I was a first time user to Paypal, I had never used it before, but I won a tournament and the prize money is sent via Paypal only, so I had to create an account. Okay, no big deal.
Create a new account, enter my email. "We are sorry, that email is already in use, log in?"
Okay, maybe I created one a long time ago and never used it? (Log in, forgot password option) "We are sorry, we cannot verify who you are."
What? Okay, I call support and ask them what is happening with my email. "It appears your email is associated as a secondary email on another account."
What account? "We can't tell you."
Can you remove it? "No, only the primary account holder can remove it."
So there is no way to ever use my own email address to use your service? "We are sorry, but you can use a different email."
So I tested this out. I made two new emails. Created a new account with my first email as my primary. Then on my account, I went to add a secondary email and just typed in my second newly created email. It gets listed on my account as unconfirmed.
I went to my email service for my second created email, checked my email, and I have a message from Paypal "Hello, (name of primary user but not their account name) Confirm your email address to let us know it really belongs to you, once that is done, then you are ready to receive money"
No instructions whatsoever on what you should do if you didn't initiate this verification email. All you can do is either accept, or ignore the email.
Then I went to Paypal and attempted to create a new account with the second email. Sure enough "We are sorry, that email is already in use, log in?"
So basically because a scammer typed in my email address on their paypal account as a secondary email, I can now never use that email on Paypal, even though the email belongs to me and I never verified it to the scammer account.
Thanks, what a great first time user experience. This is completely ridiculous and does not entice me to further use the service at all.
