dollars to almost $800 each. Some purchases were processed and some were in Pending, but they had completely wiped out my PayPal credit balance (and then some).
All of my contact info on my PayPal account is current, including email, cell phone, home phone. I never received any notification of these purchases. No emails like I would normally receive when I make a PayPal purchase at all. But there they were showing as purchases on my PayPal credit account. I would think that any regular credit card or payment processor would have immediately noticed something was off with 7 high-dollar transactions being made at a merchant I never shopped at and at least contacted me? No email, no receipts nothing. Nothing on my regular PayPal account was affected, just my PayPal credit.
I immediately called PayPal credit and told the guy that several purchases had been made the last few days that were not mine. He looked at my account and asked if I was talking about the purchases at Wayfair.com and i said yes. He listed all the disputed amounts, verified these were not my purchases, told me that he would have to close the credit account and he would send me a form that I would need to sign and send back.
Now two weeks later, most of the purchases that were in "pending" when I contacted PP have been processed, and I have received a letter from PayPal credit saying that I am responsible for paying as they found nothing wrong. They say they base this on the fact that the account is verifed as mine (yes, the account is mine, but the purchases made were not!), they also say the purchases were shipped to my verified address, but that's not true. My address has been the same for over 10 years. I did not order any items. No packages have been received at my address from this merchant, (I work from home so I am home pretty much 24/7), etc.
What happened to the supposed zero-fraud liability? I have no idea where these orders came from. I never received any receipts, Paypal notifications, etc for them. I don't have any order numbers or anything to identify these orders other than they just appeared on my account as purchases to Wayfair for $xxx. I am at a loss as to what to do now, but they say I am responsible for paying for these mysterious orders I didn't place and items I did not receive, to the tune of several thousand dollars.
I have run multiple scans on my computer just to be sure there's no problems there, all came back clean. Besides, all my contact info in my account is still mine and if a purchase was made, shouldn't I have received an email as I normally would? But nothing alerted me to these purchases other then them just appearing in my account.
Has anyone else ever had this happen, and what did you do?
