warning burnt by paypal prepaid mastercard

[maclum]

I love paypal and have been using  monepak to add money with no problems. But I have recieved multiple emails from Paypal selling the benifits of the paypal prepaid mastercard so  I went to Walgreens and paid $ 150 for a Paypal prepaid mastercard thinking that I can use it straight away. 

I get home and try to activate it online.......but my social security, passport number and greencard number are not accepted ??????

So I call paypal and guess what, after entering all my card and personal information, it also does not work, then I find that there is no person to talk to, apparently paypal has bankers hours when it comes to actualy helping you????

So I send a email from their website and to my great surprise get a email back within minutes from a support person saying they realy want to help and will call me back immediately. Did they call back ????? no, so I rang the number they gave in the email and guess what, it went to voice mail they have gone home - again bankers hours.

So I went to the drug store that I purchased the card from, gave them my recept and asked them to transfer the money to a moneypak card. Bad luck, they were happy to take my money but cant refund, they called paypal as well and could not get any real person to talk to, how can that happen, can you imagine Walgreen not been able to talk to visa or american express???? that would not happen, but Walgreen could not get hold of anyone at Paypal.

So now I am left with a card that can not be activated, I receipt for $150 and a very bad tast in my mouth. Paypal does a great job with the actual transaction with the retail organizations for the purchase of goods and services but **bleep** at managing the mastercard pre paid process and should not agressively sell something they can not support, and in fact, that does not even work,

[Rangers_customs]

That will only work with two of my multiple orders. I have two on Ebay, and many orders from my own website. I make custom airsoft parts. I'm the only person in the world making aftermarket pistons for the M28 airsoft sniper rifle lol.. I have 6 orders to ship, not counting the two items on ebay. I think I can do this shipping thing on paypal itself, but i've never done it before, and no clue how exactly. I will have to look into it tonight. I also am out of soda, and getting a damn caffiene headache haha.. Cant even go to the store to buy things I need before I ship these pistons.. I need a bunch of O rings for them first.

[hschramm83]

You should be able to ship from within PayPal if they paid using paypal.  If you have a problem USPS actually takes paypal and it is easy to set up.

It is frustrating to have to do things differently, but at least there are some options...  This banking Holiday does not help either.. FIgures..  

Another thought, I wonder if this government shutdown has something to do with it, maybe some system they use is not available and they do not want to say that it is due to that...  It seems too long for IT...  I know it did not start until last week, but a lot of things have taken time to catch up.  If there was a loop hole that was causing a problem they might have had to shut it down until it is over...

If you want to see a lot of upset people look at the Facebook page for paypal... Apparently they are deleting posts and there are still tons of bad ones...

It is obvious that the problem is understood and being worked on, that is what makes me think there is a reason relating to the government...  Remember, financial institutions, especially ones that are FDIC insured are so entwined in government they are merely instrumentalities of the government themselves... It is likely some peice of the puzzle is down and causing this, even if it was delayed...

Just my thoughts...

[RobertinSeattle]

I was plesantly surprised to see this series of comments ranging from a couple of months back to today!

Had a client pay me through PayPal on Saturday morning just when I needed the money very badly on a long weekend. But when I tried to transfer the funds "instantly" to my prepaid PayPal MasterCard debit card, I kept getting routed over to an approval page specifically for pre-approved payments (probably done this more than ten times already over this weekend trying to move funds!). As many of you may have also noticed, underneath the Instant Transfer secion, there are directions to add the Bancorp "bank account" to your banks. So I tried it and thought moving my money over to the bank account associated to my card would make my money instantly available on my card. Wrong! Once the transfer went through, up popped their warning that this would take 3 - 5 Business Days to complete!

I finally ended up calling PayPal on Saturday evening and was fortunate enough to finally get through to a sypathetic customer service rep who - once I was authenticated - managed to cancel and reverse that transaction immediately. He then also suggested that I keep trying to contact the Prepaid group (it's a separate entity) but not that night as their call center had closed before PayPal's call center closed. He also walked me through a MoneyGram transfer which actually went through very smoothly and quickly. He even promised to credit my account with the $4.95 fee for the MoneyGram (but you can only transfer up to $200 - including that $4.95 fee - per 24 hour cycle!).

On Sunday morning, I did get to a WalMart (authorized MoneyGram vendor) and picked up my $195 so it helped during this trying long weekend. And I saw this morning that PayPal did indeed reimburse my $4.95 MoneyGram fee as well.

Here's the problem: Just went back to PrePaid PayPal twice this morning and it's doing the same BS as it's been doing all weekend: Re-routing me to authorize prepayments to their account with absolutely NO transfer services available. I'm going to phone them shortly but I'm sure either they'll have the same lame excuse: "We're working on it, sir" or they might even be closed since it's officiall a banking holiday.

I had switched everything from GreenDot over to PayPal two months ago because of my perceived expectation that it would make my PayPal transfers faster and cheaper. With this muh grief and poor customer service, I'm re-considering my options. This is very poor service and PayPal needs to take charge and resolve the problem once and for all.

Maybe it's time to try the American Express prepaidd card: I've heard it's one of the best in the business.