I wanted to share my first experience with PayPal. I had to join because my sister needed to transfer funds to me here in NZ. I set up my account, she transferred the funds and then I went to transfer the funds to my bank account. To get an error message stating that the transaction couldn't be done at this time. I tried multiple times.
I then called Customer Support. During a 35 minute call, the CS rep accessed the behind-the-scenes systems and tried several ways of enabling the transaction. But ultimately she said that there was a security flag on my account that couldn't be reset. And that there was no way for me to access my money. She refused to escalate the call and gave me an escalation phone number that doesn't work. She admitted that this happens a lot and that there's nothing that PayPal can do about it. She first recommended that I use the funds to go shopping... and then said that the only thing I could do is to refund the money to my sister and use a 'real' transfer service (the actual term she used!). She said that the issue was caused because "PayPal take security really seriously".
Since then, I've done a search for this problem and it's clear from this forum and other online forums that this is a known and frequent "problem" with PayPal. I put the "Problem" in quotes because it's clearly not a problem for PayPal - I can only imagine how much money they earn from the interest on these held funds.
There are several takeaways from this:
- PayPal should not be used as a money transfer service - there's a risk that you will lose your money
- PayPal fails to communicate the nature of this problem in either its Ts&Cs or up front in its error messages
- PayPal has no resolution to this problem - or at least their CS reps have no access to a resolution.
I have no choice other than to refund the money back to my sister and then of course I will be closing my PayPal account and moving my business to a competent fund transfer company.
I would be interested to hear about any escalation success that other users have had with this problem!
