After removing all my bank accounts from my PayPal account, I opened a support request to determine exactly why PayPal does whatever it wants with my money that I did not authorize. Here is exact text copy + pasted from PayPal staff: I'm sorry about the inconveniences this is causing you. I understand you are expecting your Visa to be charged for $45.15 but the payment is being taken from your bank account instead. After reviewing your transaction, I see that you have an automatic payment that was set up in your PayPal account with Lyft. And even though, you set your Visa card as your preferred funding source for online purchases, automatic payments or billing agreements have a separate funding source. I see that your Visa card was only set up for your Lyft automatic payment on Dec 18 and that was after the $45.15 charge happened. We no longer have the option to change the funding source. But moving forward, your Lyft payments will now be taken from your Visa card. Note that a payment was setup for Lyft, but the source of funds was unchanged by me. The above statements were a lie. I responded with the following: as I stated I made three other purchases through Lyft that were not pulled from my checking account, so what you wrote is not true. please explain The support person then responded with this: Can you provide us the date of the transaction or a transaction ID? I replied with all the requested information. This particular person stopped responding, and I instead got responded from a different person: sometimes it does happen that a different funding source is charged than the set payment method when there is a higher risk associated with the payment, this could be the reason the payment was charged to your checking account as instant transfer. Occasionally, we only allow a payment to be sent from different payment method for an instance. It's not a reflection of you or your account activities, but rather we've noticed a pattern associated with higher-than-normal risk. We appreciate your understanding in this matter. The above makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. Charging my credit card that I authorize is a higher risk than EFT from my checking account that I never authorized? This is directly from PayPal staff.
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