The vendor has not recieved the payment, and customer support has not been helpful

[mtranqui]

Hello, I'm wondering if this has been a problem for others

I sent a large transaction as a initial deposit for a program I will be enrolled in this summer. The "vendor" in this case is an american company, and I am based out of canada. They had an option for a PayPal payment method. I sent the money on January 19th, and as of now the money has not been recieved by them.

When asking paypal what to do, they give me the customer service number and state that they can't do anything about the money as it has already left their system, yet the vendor will need to call the customer service line to release the funds? Makes no sense to me. 

The other issue is that when the vendor called that number, they got bounced around a bunch of automated menus and couldn't speak to a real person, and they also don't have the time to be sitting on the phone for hours trying to sort this out. 

PayPal has stated that the money is being held so that it can be assured that I recieve the goods/services that I paid for, yet they also can't refund me the money because its not in the system anymore?

Me and the vendor are at our wits end trying to figure this out, and beyond me calling the customer service line (which I have not tried yet) I have no clue what to do.

[PayPal_JonK]

Hello @mtranqui, 

Welcome to the PayPal Community. I'm sorry to hear this payment hasn't gone quite as you had expected, this is certainly a confusing situation. When you send money to someone via PayPal, personal or business, the receiver should normally see the transaction on their side right away. There may be times when the payment is placed on hold, but the receiver should always have the option to refund the transaction if needed. However, I wouldn't recommend refunding the transaction in this instance. 

PayPal may place the payment on hold for a number of reasons, but information on the most common type of hold can be found in the following Help Center guide All About Holds. 

Transactions shouldn't just disappear off of someone's PayPal Activity, so if they don't see it, it may never have been received to begin with. In that case, they may need to confirm the email address the payment was sent to.

Just in case, you may want to review the following Help Center article on Common Scams and how to spot them. 

Lastly, if you or the merchant still have questions on this or other topics, here's an article listing all of our current Customer Support channels. 

Good luck with this and future transactions, 

 - Jon K