Hacker News Reader

Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

Whoa, I just got off of a call from PayPal as to why my account was banned.

Turns out, 15 years ago when I signed up, I was 15 (I am 30 now) and that is against their terms of service. So my account is permabanned and they said to make a new one with a different email.

I can understand they don't want people under 18 to sign up, but for fucks sakes, it was 15 years ago, this feels like a fairly stupid policy.

I would like to add that the customer service experience in this instance was pretty good - they had a queue system where you can leave your number and they call you back instead of keeping you on hold forever, and they representative was helpful and professional and told me straight up that I could make another account.

View on HN

Tip: don't follow their advice. My friend had a similar situation (signed up while underage and was banned) and they have banned all subsequent accounts as well. If you are permabanned from PayPal, you are permabanned, as a person.

Ask them to reverse all transactions from 12-15 years ago.

How did you manage to call them?

I've been fighting a similar issue. I woke up one morning to an email that my account was permanently suspended, along with several family members' accounts that don't live with me. All of our accounts were shut down at the same time, with no reason given. None of us had used Paypal in months, and I haven't received money on Paypal in years. We can't get a hold of anyone to find out what happened.

https://www.paypal.com/us/smarthelp/contact-us There's a "Call us" link at the bottom.

Probably because they can't legally hold the data of a minor (who wasn't able to consent to their data policy or whatever at the time) so they have to delete everything.

Nope. The account isn't deleted, it's locked. And if they did need to delete the data they could easily delete everything from when they were under age.

Eh, kinda. If they entered their name/address/phone when they were underage, it's still data collected from a minor (even if it hasn't changed). To cleanup PayPal would have to have them re-enter everything... which is basically the same thing as creating a new account.

I'm not saying they're right, but I can see why this is the easiest way for them to fix the legal situation.

Raises a question - if they've deleted _everything_, how would they know they are banned? Surely just keeping email address + "banned" (especially for a specific reason) is storing their data.

Heard that story before. 15 when they signed up and now they're 30 and banned. Popular experience apparently.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com