Customer is unable to sign up for a recurring payment because the captcha code fails.

[paulhdunlap]

My customer has told me that no matter how many times he tries to sign up for a paypal account and start recurring payments, the captcha security code won't let him pass. Any ideas on why?

[tim92109]

Yes, they have investigated it.  The main underlying cause is negligent coding.  Probably outsourced to 3rd world countries to save a few bucks.  They said it would take at least a day to fix... even though I could fix something like that on one of my client's sites in less than an hour.  I guess it's not that important to them to expedite major issues that's costing their customers probably 100s of $1000s on a global basis.  Here's their response from 21 hours ago to this issue, in which they said would be handled in a day or two...

Unfortunately, the problem you're experiencing appears to be caused by technical issues within the PayPal system.

I am going to add this account to our existing engineering ticket so that when the problem is resolved, you will be notified of its completion right away.

Our engineers are already working diligently on a solution to this problem.

This ticket will remain in a "Pending Fix" status until you're contacted about the resolution.

I apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience!

[menacers]

I am also experiencing the same problem. It began last week when the headlines hit the news regarding the uselessness of captcha now that the Bots are cracking it at 66% accuracy. We tested this in our office with about 50 different payment attempts.... 5 times we were successful, the rest of the times it was like we were failing the captcha. In fact when you submit the form if you get a second captcha request, then the problem has happened and you will be unsuccessful in making the payment. We just did three tries consecutively with the same credit card and the same information entered into the form, one out of three tries was successful we just can't figure out why. The rest of the tries all failed captcha. This is becoming a real problem for us as we're giving away services for free and losing a lot of money everyday, since customers are unable to make payments using their credit card without signing up for a PayPal account. It seems if you sign up for a PayPal account then you won't have this captcha issue.

[rrrosemaryyy]

We are also experiencing this issue. Is it still "Pending Fix" and is there a support ticket number I can follow for updates? This is affecting a major component of our software and needs to be resolved as soon as possible.