For Christmas I gave a friend a $5 US dollar gift in one of Facebook's games. This was very much a one-time gift. He was surprised today he had more "points" and contacted me. Looking at my Paypal account I saw TWO payments to Facebook, one of P 294.99 Philippines Pesos (why the Philippines? WEIRD???) and another for $5 USA dollars.
Doing some digging around in my Paypal it appears somehow Paypal fancies that I had given Facebook full access to my Paypal account (linked to my bank) apparently at any time for any purpose. I closed that immediately, of course.
Looking at some similar threads in this forum, Paypal employees use the excuse that I "should have looked carefully at what I was agreeing to". I know that if there was any such agreement for recurring payments that I was part of (or worse, to give Facebook full access to all my money at any time). Something like that should have been VERY plain and clear, if the merchant and Paypal were interested in people to trust them. It was not clear.
I have two outstanding payment recurring payment arrangements through Paypal: Skype and my cellphone provider. Never had any problem with them. Both were very clear that I was setting a recurring payment, and for a definite fixed amount.
Basically I quite uncomfortable now on whether Paypal can handle my money safely - I never trusted those games, and I am very sure I did look carefully, precisely because of that - games are such a venue for scams...
I hope this gets solved quickly, but more importantly, I hope that Paypal and Facebook take a strong stand to protect their clients - us. I am far from being the only one, it is very obvious by now that they should fix this for good.
MAKE IT VERY CLEAR when there is a recurring payment as part of a transaction. Otherwise all this talk about "secure features" is quite empty
