Comment by jenoer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jenoer | Hacker News Reader

I wanted to close my Paypal account just now and they have very dark patterns going on. I wanted to send the remainder of my balance to my bank account, in order to do so I had to couple my bank account.

It directly presented me with the info that if I were to couple the account, Paypal will have 90 days of access to my balance and all my transactions. How about no.

Luckily there was a link on the bottom “link it in a different way”, when following this path (By manually entering my IBAN*) Paypal only stated I could then “easily transfer funds back and forth”. Sounded good, until my bank app opened again and stated that if I was pressing the ‘accept’ button, you guessed it, Paypal will have 90 days of access to my balance and all my transactions. This time I pressed ‘cancel’ and thought “I’ll just buy something random and donate the last Paypal cent I own to some random charity”. Got an error message after pressing ‘cancel’ in my bank app, but curiosity got the best of me, I refreshed the Bank Accounts page and there it was, my bank account number. I was able to transfer to it without coupling after all.

Once the funds are on my bank account I will avoid and evangelise avoiding Paypal.

Plaid does very much the same thing, and is used by, among others, CashApp. In the name of making a seamless service they at least used to ask you to enter the credentials to your e-banking portal, then scrape your transaction history and balance. I would hope that by now they have developed a better system that is not nearly so dangerous, but I honestly have no desire to find out. There was a way to instead use your bank routing and account numbers (which is still a riskier proposition than, say, a credit card), but you wouldn't even see that option unless you made a search that returned no results.

One thing you could have done is just use PayPal for purchases until your balance was used up.

PayPal are the original pioneers of dark UI patterns and are always at the cutting edge of new techniques to get their users to accidentally give them money.

Given the horror stories involving PayPal over the years, I wondered why anyone would link a bank account to a PayPal account. I guess I now understand why.

That is to allow PayPal to reverse fraudulent money transactions.

which would be more reassuring if people didn't consider paypal a more probable threat than fraud

> and there it was, my bank account number. I was able to transfer to it without coupling after all

So you could totally transfer without coupling... the real problem was you didn't know your bank account number?

In the end I could, but not before Paypal attempted to convince me to couple my whole bank account with their systems, twice.

The second ‘attempt’/flow allowed me to enter my IBAN. I will change my original comment to reflect that.

I remember going through something like that with Plaid. That one actually asks for your online banking password, it's not using some API access... very bad.

I had to convince it that it didn't recognize my bank to eventually put in account numbers rather than give it credentials to your bank's online account. I think I put in the wrong routing numbers to get to that form. Definitely a bad experience!

I am curious if people with your attitude think it is OK to try and be sneaky to trick users like that, or if you are not aware that is what is happening?

It just seemed weird that GP described this whole ordeal about how to couple accounts, and then glosses over any process after they found their account number. They have edited their post since.

I don't understand your reply at all.

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