[ic] Pay Pal consumer fraud, state Attorneys General investigations...

[Dan Sabo]

Hi all,

Just wanted to let people know here that in the past ten days, I have four
very bad experiences with www.Paypal.com , one of them blatant fraud, and I
strongly urge that everyone steer their clients or shopping carts away from
using their services.

I set up a Pay Pal account so that three of my clients could pay me through
their site.  One of them was rejected because even though he as A-1 credit,
American Express Corporate has just ended their relationship with Pay Pal
because of too many complaints to Amex.  So even though Pay Pal advertises
Amex on their site, they do not tell new users who provide all that
sensitive bank account, checking account, personal information, etc. that
they don't take Amex, until AFTER they apply to Pay pal, THEN new users find
out that they can't pay by Amex.  I had my client jump through hoops for me
so he could pay me via Amex through Pay Pal, and now he can't.  So he is
basically pissed, and I don't blame him.

A second customer tried to pay me via Visa/Pay Pal just today, and even
though this client has A-1 credit, has operated a business for seven years,
has a ten thousand dollar credit limit on this Visa, and even though I
called Pay Pal last week to make sure a new Pay Pal Member would be able to
pay me $1,500.00, she was not allowed to pay me by Visa because, according
to Pay Pal, taking that much money from a new user, was a "High risk".  They
demanded a checking account payment instead.  I thought this strange,
because they came to this decision without her providing a credit card
number on the Pay Pal site.  So now Pay Pal has all of my clients bank
account information, social security number, personal info, etc, and she
can't pay me.  Sounds like a scam to me, to get personal info under false
pretenses.

For myself, I cancelled a bill payment five minutes after I made it with
their automatic bill pay, and even though it was cancelled, Pay Pal still
dipped into my checking account anyway and took the money, and now they
won't give it back.  They stole about 85 bucks from me.

Of course after I had all of this experience the past week, THEN I hear that
Pay Pal is currently under investigation by six State Attorney Generals
Offices in the US, one of which is their home state general.  And that they
have a huge consumer fraud class action lawsuit against them filed by users
who have had their bank accounts raided, stolen funds, double dipping into
personal bank accounts, etc.  There is a web site with Pay Pal horror
stories at http://www.paypalsucks.com

I strongly recommend to anyone here to avoid Pay Pal like the plague, and
steer your customers, clients, shoppers away from them.  Personally if they
are behaving like this and have so many complaints against them, I think
they may be near bankruptcy and that any transactions through them are
extremely risky at this point.