I had verified my PayPal with a bank account a while back, but recently became concerned that if someone got my login credentials, they could remove $10K in one transaction. So I made a credit card my preferred payment method, then tried to remove the bank account. I got meaningless errors such as you cannot remove it "at this time" (as if I needed to wait for something, then try again?) and sending a message to PayPal online just resulted in frustrated form letter responses about navigating to the page and clicking Remove Bank. Finally I called the service center, and a rep explained that I could not remove the bank due to "preapproved payments". I had to go to settings (gear icon) > Payments > Manage pre-approved payments, and one by one, go into each entry and cancel it. A few of these preapproved payments were online merchants I had either done a subscription with, or had made repeated purchases from. Many, however, were single transactions where I never intended to buy from them again. Due to the fine print of the terms of service, they were allowed to store my bank account info and in doing so, each one of these incidents placed a kind of lock on my bank account in PayPal, preventing me from removing the bank. While on the line with the CS rep, I canceled each of the two dozen preapproved payments. She then did some magic on her end to remove the bank. I don't know if I would have been able to remove it myself at that point; I didn't try, since she had offered to do it on her end. It is rather unbelievable that PayPal cannot give you a simple and clear message when trying to remove a bank, such as "Cannot remove bank due to pre-approved payments". Just that much would have at least directed me to the part of the site where I needed to be. And the folks responding in the message center were no help at all. They ignored the fact that I reported an error on the Remove Bank link, and just kept telling me how to get to the link. (They're probably bots, anyway.) I hope this information helps someone else, and if someone from PayPal is reading this -- PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE put a meaningful error message on the Remove Bank link to avoid this needless frustration.
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