Still cannot recover account that has an old phone number for sending text verification to.

chrisco23
New Community Member

TL;DR:  I can't get into my account because it still wants to send a code to a phone I no longer have.

 

The account had/has a small amount of money in it and more recently it has (in theory) been getting Safeway.com rebates.

 

In my 25 years being on and developing for the www, this has hands down become the biggest CSR snafu I've ever faced.

 

For years I had asked (sporadically, not a daily user) to fix the problem that PayPal wants to verify my login by sending a code to a phone that I destroyed years ago.

 

A month or so ago a PayPal rep finally gave up and just asked me to create a new account.

 

I did so.  I was willing to just lose the money I had left just to be done with this, as long as my account was closed out.  (It turned out later that account was not closed out).

 

Then came the thing with Safeway.com, where I buy all my groceries.  They have an arrangement with PayPal to do rebates, as long as the email addresses match (ie. my old PayPal account, unless I want to go changing my safeway account and open up that new can of worms).

 

So I was on chat earlier this week.  If you let the chat pause for more than a few seconds (because, say, battling PayPal is not your sole occupation in life), you get a new CSR.  I do not exaggerate when I say I went through at least a half dozen CSRs before I got one that seemed to help me, that stuck around long enough to understand the issue.

 

So this ended up being a nearly-3-hour ordeal.  At the end, I was told that he would try to escalate it such that PayPal could send the text verification to the correct phone, and that I should log in after 48 hours.  He said if that still did not work, they would transfer the funds from the old account into the new one and close out the new account.

 

It's past 48 hours now and I get an automated PayPal email:  "We're waiting to hear from you.  Blah blah go to Message Center".

 

So I log in (with my new account), see that I have one message, and I get a broken page.  Error 429.  ("Too many requests").  On my FIRST TRY.  (and on any subsequent attempts).

 

So reluctantly I go click on the "Chat with Us" stuff.  That plain does not work.  Does nothing in fact.  Apparently Customer Service has just been completely taken down (covid?).

 

So that's how I start my morning today.

 

Elon Musk can design, build, and send into orbit, his "cybertruck" (ok I understand he "only" sent his sports car due to the mishap at the unveiling of the cybertruck).

 

Elon Musk can do that, but he's incapable of changing a single field in a database (my phone number).

 

Beyond Maddening!!

 

I know by now, dear community, there is nothing I can do.  But I write this hear in the dim hope that someone competent still exists at PayPal and can at last rectify a situation that amounts to toying with both my money and my time.

 

 

 

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