PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts(theguardian.com)

PayPal introduces new fee for dormant accounts

https://www.theguardian.com/money/2020/dec/12/paypal-introduces-new-fee-for-dormant-accounts

135 comments

qz26 anni fa

They’ve basically found a way to steal what’s left in the account. That’s all this is. There’s probably tens of thousands of accounts that people got locked out of or abandoned with money in and this lets them steal it.

Thorncorona6 anni fa

Oh there's more than that. I've done some work in the past in some video games, and used to get paid through a Paypal registered under a pseudonym.

But since now Paypal requires your name, DOB, SSN, banking info, to simply transfer money out, the money is stuck.

I can't use the money to pay for things, because they require you to link banking info DESPITE the fact that I have cash balance. So basically, I had cash that I couldn't take out or use.

Now finally, they are figuring out how to steal that money.

huhtenberg6 anni fa

Yeah, that's the KYC for you. For all they know your account can be a part of a money-laundering scheme.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_your_customer

thenickdude6 anni fa

This is completely unavoidable due to government-imposed Know-Your-Customer regulations.

slim6 anni fa

sell the account to someone who can use it

alpanka6 anni fa

So basically rules created to stop money laundering forced honest citizens to engage in money laundering??

jandrese6 anni fa

Well how else are they going to get the money out of all of those accounts they locked for no good reason?

dylan6046 anni fa

Oh, they had good reason. One for every dollar in the account

droopyEyelids6 anni fa

You're right about that, AND PayPal has some sort of aversion to debt obligations.

I remember reading something about how PayPal can't loan out or use the money it is holding for users like a normal bank would- it's a sacrifice to their strategy to avoid being a bank in the USA.

I think that would make having all this money on their books annoying from a business perspective, along with the 'it's not mine' problem

ASalazarMX6 anni fa

I haven't used my Paypal account in years, and a few months ago they gave $10 USD, not enough to buy something, but enough for me to consider using it again. At the end I didn't, and I guess they'll slowly take it back.

Edit: read the article, it seems they'll take it back in one fell swoop.

seibelj6 anni fa

No silly, it costs them tons of money to maintain a database record. Storage costs alone are on the order of kilobytes!

baobabKoodaa6 anni fa

Moneybookers (Skrill) introduced a similar dormant account fee a few years ago. I hadn't used my account for a while, and then I needed to use it, so I first logged in to check if my account balance was negative, before I deposited money to it. It was $0, great, I can safely deposit. And what do ya know, as soon as my deposit hit that account, Moneybookers retroactively applied a dormant account fee to my account. They even forged the timestamp for the fee event in my account history to pretend like it was applied several months earlier, when in fact it was applied only after I deposited.

exabrial6 anni fa

Fairly unethical, though their rationale is probably something like 'hey everyone else is doing it!'

My state has a law where it account goes dormant for a long time, the balance is turned over to the state. The state sees this as revenue, but an individual can submit a claim online and recieve it for no fee, up to 10 years I think.

tauwauwau6 anni fa

You are probably talking about Escheat system. Planet money had a nice episode about it, here's the link

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/799345159

colejohnson666 anni fa

I think every state has a “lost money” system, but some do have a time limit for the obvious reason that people die after never claiming it.

carapace6 anni fa

TL;DR: Paypal owes me $200.

Yeah I got a letter from the State Comptroller about an old account that paypal locked me out of and wouldn't re-activate (I jumped through all their hoops but they never replied) saying "call this (paypal) number to get your money or they'll give it to us (the state.)"

So I call the number and the person says "check or paypal balance?" and I choose check because of course I've been locked out of the account for years. So she says "Okay, we'll mail you a check."

And that's the last I ever heard about it. I figure they kept it. I could follow up with the comptroller's office, but it's already more than my time is worth, so I just complain about it in public, like this, from time to time.

schmorptron6 anni fa

Or: Jump through the hoops to get it, and then over the next year use that $200 to pay people on fiverr to complain about it online periodically FOR you.

Think of the time savings!

pansa26 anni fa

> for anyone whose account has been dormant for at least a year, but still has some money left in it.

Isn’t it considered a bad idea to ever keep a non-zero balance in a PayPal account? When money comes in, transfer it to a real bank account straightaway.

bdibs6 anni fa

Absolutely, otherwise they can shut down your account with $15k in it and hold it for 6 months. Ask me how I know, haha.

katsura6 anni fa

Well, I'm glad I don't have money left there, because I had two factor authentication turned on, and for some unforseen circumstances, I lost my phone number. PayPal customer service is actually quite hard to contact, because every possibility they give you requires you to log in. I found an email address somewhere, but when I wrote them telling them about my situation, I got an email that if I log in I can check their answer in the internal ticketing system. Then a few days later there was another email asking me about my experience with their support.

I'll never use PayPal again. No way in hell I'll trust a company with handling my money when they make it impossible to contact them.