Greetings all!
In response to the recent upswing in posts about PayPal requesting more personal information, I felt it would be a good idea to provide some information and reasoning behind why we’re doing what we’re doing.
In short, to comply with various government regulations, we are required to verify who is using PayPal in certain circumstances.
One of the issues that is causing this sudden interest in your information is our compliance with Anti-Money Laundering regulations as well as various Know Your Customer requirements. Previously, when you signed up for PayPal, we asked you for no more information than your name, email address, physical address, and some sort of financial instrument to make your purchase with.
In light of these regulations we now need to verify the accuracy of the information being provided. So in most cases we’ll ask for your date of birth, social security number, and verification that the address you provided is actually linked to you in some way. We’ll ask you for this information via our secure site, and in most cases the verification is fully automated and you’ll continue with your activity without any trouble. But sometimes that automatic process will fail; some reasons for this may be:
- A customer recently moved and the records haven't been updated.
- A customer has recently had a name change for some reason.
- The customer is quite young and has no history we can verify.
- Or at the extreme end, the PayPal account was created with false information.
If any of these is the case, we'll start asking for physical documentation and once we've obtained and verified that information you can continue using your PayPal account.
So that’s the long and the short it. I know that not everyone will be happy with this change to our policy. You’re concerned with your information being secure. So are we. But we’re also concerned with who you’re doing business with and this will definitely help with our ability to eliminate potential issues before they negatively affect anyone.
Andy
