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Comment by WA | Hacker News Reader

Because they're still anecdotal and for most people, PayPal works just fine. I find the stories horrifying, but I ran about 40,000 transactions through PayPal in the last 5-6 years and never had any problems.

I guess this is how it is for most people, at least, I can use PayPal as a buyer on most online businesses I deal with.

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Sure, using PayPal as a buyer is great as long as you never get into a dispute with a seller. It took about 4 months for me to get PayPal to refund my money when a seller on eBay ripped me off.

PayPal support was so inept they claimed that I had not returned the merchandise despite giving them the DHL tracking number and shipping receipt multiple times and eventually they closed my case in favor of the merchant.

I had to keep calling and harassing them and finally threatening to have the charges reversed by my credit card company when they suddenly reversed their decision.

I will never use PayPal for anything if I can avoid it.

As a seller I requested a refund on Ebay and received my refund before I even shipped the goods back!

I used to accept PayPal as a payment method when I was doing freelancing, ran hundreds of thousands of dollars through my account over the many years of having it. One client refuted a payment SIX MONTHS later, and they granted it to him based on the fact that it was a digital service and there's no way to verify it was successfully transferred.

I immediately closed my bank account (PayPal wouldn't let me remove it while a refund was being made. Yes they were going to debit my bank account since I had no funds in my account, which I never kept).

Now they've put that amount in collections and honestly, as someone who cares about his credit, that one will stay the time until it's removed. I'm not paying them, or the thief.

You could get together all your documentation with respect to that transaction and dispute that negative credit item directly with the three credit bureaus.

Exactly right, up to now the dispute existed in PayPal's walled garden and played out under their rules. PayPal's dispute resolution process has some serious flaws - with many high-profile examples - and often drags out to just slightly longer than the time limit for chargebacks (funny that, huh?).

I would raise the stakes a bit more and send PayPal a hard copy of supporting documentation and tell them that you will be disputing any negative report. Send this by a recorded delivery method like registered mail or courier. This means you can go to court and prove that PayPal had clear evidence of fraud and failed to take appropriate action. It also proves that they had knowledge of these facts prior to making the negative report to the credit agencies, which puts them in a bad spot if this all ends up in court. In the USA, the Fair Debt Reporting Act covers this scenario but similar laws exist in other countries.

Keep good documentation and send everything by a trackable method and never let these companies get away with ignoring you when you have a legitimate issue. Just make sure you are sure you have proof that you are correct, otherwise keep better documentation next time.

We run thousands of PayPal transactions per day. I've been keeping a record of the horrifying failures we've experienced in anticipation of someday writing a scathing blog entry. We sometimes see lost transactions - as in, call the 'execute' endpoint, get a 500, then all future attempts to fetch information for the payment fail. And no webhook. File a ticket, wait two weeks, then someone at PayPal acknowledges the problem and says it's fixed.

Forget all the policy problems. PayPal's basic technology platform doesn't work.

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