PayPal increasing withdrawal fee to 3.0% | Hacker News Reader

PayPal increasing withdrawal fee to 3.0%

paypal.com

66 pointsbasicplus211 comments

What a godawful piece of shit company. For freelancers of many kinds, it's also one of the only available methods of payment out there, especially for those doing low to mid-pay copywriting work, graphic design and so forth. The fees and somewhat hidden currency conversion fees add up to a serious chunk of any payment, and way in excess of anything justified by what Paypal does to facilitate those transactions. It's in effect simply extorting these funds from people who often are those that can least afford to see margins shaved off their pay. Despicable.

the world of cryptocurrencies may be loaded with fraudulent activity and gets hated on extensively by many well-paid programmer types here at HN, but in facilitating payments for low paid freelance work, it's amazing for the cheapness of transactions and the speed with which one can get their money in their hands. (whenever you find someone who actually knows how to or is willing to pay in this way for work done internationally in ways that don't allow for in-country instant payment transfers like the E-Transfer mentioned below in another comment for Canada).

Or they could use a more customer-friendly service like TransferWise.

TransferWise gives me bank account numbers in multiple countries (service may be limited by nationality), and has a more sane ~0.5% conversion fee. They charge a small flat fee for withdrawals to (some?) bank accounts, but it's not outrageous like 3%.

Yes, that's one useful option, in cases where those contracting work or buying services want to or know about using it. But does Transferwise also have a tendency to engage in Paypal's now famous other habit of randomly freezing accounts (with all funds held for weeks or even months sometimes) for ambiguous claims of suspicious activity? This too is yet another one of this dumpster fire's habits

I haven't had the misfortune of having to talk to their KYC/AML team, but I hear their customer service is fairly good.

PayPal, on the other hand, asked me to provide charity information for my personal account some months ago, and subsequently limited my receiving/sending privileges.

Phone calls to them trying to sort this out have always ended up at some call centre in the Philippines, where the agents can only tell their users that the account limitation is "for their safety".

That account of mine is still limited.

They've also limited the personal account of a friend of mine (who was interestingly enough ex-PayPal) before, also asking for charity information.

Canadians are fortunate enough to have interac e-transfer, which is free and no fees for small to medium sized amounts of bank transfers between mutually trusted parties. It's built into the online banking platform of all the major banks. For a great many people it has entirely replaced paper checks.

This seems to be of concern only to Australian PayPal users who have linked a US $ account and wish to withdraw to it.

This seems to apply only to accounts from certain countries (the link goes to the Australian account changes; the Singapore changes are here [1]) that withdraw USD to a US bank account.

[1] https://www.paypal.com/sg/webapps/mpp/ua/upcoming-policies-f...

And the US changes are here:

https://www.paypal.com/us/webapps/mpp/ua/upcoming-policies-f...

I don't see anything about a withdrawal fee there.

from au:

  Access Denied.
  You don't have permission to access 
  "/au/webapps/mpp/ua/upcoming-policies-full" on this server.
  Reference #2bb3d57d-952c-4277-96d4-c1b666d12682

Timestamp: 1601957913

These jokers are kidding me, right? They're introducing a fee for inactivity of 300 CZK, and blocking the cancellation of my account at the same time, lol.

left then definitively a year ago, and it was VERY difficult to close the account: please do close your account if you do not use it, but close it really: be patient, sooner or later they have to let you go!

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