Lied perhaps ... or somebody made a mistake. Support rep might just not have understood the information they were seeing on their screen. Why immediately say THEY LIED rather than, they were mistaken. I find it more fruitful in life not to assume bad faith from the outset.
Fair point, PayPal were possibly mistaken because they've designed their system badly. They have it in their power to ensure they're not mistaken. Choosing to tell a falsehood as truth ... now, there's a name for that ...
I'm assuming good faith on behalf of the OP primarily because I've had a similar experience of missing transactions on PayPal.
Re:Is this Paypal experience customary?
by JudgeWapner on Friday July 05, 2019 @09:21AM
(#20362291)
PayPal exists, by design, in a legal gray area where they do almost everything that a bank does, but aren't legally a bank and thus avoid all the regulations and liabilities of the banking industry. Removing funds from your account sent in error (something normal banks do) and not telling you why is fully within the realm of a non regulated money transfer service. Use fed wire transfers next time. They're irreversible.
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) -
I mean come on, is basic accounting beyond them?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.