I go to add my new bank to replace my primary. I forget that it's under "Wallet" because the last time I was in to manage my account was years ago. I go to "Payments" where there is a listing of my current bank and a link next to it to "Change". I click this link. I am taken to a screen where it says
Choose your preferred way to pay online
We’ll use this when you shop online or send money for goods and services. You can always choose a different way to pay at checkout.
<bank listed here>
<Confirm button>
That is all. No option to change anything. Seemingly this is a screen where one would change between more than one already configured options, but I only have the one. Misleading, but ok, whatever.
I do a quick search online and remember and find the Wallet. I go to add a new bank account via the "Link a bank" icon. I enter routing and account numbers and get a message:
"This account needs a little help to link it. Contact us and we can help with that, or you can link a different account."
The "contact us" words are a link to the same page as "contact us" at the bottom of each page of the site.
On the contact page, I try the "Message us" option, which comes up with an automated chat assistant. I type that I'm trying to add an account. It asks for my account and routing numbers.
It comes back with "The bank account you're trying to link can't be added at this time due to one or more security factors."
I look up what could be causing this and nobody has an answer for me in the community. Someone mentioned their phone number was different. Mine was not. I was able to find a help article (that I can't find now) that explained why I might not be able to add an account. A number of reasons were listed such as differing name or address between paypal and that bank, the bank account already being attached to another paypal account, having been used already and having a zero balance, etc. None of these was valid for my situation.
I am logging in from a non-private browser, from a computer I've had for years, with the same internet service I've had for even longer. What possible security problem could there have been?
I ended up calling and spending about ten minutes on the phone. In total, to simply add a bank account, a process that takes about 30 seconds, it took me over 30 minutes. I'm not even sure that the agent I called helped me. He said he added the account from his end but I don't see it in the portal (I expect it to show pending verification). And he of course had no answer for why I was denied online.
Also, the first time I tried to ask the community it wouldn't let me in. It registered that I was already signed in but was unable to pass the credentials or something because each time resulted in an error, eventually returning:
Sorry about that
Looks like this action is not supported. Please return and report this error so that we can support it in the future. (invalid client_id or redirect_uri)
Once I got in, while submitting this form it said "verification failed" even after I received a green checkbox in the "I'm not a robot" capcha. Then said "invalid html was found in the message body" - because I used greater than and less than signs??
Am I having an uniquely bad experience or is Paypal just complete garbage now?
