Hi all! I run a small animal welfare project (outside US) and most part of our work is funded by donations we mainly receive via PayPal. We do not sell anything online, so money we receive to our PayPal is from people who want to support our work and they donate when they want and how much they want. Maybe 6 months ago we started receiving weird tiny donations, 0.01-2.00USD. Some days there were several of these. At first I did nothing, as who am I to say people should donate more, if someone wants to donate 1 dollar, it's up to them. Then, all these weird donations suddenly came back to haunt me as dispute/chargeback cases. There, I was able to see the disputed amount usually was much more than the tiny amount we saw when the transaction first arrived. We might have actually received 0.00USD but the disputed amount could be several hundreds of dollars. I then of course reacted, replied, contacted PayPal explaining the situation. I had to send several messages until someone actually responded with something real, not just auto-replies sending me links to "helpful" articles. Once the disputes and chargeback cases we resolved, PayPal started to take 10USD for each resolved case from us, even when the transaction we received was 0.00USD! Luckily, finally after gazillion messages, all these 10USD payments were refunded to us. I was also adviced to refund any suspicious donations immediately after receiving those, and that I have been doing. I refund all donations that are under 5USD now. However, today, PayPal has taken nearly 300USD from our account for a dispute case they resolved. Transaction amount was 0.01USD, which I refunded when it arrived. Dispute case was opened later and the disputed amount was nearly 300USD which PayPal has now taken from us. We never saw that money! We got 0.01USD, which we refunded already. I tried to report this as a problem via Resolution Center, but no luck as it does not work. All I get is a message saying "Something went wrong, please try again later". I have contacted PayPal by email (which is a pleasure, as the messages are only allowed to be 250 characters, I can hardly explain anything with such a limited message) and am waiting for a reply at the moment. I am expecting auto-replies again but hopefully somehow will reach someone who can solve this mess. We are basically a one person project, and these cases have taken so much of my time I have lost count how many hours I have spent on trying to get these resolved. Especially, when most of my time goes to trying to get help from PayPal. We still occasionally receive these weird tiny "donations", not as many as in the beginning, and there are several open dispute cases still hanging and waiting to be resolved. I cannot understand the logic behind this. If we receive 0.01 USD, where does the bigger amount come, the hundreds of dollars, that we never see even mentioned anywhere until a chargeback case is open? And just a warning to fellow charities: react immediately if you start receiving strange looking tiny donations. This is a mess that can basically stop everything else you do.
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