Our company has had this PayPal account for 11 years now, we manage over 100 transactions per day and have thousands of subscribers. We've paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees to PayPal over this time, in payment charges and exchange rate fees. Yesterday, the account was permanently terminated without notice, on a Friday evening at 17:00.
PayPal is the main way we receive income, it has been for a decade. It's the cornerstone of my business, my livelihood. So you can imagine my shock when out of nowhere, we can no longer receive payments or pay employees.
I immediately called customer support and was informed of the reasoning behind the account closure. 11 years ago, when I signed up to PayPal, using my legitimate information, I was 17 years old (not 18 years old). I used my real date of birth during the signup procedure, and verfied the account with documents containing my birthdate. So.. I'm totally baffled.
The representative went on to explain that I had been sent two emails prior to closure. These emails were sent to just one of the four email addresses assigned to our PayPal account. I never received any contact via phone or post. And there was no warning that the account would be permanently terminated without the option for appeal. The emails were sent to the 'Primary' email address on the PayPal account, of which we no longer had access to. We were (and still are) unable to change our primary email address prior to this event (There's no 'Change primary', 'Set as primary' or even 'Remove' options at all for our account). We assumed (mistakenly) that at least one of the other three email addresses would be used for important information, or the phone numbers, or postal address.
We managed to gain access to the old email account and saw the email which had been sent.
https://i.gyazo.com/966aaa9cbd3f64eb2022d4d44ce8a969.png
That's it. All I had to do was respond to the email in a single line... "I agree to the PayPal User Agreement and Privacy Policy".
Their response to my inaction (after they emailed me to an inactive email account of which could not be changed from the primary position and cannot be removed) was to totally close the business account. Which will cost us thousands of dollars for every day that it's down, $50,000 - $200,000 from the loss of our subscribers, and it's already causing havoc as all of our automatic payments and other websites that use this PayPal account as a form of payment.
I can't even create a new account, because our company bank account is assigned to the terminated account and cannot be removed.
What on earth do I do now? I'm sure losses can be reclaimed from PayPal by taking solicitor route, since this is obviously madness. But that's a lot of time and hassle. If we cannot get this account reopened and have to start up a new account, we lose tens of thousands of dollars from lost subscribers. Let alone the money we're losing every hour that we don't have a PayPal account.
Because they closed the account at 17:00 on Friday .. I cannot contact customer support again until Monday. And even then, the account is clearly listed as permanently closed (cannot be appealed against). It was mentioned that the Appeals department does work on the weekends - but I have no way of contacting them.
Thanks.
