PayPal security is amazing. It randomly locks people out of their accounts and randomly closes their accounts too, but actual fraudsters and criminals are never deterred.
Dealing with fraud is a red queen game: The fraudsters can keep trying until they find what gaps are there in your system, and will sometimes communicate with each other: Part of our defense system involved infiltrating some of those spaces and seeing the guides that were being sold to try to commit fraud in our platform. Meanwhile you will still have a false positive rate, and getting it all the way to zero means crazy fraud. Most people just don't get to see how much fraud is stopped before they know it exists. This isn't just for financial institutions: You'd be surprised by how much credential stuffing is attempted at, say, any very large streaming site which charges a subscription.
Without looking in, it's hard for me to say exactly how successful their security team is, but being as big as they are, and having probably thousands of people whose only job is to do fraud on their platform, winning has to be pretty hard.
I've had one since shortly after their merger from the old X.com https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X.com_(bank) .
Per discussions on this thread, the singular reason people have tolerated their horrid service over the years they've been an effective monopoly in many locales.
This is correct. For some reason, many people (merchants surprisingly!) love PayPal and only accept payments through it, especially those outside the US and UK. Sometimes "guest payments" aren't an option, and that means you either get a PayPal account or don't purchase the product/service.
They blocked me claiming suspicious activity occurred in my account (just a low traffic personal account). Ignoring me wanting to know what suspicious activity was it and if it needed, or actually already was, reported to the authorities.
Unluckily this deletion does not hold well, occasionally with weird merchants only offering PayPal payment - credit card through PayPal - the paying fails using my old email used in the purchase and was used with PayPal before. They keep forcing me to log in. But can't! It is deleted!
I did not trust their sloppy ways then, the feeling is stronger now.
Until that is solved, I'd argue that the benefits are not worth the costs.
Federal government provided electronic money accounts and transfer systems, along with federal government provided identity verification APIs, where the fraud requires defrauding the government. Basically, a government utility. They do it with passports, why not with digital travel?
Obviously, this has to go hand in hand with constitutional inalienable rights to protect people's access to electronic money accounts and identity verification.
The lack of effective appeal seems to be the real problem with paypal.
Though extremely innovative (for its time), it's been a slipshod org since inception and slipshod is a property you decidedly do not want in a payments processor.
This is literally their business model, which is why they are able to get away with so many shady practices. Until very recently they held a practical monopoly on web based international payments.
Merchants are definitely selling email lists.
When my argument is kinda weak I love throwing in some hyperbole to spice it up.
yup, my paypal got locked after using it for over 20 years. Customer service refused to help and wouldn't even tell me why it was locked. I still get messages from paypal that they "couldn't get process subscription for X." won't delete my data either.
Scummy behavior from them on multiple levels.
Gave up on it after a while and now try to avoid it as much as I can. Good riddance.