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Same problem here. My old credit card was lost, so I replaced it, and since then the last three transactions have come out of my bank even though credit card is preferred. I think I'll start looking at other payment providers.
I chatted with PayPal support, and they said it was because the charges were from subscriptions or automatic payments, which can have different preferred payment methods than your global preferred payment. Here is the full response below, along with steps of how to fix. Hope that helps someone who ended up here like me!
A Billing Agreement lets you authorize a merchant to withdraw money from your PayPal account whenever you make a purchase on their website.
If a merchant offers Billing Agreements, you can sign up during checkout. The merchant bills you based on the terms of your Billing Agreement. We don’t share your financial information with the merchant. (Please note that not all merchants offer PayPal Billing Agreements.)
If you are able to use your PayPal account balance to make purchases then it is always the first payment method we use to pay a Billing Agreement. If you do not have enough money in your PayPal balance, we use your preferred backup payment method.
Here's how to change your backup payment method for a Billing Agreement:
If you haven't selected a backup payment method or funds aren't available, we use another funding source on your PayPal account.
I had this problem and updated all my automatic payments and set my preferred card. HOWEVER even with NEW vendors (that I have never shopped with) I am getting the wrong credit card option showing up, with neither of my other two credit cards selectable. I've deleted cookies, double checked subscriptions and card settings. It makes no sense since all these three credit cards are from the SAME provider.
It's purely a PayPal bug and super annoying -- I'm specifically trying to use one credit card because they have rewards for using it through PayPal this quarter, but I can't get it to show up anywhere despite having it set as my preferred payment method on PayPal. I've even then bothered to hit the "add new card" option in the PayPal popup dialog (even though... this card is already in my account) and even THEN it will return to the dialog WITHOUT the preferred card shown as an option (again, all three cards from the same provider, so there should be no issues w.r.t. international conversion or whatever).
P.S. I first had this problem when PayPal was charging my company card for autopay recurring payment transactions EVEN THOUGH I had never selected that company card for anything, definitely not preferred card. I checked everything multiple times but in the end, the only way to fix it for sure was to completely remove my company card from PayPal. Their preferred card and "autopay" management is all messed up, super freaking annoying.
Thank you!!!
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