I can’t even count how many hours I’ve spent in the past year arguing about some BS charge, trying to get something repaired under warranty, or even trying to redeem an valid coupon that was sent to me. I’ve reached a point where I’m exhausted in trying to fight these kinds of things but I feel like I can’t just let any of it go. Sometimes I wish I could hire a Karen, it would be 100% worth it.

  • simple@lemm.eeEnglish
    37·
    1 year ago

    PayPal. Oh god, PayPal. They shut down my account over a misunderstanding (from their end), and did nothing but spam me with pre-written corpospeak every time I begged to talk to a person. I would send a ticket explaining EXACTLY what happened and I would get the same copy-pasted response from the human representative that literally ignores everything I said and says now that my account is flagged, I should stop using Paypal and there’s nothing I can do about it.

    I’m not kidding, that was the response they kept sending me. If your Paypal account gets tagged as suspicious they literally tell you to bugger off and stop bothering them. I’ve never seen anything like it.

    After a few weeks of insulting and attacking them they finally decided I was more trouble than it’s worth, allowed me to close my account and make a new one. It only took like 10 tickets of getting the same pre-written “good luck trying another service” response. By far the worst company I’ve had the displeasure of dealing with, but unfortunately I need it for work.

    This is also a good place to say, never store any money on your PP account. This isn’t an uncommon story, if you look on Google there are tons of cases of people getting locked out of their account for virtually no reason.

    • Crozekiel@kbin.social
      19·
      1 year ago

      paypal’s business model is basically theft. They regularly “freeze” accounts of people that have money to be taken, refuse to unfreeze them, and then when it eventually turns into a class-action lawsuit they settle for pennies on the dollar (that mostly goes to attorneys anyway). When it happened to me over 10 years ago, I was doing remote tech support and getting paid via paypal. Had a business account that was like 10 years of use. Then one day they froze the account and told me there was “suspicious activity”.

      When I appealed and asked what suspicious activity they found, they simply said that there was money in the account and there wasn’t before… Then they asked for, specifically, ebay transaction IDs and UPS or Fedex tracking numbers for the products sold on ebay. I explained to them again that I was not selling on ebay and was doing remote tech support. The person on the other end of the phone just said “ok, well, then your appeal is denied. Your account is staying frozen” and hung up.

      I ended up just refunding all the transactions that were recent enough I could (because that was the only thing I could do with the account) and sent those customers a note explaining briefly what happened and that I would rather have done the work for free than have done it so paypal can steal the money…

      Eventually got tacked onto a class action and got a low double digit payout almost a decade after losing a few thousand…

      • simple@lemm.ee
        4·
        1 year ago

        I did. Sadly there aren’t many alternatives where I live. Most are US/EU only. I have definitely used it way less though.

    • Fleppensteyn@feddit.nl
      2·
      1 year ago

      Paypal is the worst.

      I wanted to link a card to Paypal but it just kept saying I couldn’t transfer money to it. Support said they could see there was a block on it which would resolve after 72 hours. Weeks later I finally get a response: adding a card is not supported in your country. Why do they let me add a card and then lie to me?

      I get some side cash in a foreign currency but have no way to get the money out without being charged a crazy fee