I had the same experience, but even more ridiculous. When I was trying to fill the form for the verification, I always had an error on the page that said "please try again later". I tried to get in touch with support, and at all my emails they were replying with the same copy and paste with the steps, which I could not follow. I tried to get someone on the phone, with no luck. After weeks I gave up, because the money on the account were not worth the hassle (they were around 300€).

But I will never use PayPal again, that's for sure.

It's your choice, but I would never let it go, just as a matter of principle.

I wonder how much Paypal has stolen from their former customers this way over the years. It might even account for a sizable portion of their total revenue.

Do you really think they will count money they steal as part of their revenue? I'd be willing to bet it goes straight into some sort of bonus pool.

It will be held in non-interest generating accounts until it can be released. Srsly, this is financial services and there's the odd regulation or two that everyone - including PayPal - have to follow.

They can't 'steal' the money - when accounts are locked they either hold onto it for six months or require you to keep a minimum balance. This is how they mitigate their massive risk profile.

Their customer services are entirely worthless, it's true, but I suspect that anyone coming to 'disrupt' PayPal will struggle with many of the same issues because they're caused by fundamental risk issues with online payments.

I had a similar experience when I accessed my personal PayPal account from another country.

In this case I was both the buyer (from my personal account) and the seller (my business paypal account - I was using my own app to register a domain).

So despite the fact that I had access to both accounts PayPal interfered and did not let either side mark the transaction as legit! Various emails to paypal later I gave up. I did everything they asked, re-verified etc

It was basically impossible to sort out either through the paypal interface, through their customer support, or by phone. At least I know what my customers go through... bye paypal.

Without wanting to justify Paypal's actions wouldn't it be easy to launder money through Paypal if they let you so easily mark a 'suspicious' transaction as legit?

One of the properties of money is that it's useful as a medium of exchange.

If this property is sacrificed in the interest of making it difficult to 'launder', then its utility is questionable.

True and I'm not trying to undermine the point that Paypal is a complete PITA but..

One of the properties of money is that it's value can be trusted. If money can be easily laundered then it can't be trusted and it's utility is questionable.

Counterfeiting changes the value of money. Laundering doesn't. It just hides the flow of money from authorities.

I understand your point, what I'm saying is that even after following all of PayPal's instructions, re-verifications and talking to customer services - as well as telling them (as the buyer) that the transaction is legit, I wasn't able to sort it out.