Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Alupis | Hacker News Reader

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> I had a similar situation with PayPal when I opened a business account for the first time. Minutes after opening the account I was perma-banned and I was told there was no appeal.

So... what did you do that got you banned?

I know it's popular to hate on PayPal, but they're not in the business of banning people, they're in the business of facilitating payments. Banning people for literally no reason doesn't serve that cause.

Almost every time, when you pull on threads from this sort of story, it unravels into high-risk accounts receiving unusual payments from unusual places all within a limited timeframe where PayPal (or any payments processor for the matter) doesn't have time to evaluate your legitimacy.

Your story might be the one out of a thousand that was on the wrong end of a rouge bot or something, but I have serious doubts.

PayPal processes billions of dollars of payments annually. They don't do that by banning everyone for no reason. Did you use a VPN to deceive them on your location? Did you try to open a business account in the US despite being a UK citizen? Something you did tripped their system into believing you are/were not legitimate, and it's likely you would have also been banned from other similar-tier payment processors, such as CyberSource, Authorize.net, etc.

I hadn’t even made a single transaction before I got banned, so presumably there was something about my email address, phone number or postal address they didn’t like. I was registering in the UK with all UK details etc. something tripped, but I have no idea what. Upon contacting PayPal’s executive complaints team using details I found on Reddit they decided to do a whole bunch of KYC and reverse the ban, but they were adamant that it was irreversible when I initially contacted them using their normal phone number.

To this day I have no idea why (and it wasn’t clear to me that the complaints people even knew), just that something flagged in their automated system.

There are always false positives with this kind of thing, and you can only hope that you don’t become one. I’m lucky that it was possible to fix my issue but as automated decision making becomes more common there will be increasingly large numbers of people who are just arbitrarily denied access to services with absolutely no recourse.

Paypal froze my account over a decade ago for not being 18. I had about 400$ built up in there from selling various gaming cheats as a kid. Despite being assured at the time I would get the account back after turning 18, many appeals later that never happened.

1) Broke every rule imaginable

2) Correctly is banned from the platform

3) Expects to be forgiven because they turned 18

What am I missing?

that their $400 was effectively stolen. not sure why you consider that correct on paypal's end

The money was not stolen, it was never legitimate in the first place.

Such funds usually get turned over to the governing body

You are a bit naive. I opened account for my mum, and I've seen how when I want to send or receive (legitimate and small) payments for her PayPal just says "cannot proceed with action" or something like this.

It is better if you submit your passport and other data, but still far from painless. Their automatic systems flag transaction and then you are stuck, sometimes for ages. If you use browsers that prevent tracking or VPNs (legitimate and needed in many cases), then it is even worse.

It takes half a year for the new account to become more trusted and be less flagged.

Internet is full of stories how PayPal blocks people and they can't find why or appeal.

You are talking about something entirely different than myself or the OP.

OP, and this discussion is about PayPal the credit card processor (their main business), not PayPal the p2p payments things a la Venmo.

For p2p payments, you do need to verify the account, otherwise it will be locked. They go out of their way to tell you this, so if you refuse to do so, do not be surprised when your account is limited or locked.

> It takes half a year for the new account to become more trusted and be less flagged.

This is entirely made up. Simply verify you account. They offer several ways. They have to verify who they are allowing to receive/send money for very obvious reasons.

Fun fact, people love Venmo and hate PayPal - yet few realize they're actually the same company.

Made up? Im talking about my own personal experience. You can't receive money from other newer accounts for some time. It starts to work only when you "trained" their algorithms with older accounts and smaller amounts.

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