PayPal Email Support Sucks

[DaftDog]

I recently made a payment via PayPal (PoepHol may be more appropriate) for some articles. The next morning I received an email from the author of the articles stating that the funds were being withheld by PayPal. I also received this email from PayPal:

We need your help

Dear Correct Name,

We need your help resolving an issue with your account. To give us time to work together on this, we've temporarily limited what you can do with your account until the issue is resolved.

We understand it may be frustrating not to have full access to your PayPal account. We want to work with you to get your account back to normal as quickly as possible.

What's the problem?

We want to check with you to make sure that no one has logged in to your account without your permission.

Please take a moment to change your password and create new security questions. You should also take a look at your account information and recent transactions. Make sure that your account information (address, phone number, etc.) hasn't changed and that you recognize all of your recent transactions.

If you see a payment that you don't recognize, let us know by going to the Resolution Center. Click "Dispute a Transaction" to report an unauthorized transaction.

Case ID Number: PP-xxxxxxxxxx

How you can help

It's usually pretty easy to take care of things like this. Most of the time, we just need a little more information about your account or latest transactions.

To help us with this and to find out what you can and can't do with your account until the issue is resolved, log in to your account and go to the Resolution Center.

Yours sincerely,
PayPal

So I did as instructed and changed my password.

I later received this mysterious email which I thought was from PayPal (paypal.feedback@echosurvey.com)

Dear My Full Name,

We understand that your PayPal account may have been temporarily limited due to questions or concerns by our Account Review team. Thank you very much for your cooperation during this process. We are pleased that your account has now been reinstated.

As part of PayPal's Commitment to excellence, we would like to ask you to take just a few minutes to answer questions about PayPal's account limitation process.

To respond to our survey, please click on the web address below. If that does not work, please cut and paste the entire web address into the address field of your browser.

NOTE: Please respond within five days. After 5 days, this invitation will expire.

xxhttp://surveys2.incontact.com/paypal/survey_paypal.taf?survey_id=xxx

Thank you for your feedback and continued business with PayPal!

Sincerely,

PayPal Customer Support

** An important note from the survey vendor **

PayPal, as the party who controls the data collected in this survey, may use your responses together with existing data it has about you to ensure its products and services meet your needs. PayPal will treat data collected from you in accordance with PayPal's privacy policy. To review this privacy policy, please contact PayPal or visit PayPal's web site.

If you want to be excluded from future surveys and survey correspondence, please click below:

"Great!" I thought, my account is back and the restriction on the payment for my writer should be lifted. Impressed with the seemingly professional way in which PayPal had managed the problem I clicked on the link in the email and gave them top points in the survey.

I then contacted my writer who informed me that the payment was still being withheld. So I logged into my PayPal account and noticed that the dispute was still showing as un resolved. I thought maybe that it would still take a couple of hours for the dispute to be cleared.

Next morning the dispute was still showing as unresolved. So I sent them an email and copy pasted the part from the other email that stated that restriction on my account had been lifted.

Today I receive this email from them:

Hello My Correct Name,

Thanks for reporting that suspicious-looking email. The email you received was not sent by PayPal and it links to a fake website. We are investigating and working on stopping the fraud.

If you have already given any personal or financial information to this fake website, you should immediately log in to your PayPal account and change the password and secret questions. You should also tell your bank about this problem.

I thought, bulls1t. How can this be a phishing email when they had my correct full name at the beginning of the email. If you look at the link above you will notice that the primary domain is xxhttp://incontact.com, which is in fact a website that does do surveys and does not look like a phishing site to me.

Conclusion: PayPal support does not have a phkkunig clue what is going on. I tried to phone them to day but apparently it's a public holiday in the USA. I'll try calling them again tomorrow. Let's hope that something a bit more advanced than an amoeba takes my call.

[davemerry]

Oh Ixian, I wish I had the time to type out my full past problems with PayPal support, it is crazy how bad it actually is.

I'm a calm guy, but the sheer stupidity of them and the amount of times they put unwarranted limits on our accounts, I can honestly say I've never flipped out as much as I have at them.

At one point they banned the CastleCasino.com account, our account for our sister affiliate portal company and my personal account for facilitating e-gaming payments, when all they are used for is to pay writers etc. It doesn't take a genius to log-on to our casino and see that we don't use it for anything else. After 6 weeks of literal back and forth emails, constant protests from me and others and countless signed documents, I spoke to an advisor and said for the last time 'WE DO NOT USE IT FOR E-GAMING PURPOSES, IT JUST HAS CASINO IN OUR EMAIL DOMAIN'. She replied, 'Oh why didn't you tell us that, I'll unblock it.'

Needless to say, you can only control frustration to a certain level.

[Renee]

My experience was not as bad as yours.. The only gripe I have with them is that years ago they wouldn't let me use my debit card for some reason and would only allow direct bank transactions, so after I added the bank account it got hacked and allowed over $7k to be taken from my bank account, which didn't even have 7k in it.

It took 2 months to resolve and in the meantime I had to open a new bank account so I could have my salary deposited into it instead of it going into a negative bank balance.
Worst thing was that I had people who the hacker had paid writing me nasty emails saying "you lied, you took the money and the goods blah blah" so i had to reply to each one telling them that someone hacked into my account and stole my money to pay them.. Of course they didn't believe me so then I had to contact paypal and ask them to get in touch with these people.

So annoying.

[Squigley]

When I had my account limited I also got that survey email straight after but I didn't bother filling it out. I think it is a legit site.

[DaftDog]

It seems that PayPal's telephonic support is far superior to their email support. I called them this afternoon and my problem was solved within a matter of minutes.

[davemerry]

I'd disagree with you there, but suppose it depends on the case in question

On a side note, I've had to contact Neteller support on a few occasions recently, years ahead of PayPal.

[mizzm001]

Got to agree neteller are way better, even moneybookers