PayPal RIP OFF tracked by Times of Assam

It has been alleged that Online Money transfer entity PayPal has either intentionally started to play fouler against targeted users or their own services including customer care, verifications and database records have gone down to very poor standards.

After a series of reports done by Times of Assam regarding certain deeds and policies of Paypal which made life miserable for a lot of Small scale service providers, merchants and freelancers, many current and previous users of Paypal have approached the news site to inform about several inconveniences hey faced through using Paypal. Many such users have faced huge inconvenience either in the form of changing policies, auto-withdrawals enforced or low exchange rates given.

The latest nail in the head is that Paypal is alleged to have made account limited to many users, including members of  Times of Assam without providing any actual reason for the same. The best (only) that Paypal could do to such users whose accounts were suddenly made limited was a response citing certain possibilities for which the account might have been disabled. As many as 76 users have contacted Times of Assam with their PayPal issue regarding to Permanent Limitation.

Some users have in fact complained that the possible reasons are actually mere excuses to cover up and that their accounts are blocked only to freeze their own money inside it for as long as possible. Besides many have received late responses rather than any proactive communication, that too only when enquired upon by the victim-users.

Following is an excerpt from an email received from Paypal (name removed):

Dear ____,

What’s the problem?

To help protect our members’ accounts, we routinely review account activity. When we reviewed your activity, we noticed that you have more than one Personal account or more than one Premier or Business account. In addition, we noticed one or more of the following other reasons to limit your account and terminate our services:

• You provided us with information that we believe was false, inaccurate or misleading information; or
• You sent or received funds that were potentially fraudulent; or
• You have more than one account with a negative balance; or
• You are in violation of the User Agreement, the Commercial Entity Agreement, the Acceptable Use Policy or another agreement you have with PayPal.

Our decision was based on terms outlined in these agreements.

What to do next

Because of these issues, your account(s) has been permanently limited and we can no longer offer our services to you. You will still be able to log-in to see your transaction history for a limited time.
If you believe you’ve received this message in error you may appeal the decision by contacting PayPal at the Help Center and clicking “Contact Us”.

Please be prepared to provide one or all of the following pieces of information; drivers’ license, social security or tax ID card, current utility bill, business license, articles of incorporation or other identifying documentation.
If you don’t appeal this decision within 14 days, we will use any positive balance in your PayPal accounts to resolve any negative balance you have.

To protect against the risk of reversals like buyer complaints or chargebacks, we will hold the funds in your account for up to 45 days. We will use your account balance to pay for any reversals we receive against your account. You’ll receive an email within this time period advising you that any balance in your account is available for withdrawal. Once you receive this email, you can log into your account and click “Withdraw” at the top of the page to receive your funds.

Thanks,

PayPal

From the above email, a few things are clear enough to raise unmatched questions.

Firstly, Paypal itself is not sure enough as to why exactly the user’s account was permanently limited. By providing multiple possibilities, it cleary shows either a lack of will to track issues to granular level or an attitude of Confuse if you cannot convince. In an age and a country where even the Government is bound to give exact information when sought through the Right to Information (RTI), it is really a sorry state of affairs to see that an internationally acclaimed Organisation cannot track exact reason of an account termination of customer. It puts a question mark on the tall claim by the organization that repeatedly uses RBI guidelines as a mask to change its policies constantly, even at the cost of customer’s inconvenience.

Secondly, the email states about the user having more than one Personal account. In India, it is impossible to have more than one PAN and no user can open or maintain two or more personal accounts because of a single PAN system. It must be mentioned here that PAN is a mandatory field along with purpose code and bank details for opening any Paypal account. In current age, even the simplest online tools, ERPs or database management software’s have the inbuilt simple logic of throwing out alert or error message when duplicate values are input. In the first place a user could not ideally open two personal accounts using the same PAN. He or she should ideally get an alert, which also goes to the Paypal internal operations team, that another account with the same PAN is already available. However if one is able to still create an additional account with the same PAN, it calls for a huge security issue of possible fraudulence and potential online theft, even if both accounts are later terminated. Needless to mention, in such cases the probability of a hacker using someone else’s personal information to transfer amounts.

Paypal also mentions in the email about the issue of funds that were potentially fraudulent. There is no definition around what can be considered as a potential fraudulent fund. If an online imposter or fraud merchant cons or convinces to buy certain product online from him and you end up making a payment to that person even that can be a case of sent funds that were potentially fraudulent. Would it be right to terminate the user who was conned then? Obviously it would not, without proper investigation and proof on the matter. This again re-iterates the necessity of Paypal giving exact reasoning regarding a user account termination instead of multiple possibilities.

In fact PayPal’s creation of annoyance to its users has a long history. The only constant thing in Paypal’s policies have been change, it is time and again accused to offer lower currency conversion rates, local currency not supported leads users to lose money in conversion, forced auto-withdrawals and more have irked even the most loyal of its customers which includes all sorts of service providers,- small data entry firms, medical transcription providers, copywriters, web designing firms, report writers, freelance software developers, graphic designers, animators and others who depends on foreign clients.

If the service delivery of Paypal does not improve immediately or their foul play does not stop, PayPal would end up being rated as the most amoral and unprofessional organisations.