It sounds like PayPal, or someone, made a mistake that PayPal then processed a fix on. When the guy called to say someone took money from his account with no notification, "what happened?", they said _he_ had actioned the refunding of the money. Which he hadn't.

They lied, purposefully and deliberately. But there's a good chance that the person on the phone wasn't lying IMO, instead someone altered his account in a way that didn't show [to their phone reps] in their system ... which is IMO much more messed up.

So PayPal lied to him.

Then they asked for details of the transaction that they said he had refunded and "blocked" his account for not providing them.

Government financial services should impose heavy fines on things like this, not informing a creditor when debits are made on their accounts. His PayPal account should have a user traceable error (with doubled entries in the other relevant account entries) -

    money paid from $ACCNUM with $ACCID
    money paid due to PayPal error and refunded to $ACCNUM

If they could do accounting properly then they wouldn't have to implictly accuse him of fraud (demanding the transaction details).

My experience of PayPal has in general been pretty good, but I did have a person pay for something from eBay, then when I was sending it - like just about to head to the post office I realised I'd not checked the payment. On checking the transaction link in eBay the transaction didn't appear on PayPal .. uh oh, so I checked PayPal and I couldn't find a transaction for the amount in my account list. So I checked eBay and the buyer had asked to cancel the completed transaction ... so I said yes, very begrudgingly. Then a few days later the buyer asked for the money back, but I never had it, and they (assuming they weren't lying) had a transaction for paying me ... which should be impossible with proper accounting because that transaction should include an entry in my account ledger too his payment and my receipt are one transaction.

My suspicion is that their database processing is lacking and their account ledgers as displayed to users don't properly demonstrate the status of accounts.

I'm assuming good faith on behalf of the OP primarily because I've had a similar experience of missing transactions on PayPal.

I had an unexpected deposit show up in my bank account last year and then disappear a day later. The bank sent me a letter in the mail explaining what happened.

Maybe you need a better bank.

so, i deposited a $1000 paycheck (was working for a local guy, fixing computers) once and did NOT notice that i actually ended up with $2000 in my account. This went on for at least three months, when all of a sudden I lose $1000 from my account. Apparently Wells Fargo had figured out about the bug and found all the accounts that had gotten double deposits and 'fixed it'.

All without notifying me.

...I don't bank with Wells Fargo any more.

When the bank corrected it the transaction completely disappeared, apart from the screenshots he took there was no trace of it whatsoever.

No need to get angry, but you might need to get careful. It's a bit like seeing a single cockroach in a restaurant; you can't just kill and remove it then declare that everything's fine.

Contacting them and confirming that it was a mistake is basic CYA, it establishes with them that it's not your transaction and hopefully gets something on file.

(I've just got off the phone with EE after a mysterious charge appeared on my account. They couldn't tell me where it had come from or even when it was applied, so after putting me on hold for a while they agreed to just take it off again. But I only spotted it because I'm checking my bills carefully after a previous dispute ...)

In his case, he just got suspended and asked to provide documents he is physically unable to produce (contrary to presumption of innocence).

the next day, and after almost two weeks since the refund to place (but only one day after the long phone discussion) my account was blocked as "suspicious" activity and in order to unblock it I will have to provide original product receipts of the product I was "selling", something that I do not have as I do not even know what I was selling!

Yet again, emotion and anger are now somehow the company's fault.

This is merchant 101: always refund suspicious payments before your payment processor has to do it, it'd be really bizarre if Paypal was somehow the only exception in the industry.

There is no risk of OP loosing $1,200 to two refunds if he went through the proper refund procedure. A transfer can only ever be refunded once.

The only way I see this going wrong is if instead of doing a refund you create a new transfer to send the money back, but you obviously shouldn't do that.

I suppose the key is if Paypal put it in the wrong account then cleared up after themselves, I don't think that's a refund as such, you should be telling the account holder when they ask though. The other option is the payer paid money to the wrong account, in that situation this guy should be getting notified.

This isn't just an issue of 'not his money'. How are you supposed to know if your account is hacked, or some weird fraud is going on, or even just a straight forward, he sold something and thought he got paid for it.

In many (all?) countries, your bank would've acted criminally. If money has been deposited to your account, only you or a court order can get it out again. If somebody "just does it", they are on a similar legal basis as somebody that forgot a jacket in your house and decides to break your lock and enter your house without your knowledge or authorization to get it back.

Requiring a court order to correct simple bank errors is entirely infeasible and, frankly, pretty silly.

https://digital.wf.com/treasuryinsights/portfolio-items/tm31...

>A payor can attempt to reverse a payment made with an ACH credit only if the payor claims the beneficiary was already paid by a previous ACH credit entry, or the beneficiary was the wrong recipient of the funds, or the original ACH payment was in the wrong amount. Otherwise, the credit is considered final.

There's a good reason for that: nobody want's banks to take money out of accounts because they "feel that's the right thing to do".

There's one notable exception: SEPA direct debits getting reversed. Using DD requires a special agreement with your bank, however, and it won't happen that money ends up in your account without you requesting it - or if it does, you will get a phone call from your bank where somebody explains the situation, apologizes a dozen times and asks you to look into the matter and authorize a reversal. Acting on their own would be a criminal matter and likely be of interest to the regulators as well.

Unless it's a real lot of money going through the courts to get reimbursed would be impractical and if you transposed two numbers while typing an account number then you might not even know who the money went to.

No, the law gets involved and at some point, a judge will decide whether you owe the sender the amount they mistakenly sent. It's basically the same for "I mistakenly sent you 100 that I meant to send to my friend" and "I mistakenly sent you 100 when I only meant to send you 50 that I owe".

And yeah, it's a hassle. At least you can generally find out which account the money went to, and with new IBANs, you need to mess up multiple digits, since they include a checksum. If the checksum doesn't match, the money bounces back into your account. Previously, some banks required that the account number and account holder match (within reasonable limits, misspelling the last name would work), but that changed with the IBAN system, only the account number matters now.

> When you notify your bank or building society that you have made an electronic payment to the wrong account, your bank will commence action on your behalf within a maximum of two working days.

> Where your bank finds clear evidence of a genuine mistake, they will contact the receiving bank on your behalf with a request to prevent the money being mistakenly spent. As long as the recipient does not dispute your claim, you will subsequently receive a refund of the protected funds within 20 working days from when you notified your bank.

http://www.fasterpayments.org.uk/press-release/new-help-cust...

Well, you clearly aren’t a lawyer (anywhere).