I've heard of PayPal freezing accounts for arbitrary reasons and refusing to allow people to access their funds. But PayPal administers millions of accounts, and if they just skimmed a few cents or even dollars from accounts by some algorithm so as to minimize their risk of exposure while bringing in the most amount of stolen money... How would we know any better?
I have a small trickle of money that comes into my PayPal account from day to day. Lately, I've noticed that the numbers associated with my recent transactions (including deposits minus the seller fees that PayPal charges) are significantly off from my balance, and I send my money to my bank account fairly regularly. So there is not that much room for errors of multiple dollars here, especially when ALL of the funds coming and going from this account are documented on the very same damned page.
Example: Let's say I transfer all my funds to my bank account and start over at $0 in my PayPal account. Then let's say I get the following deposits: $10, $5, and $20. Pretty obviously, my balance in this case SHOULD be $35. Instead, as I recently noticed in a similar situation, I had about $22. No additional expenditures that would show why any more money should be leaving the account. No explanation as to why the numbers might differ.
Nothing. Oh, and also, they are CONSTANTLY sending out emails updating their terms of agreement, and recently "upgraded" me to some other type of account without asking me.
(And PayPal is owned and operated by.....)
Am I the only one experiencing this?
view the rest of the comments →
[–] hwong 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
I have seen a few other threads lately about this exact thing. I bet they are....
[–] bb22 [S] 1 point -1 points 0 points (+0|-1) ago
That's what I was wondering. I'm sure if this is happening then I'm not the only one to notice. I wasn't going to say anything initially either, because there's not a whole lot of alternatives anyway.
You don't happen to remember where you've seen similar complaints lately do you?
[–] hwong 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago (edited ago)
I think on reddit just a few days ago in /personalfinance I saw this exact thread where folks accounts wern't balancing, then a few days later they majically are.
I suspect paypal is syphoning off monies only for a short time, and then synching them back up.
I remember an old comptroller friend of mine at a small company (50 employees) would take all the accounts from the day (companies monies, bill monies, shipping monies, salary monies) which were all in seperate accounts, merge them and invest them overnight in stocks and bonds, then cash out int he morning and re-syncch the accounts for the day. Would make millions for the company over the year doing this everyday.. Turns out, if a fairly standard practice in US business to do this.