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Comment by aleksandrm | Hacker News Reader

PayPal is a nightmarish company. I've lost ~3000 USD to PayPal when I was doing small business back in early 2000s. Their "buyer first" policy had screwed us big time, even though we have provided all the documentation to contest the bogus claims. PayPal froze our money, and terrorized me for a whole year with collections agencies. It was awful. I am out of 3K dollars, and I have stopped using PayPal since.

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Same here, about $2,000 they claim I owe them because they stupidly decided to refund money to an obvious scammer. Luckily I had already withdrawn the money. This happened when I was 15 and since then I am banned for life from Paypal - every time I tried opening up a new account they would eventually ban me. However during the last 15 years I have started multiple successful businesses and used alternatives like Stripe instead of Paypal and they are missing out on literally hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees.

At 15 you aren't allowed to have an account with PayPal and were technically defrauding them with a false birthday to get in. It isn't much of a stretch for them to ban you for that alone. Even if you were emancipated, it would be nearly impossible to prove that to a web business with no allowances for unusual circumstances.

Maybe they changed the policy since 1999? I don't remember lying about my age at the time, and they had my SSN. Plus my age never came up as a factor during my fight with them about the ban.

Notch (original Minecraft author) got $750k frozen by PayPal.

Only ~500 for me, but same deal. Fradulent buyers flat out lying and no amount of evidence on my side stopped them from trying to go to collections over it.

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