I have used PayPal and E-Bay about 7 times over the course of about 5 years. Never had a problem until this past month. How many of you give PayPal your bacnk account numbers? I refuse to as a purchaser. If I was selling, then I'd set up a specific account just for that, and only keep X number of dollars in it so I couldn't get ripped off.
Anyway, I purchased a pump for my sprinkler system, went to pay for it, wouldn't take the PayPal payment. Wouldn't accept my credit card number to add it in. Hmmm. E-mail them and it takes 2 days to get a response. Answer, multiple accounts, close the accounts and open a new one, can't have multiple personal accounts. I do so, and it still won't accept. Have to authorize a 1.95 charge that will show up as a credit on PayPal after 24 hours, to verify account. Do that reluctantly, because I feel like part of it is my fault for not remembering the account was under an e-mail account I haven't used in 2 years. That goes through, I enter the confirmation number from the credit card account to verify, takes it, still won't let me pay the company for the pump! I'm getting livid now. Starts taking more that 2 days for answers on e-mail, and the last one has been 6 days now. Says I need to give them my bank account number for verification. Nope, sorry, no will do. I asked them why they didn't say this to begin with, and I would close my PayPal account out, vow to never use them again, and send a cashier's check for my purchase. That's the one I haven't heard from yet. Then after some digging around, I see I could have changed the e-mail address for the old account to begin with, and kept going. They didn't suggest that as the best avenue. Wonder why???
So be careful. I think PayPal has gotten too big for their own pants. I don't think this was a phishing scheme, because I was dealing with the E-bay site and had e-mailed the vendor.
Has anyone else seen this or something similar? I spouted off and told them I was going to spread the news of this on the forums I was on, so I'm living up to my word. And I'm serious about not using PayPal ever again. If a vendor won't do payment some other way, they won't get my business. Probably won't do much with E-bay again for that matter, since they are one in the same company. I might email the vendor to see if they have similar items off Ebay that can be purchased, like maybe through Google checkout.
Thanks for listening to me vent. I don't do this often. Jim.