Why does PayPal charge a removed bank account on a renewal?

[techmom0f4]

I have an annual subscription for a marketing service that I used PayPal for the first year annual subscription. I setup automated payment for the renewal back in August of last year. Since, I closed the bank account that had been on my PayPal wallet and I removed the bank in May or June of this year to move to my new bank. I knew the renewal was coming up last week so I signed in to PayPal to ensure that my Preferred bank was updated and logged into my app to verify that PayPal was still selected.

Today I received an email notification from PayPal that my bank declined the payment. However, I had just successfully paid an Airbnb reservation so I was surprised. I see another email and it has the last four digits of the bank account that I had removed. 

I don't understand why PayPal would use a bank account that was removed from my account?  Is this a bug in the system or expected behavior?

I have been with PayPal for over 20 years and this just baffles me. 

I attempted to open a ticket and then reached out to my marketing subscription to make them aware of a potential problem with the payment. I also added money to my PayPal account because having a negative balance in there is really bugging me. You would think that if you removed an account that there would be some notification that I would need to make adjustments for anything still tied to that account. I don't have anything. I cannot even see the history on the activity in my Wallet, only transactions. 

How does one prevent this from happening again in the future? (besides not using PayPal for these types of transactions). 

Thanks!

[PayPal_JonK]

Hello @techmom0f4, 

Welcome! Thanks for visiting PayPal's Community Forum. I'm sorry to hear you've run into some issues with a recent annual subscription. Normally, if a bank or card is set as the preferred funding source for a subscription or billing agreement, that funding source can't be removed until another bank or card is chosen. Have you double-checked that your bank and any debit cards tied to that bank have been properly removed from your Wallet? If it was, please reach out to our Customer Support teams to have them review what may have happened. 

My apologies for any confusion and best wishes!

 - Jon K