PayPal is supposed to be the easy way to pay and get paid for sales, services and products exchanged over the internet.  As an American writer for a blog owned by an Australian, it seemed like the easiest way to get paid for my writing.  I mean just how many ways can money get lost in the mail between Australia and North Carolina.

This is just a continuation of a series of negative PayPal incidents from around the world.  In September 2007, Jonathan Schlaffer reported that people were unable to accept payments for several days without any real progress or acknowledgement on the part of PayPal.

This past May of  2008, Dave Parrack  and I wrote about PayPal’s ongoing problem with transactions between merchants and buyers from different countries.  The problem continued for well over 10 days causing millions of merchants to lose thousands of dollars.  In June, Triston McIntyre reported about mysterious Skype charges showing up in British PayPal accounts.

I opened a PayPal account in 2000 so that I could easily pay for purchases on line.  Ebay, Fictionwise, and other online auction sites and ebook sites have been easy to use with my PayPal account, until now.

In 2006 I ran for judge in a local election.  PayPal promised an easy way to accept online donations for my election.  I upgraded my account to be able to accept any donations that might come my way.  I never received any online donations, lost the election, closed my election account and continued to use PayPal the way I always have to pay for online purchases and to receive refunds or payments for items sold or for my writing.

Now my account has been limited until I provide PayPal with account information and documents for my election account, which no longer exists.  I have emailed PayPal receiving a response on August 6th from “Mary” in customer support stating that my account problems had been corrected.  Since then I have called twice which turned out to be a waste of time.  The emails that I was to receive in response from a different department have not arrived. 

I now have money in my PayPal account that I can not access and I have bounced check fees in my bank account that I can’t pay because I can’t access my money. 

I have used PayPal for hundreds of transactions over the last eight years and have received payments for my writing without any difficulty until recently.  Now I can’t get out of PayPal hell.

Let’s see, there’s Google Checkout and WorldPay and PayPoint…….. Maybe one of the alternatives offers something resembling reliability and customer service

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Entry was posted on Tuesday, August 12th, 2008 at 12:58 pm under Ecommerce, Opinion, Scams, Security.

Read more entries by Susan Wilson.
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