My account was mysteriously limited on Thursday August 23rd along with about 20+ people I know of. We're all artists. Obviously a bot must have sweeped a bunch of people this day.
As PayPal owns Venmo, my Venmo was limited the same day as well, similar email. Two services gone in a flash.
None of us have gotten anywhere yet with customer service, some have reached them on the phone ( a miracle ) but only given the runaround with "we'll look into it". Some of the other users are more busy, completely verified, and have thousands of dollars tied up in PayPal's 6 month freeze plan.
but I can only speak from my personal perspective so here it goes.
The titles are the TL;DR version in bold
My Account Usage is light and Terms abiding:
My account is used lightly. My last purchase was July 24 for a $15 book online. I've made less than 10 transactions between now and last year but all under $300 and they are all online commerce purchases from reputable sites and about 3 or 4 were art commissions. My art commissions are all SFW, I'm only mentioning that because I know paypal has some policy about it but it's not my thing anyway.
My Venmo activity is similar, very small transactions back and forth consisting of people buying prints amd drawings from me in IRL art fairs as well as me and a friend rotating covering each other's restaurant bill when we meet up.
There was no activity that triggered the limitation, just a sudden permanent account limitation and notification in my email inbox for both services.
The 2 ambiguous reasons given for my account limitation are conflicting
The email states I am a spam risk.
The Paypal resource center states I broke Terms & Conditions ( As I have stated, nothing has occurred here. ) But that is an interesting discrepancy.
The Resource center also proposes I create a ticket in their resource/claims system, but as my account is permanently limited I am not allowed to do that, unlike what the help tree suggestions. It says I must contact PayPal directly.
I Cannot Contact PayPal Directly, Call Centers Purposefully ending my calls before the wait queue
I have called several times in the past few days, both early morning and through afternoon. Their call center opens up, recognizes my number associated with my account, gives me a few options and when I say account limitation, it pauses for a moment, says it cannot connect me with a customer service agent with this issue and hangs up. I believe PayPal has either blocked me from reaching a person or has blocked account limitation inquiries entirely. Or maybe they are flooded with inquiries which would also not be surprising.
My friend can connect, but call center seems untrained or unable to solve the problem
My friend with the same problem has not had a problem contacting them(despite the one/two hour wait times he goes through to do it), which is weird. We have identical emails and received them on the same day.
Although he has reached PayPal by phone, he has stated they act confused why his account is limited, and they "will look into it" which basically means it will go nowhere. He keeps calling them anyway to keep the pressure on. All our contacts that got anywhere are stuck in this limbo.
The main reason we are going through this is we both need answers. There is no answer for this. Nobody has stated a fault we have made. There is no event they can point to that details any sort of violation we have done. These are just random (probably bot-initiated) account limitations. He has a few thousand dollars frozen for 6 months so he definitely has reason to track it down.
I have no history communicating with PayPal so there should be no reason I get any sort of exceptional treatment like blocked calls, but I am fairly certain I am being blocked or pushed down somehow.
I have been Contacting PayPal through Email as the only method of communication left.
This is my last resort - emails are so easy to ignore. But I go to the deftly hidden PayPal customer service message center and send in my very well documented and detailed listing of these events and my list of all transactions in the past year, what they are, and why they're harmless/terms abiding.
I get parrot replies like this:
I have gotten that same reply a few times now while trying to interact with a person. I got one real person on the messages.
The human I was talking to agreed that it would be cool to send in my updated documents to help verify my account and allay whatever spam risk PayPal thinks I am.
My attempts at verifying my account ends in errors and feeds me through the parroting customer service email pipeline, again
A day later my bank statement document was rejected randomly because no document included my SSN card ( which I thought was optional, but I can hunt it down and send in ). But while the help center simply says to reupload documents for review, the resubmission page declares I cannot do this right now and the only way to remedy it is to contact a customer service representative through email, again.
Here we go.
I send more emails seeking to verify my account as I can only do so through a customer service representative now, the site has left me with no choice.
Our good friendbot Jessica sends back more parrot statements matching the image above.
In the meantime there is not a lot else to do so I filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau.
All I can do is keep making my case known and try to get PayPal to read what I am sending.
I will welcome suggestions and insight.
I will keep contacting PayPal until I have a satisfactory interaction or answer. I am in it for the long haul.
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