PayPal Insecurities

i keep as little money in my paypal account as possible, and assume someday i will have a problem significant enough to close the account.

etradebank sucks also. the customer service is only good for copying, pasting, and emailing "We value you as a customer" emails that dont address or even pretend to solve the problem you contacted them about.

the good news is that i predict a lot less outsourcing of customer service jobs to India, etc. in the future.

I have a problem w\ AOL making unauthorized withdrawals from my Paypal account even when it went negative. I called Paypal to change my debit card numbers but they did not do so. I have not used my Paypal account since!

Fairly simple solution that would eliminate a good percentage (if not all) phishing victimizationa:

Don't give any personal/account information to any web site in response to any prompting whatsoever. If YOU did not initiate the communication, give nothing.

On the other hand, it sounds like the person in question had a problem logging in to his account and needed to initiate such action. In this case, shame on PayPal for having such a weak policy! We comsumers need to exercise our RIGHT to have better practices than this from companies that are both making money off us and also potentially exposing our money to the various Internet knuckleheads.

A rare word in favor of Paypal: someone hacked my hotmail account and, because of my stupidity, was then able to access my Paypal account, and I soon found an $1100 payment taken out of my bank account. Paypal quickly investigated, believed me that I'd never heard of the person the payment went to, and refunded my money. Not saying this will be the experience of everyone who has a problem with Paypal, but it was mine.

I created a seperate account at my bank to handle paypal transactions. Unless I am paying for something, the balance will be $.01. When I need to pay via paypal, if not paying via my CC, they only have a penny to play with.

Brian M:

Great idea!

Since it is becoming more and more customary for some companies to use Pay Pal, I find I'm using it more. They don't have any of my money. My payments are made directly using my charge card, not credit card. So my question is, why do they have anyone's money?

ANOTHER REASON THAT THIS IS REALLY, REALLY POOR SECURITY IS THAT ALMOST EVERY RECEIPT THAT YOU GET FROM A FINANCIAL TRANSACTION HAS THE LAST FOUR DIGITS OF THE ACCOUNT YOU ARE PAYING WITH ON IT!!!

Pay Pal's software is horribly innadequate. They do not have a rules based system. It is easy to do and we could reccoment many good systems people and companies who could get it right. They have been dragged before the courts for their software and paid up. They should have imporved their software but did not. They would rather pay up to the courts than get outside help. Caveat - their phone line service people are genuine, helpgul and even thoughtul. They however, do not have the authority to make PayPal bring in the help they need to get it right to begin with. They seem to feel that it is cheaper than pay millions of dollars as fines rather than straighten out the software. Too bad.

Pay Pal is innadequate--I have tried all day to send money to the UK from Australia via Visa card only to be reminded constantly that I have entered the wrong ammount and telling me to enter 5.00. for the sum of 5 pounds stirling after doing so it tells me to do the same thing over & over again --- I have NO pound font on my keyboard --so what is one to do --I am supposed to be able to send monies to all parts of the world ro so they say -- what a joke !! I give up