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Ask HN: Paypal Messup, Missing money from account. What next?

16 points by jyothi ↗ HN
I am facing some extremely unpleasant time with paypal.

I transferred $2402 to my bank account on 19th January. The money is still not in my bank, after 25 days. I have called paypal 3 times in the last 25 days and have heard no convincing resolution on this. No written communication from Paypal after the calls.

Additionally $300 went missing from my account - mostly in between all the CR DR transactions. I have carefully looked into the USD conversions - still there is a clear mismatch and paypal accepted this orally & written.

If I have to sue them and the partner bank in India - is it going to give me any benefit at all for all the stress? What should I do?

8 comments

[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 31.8 ms ] thread
pbreit
If what you are reporting is accurate, I would be very surprised if PayPal does not resolve the issue appropriately. If you have managed to contact actual PayPal representatives and can show them clearly, without innuendo, the issues that have transpired, you should be able to get the situation rectified.
jyothi
Yes I have spoken to Paypal representatives, they created a trace 15 days ago. They say there is no update yet, we are following up with our partner bank in India.

  I understand that you're concerned about the withdrawal made on January 19, 2012. for Rs.117,300.37 INR. There's already a ticket made for this request and right noiw the recent update about this was that, our account specialist are coordinating with the partner bank and they are waiting fro reports from them about the trace.

  Date of the transaction: Jan 19, 2012
  Amount: Rs.117,300.37 INR
  Transaction ID: 5SF58792B0877314B
  Trace ID: 226874463
  
  We'll definitely send you an email as soon as we received the update from them.
  I am happy to have been of assistance to you today. PayPal strives for improvement and your support is appreciated.

  Sincerely,
  Toni
  PayPal, an eBay Company
The representatives seem to be not in a position to resolve it. they only initiate traces. There is no mentioned route to reach out to anyone else on Paypal.
mansolo
Sounds like you haven't dealt with PayPal before. If that's the case, why bother writing a comment?

In my experience, PayPal doesn't like to be accountable and they don't offer explanations for why they take punitive actions (I have specific personal examples but decided not to share).

pbreit
I worked at PayPal for 7 years and know very well how things operate. PayPal definitely does offer explanations where possible (which is not always for obvious reasons).
jyothi
so you just think this does not need an explanation. That definitely sounds like paypal.
mansolo
It happened with me as well, but a much smaller amount of $50. After looking into it, the $50 charge was under a mysterious "professional fees" which PayPal refused to explain. I did get my money back after repeated enquiries though.

On the other hand, there have been several disputes though where I didnt get a fair shake and was essentially ripped off.

Let's face it, for those outside of the US, PayPal is a necessary evil. I loathe having to use them. They seem grossly incompetent in terms of customer support.

Continue to try every PayPal connection you have. Go to the Consumerist, media outlets etc about this. Make some noise.

If you make a big enough stink about it, maybe the money will show up.

jyothi
Update I digged into the transactions a bit and understood this: The autosweep on my account got reversed & paypal was still showing balance in USD in my account. The reversal of autosweep took 3 hours and in that amount I lost 300$ out of $4804 in currency conversion.

Then I initiated the transaction to transfer to the bank myself but only for $2402. If they had some retries on the auto-sweep there is a chance their system got into some deadlock state in that time period. Their customer support cannot comprehend this & have no idea about Bank Regulations or about policies. They are treating this as if there is a small glitch on facebook while throwing a sheep.

edit: removed transaction details

sdfjkl
Reason, plead, threaten - it's worth a try, but probably won't help. The amount isn't worth suing over. Write it off as learning expense and never deal with them again. Warn others. Welcome to the club.