PaypalStealsYourMoney (2010-01-23 22:09:17)

Paypal steals users' money. Sad, but true.

If everything works well, a paypal payment receipent gets 4,8 or 12% less than what is charged from the sender. But it can get much worse than that, and everyone using paypal is at risk (by accepting the paypal user-agreement).


Unbelievable? No, just Paypal.

When you agree to paypal terms of conditions (essential to payment or withdrawal), according to Paypal you agree


Everyone thinks that it only happens to others - until it just happens to him / her

We thought http://www.paypalsucks.com/ is not serious. Unfortunately we had to find paypal is worse than one would imagine.

Paypal has unbelievable number of dirty tricks to rip off paypal users (sooner or later you, if you use paypal).


Tricks in short

One would think some of the stuff is just "processing error" or "well, expensive", but when it gets obvious that


Planned Actions ("the time is out of joint"...)


Artificial Trick's List - there is no excuse for


Many hidden charges - could be OK without the Artificial Trick's List above


Paypal card-processing gateway - TOTALLY confusing message

This is not a security problem, but wastes time, causes confusion and hurts reputation.

AFTER the cardholder enters card and address data, pp gateway (with the transaction-terminal gateway messed up by paypal internally) presents the following message to the cardholder:

''"Transaction declined. We were unable to process your transaction due to one of the following reasons: the credit card or expiration date you entered is invalid, the street address you entered does not match the address of your credit card, the zip code you entered does not match the zip code of your credit card or there are insufficient funds available on the credit card you entered.

Click back and check to ensure your payment information is correct."''

With a good card, and data (address does not actually matter, mostly), no matter what he writes (no use to "click back"), he will always get this (and perhaps blame his bank instead of the paypal card-processing-gateway). The gateway should write BEFORE presenting the card-form, that the "gateway is inoperable due to internal problem (transaction terminal link is off temporarily)".

Important: the merchant is a passive party, has absolutely NO control on this. Actually paypal often confuses the merchant as well by showing "approved, result=0 (no error)" transactions in the report, for transactions that didn't actually "settle". Paypal report should show big red UNSETTLED in the report to the merchant, especially for week-old transactions.


Paypal - operating a card processing gateway unbelievably negligently

Abstract: paypal: the negligent card-processor-gateway with card payment settlement "speed-record": 2+ months (!!!!)

On a query about OID3582 payment (without names):

On 2009-11-16 payment of 627.97 USD was initiated and approved by the customer related to oID=3582 (items were sent out on 2009-11-16 - same day)...

Card clearing happens in USD (there is no currency selector in the card-processing system, and Visa ALWAYS works in USD). IBAN is the only method where the bank charges exact value. That's why IBAN is recommended. For card payment, for certain USD value the cardholder bank can charge as much EUR value as it likes. Totally out of control of the cardholder and the merchant.

Card payment costs 2.5 % fee for the merchant (and usually+1..2% for the customer - hidden in the exchange rate: the cardholder bank charges as much as it likes). 417.91 EUR was 627.97 USD with actual rate at the time (1 EUR = 1.5026) - according to rate by the merchant's store. The customer saw the 627.97 USD during the card payment.

Now xe.com/ict shows 1 EUR = 1.49747 USD for 2009-11-16. For real-time rates, rate depends on the time the rate is refreshed from xe.com server. Can change by the minute. Sometimes >2 % change within a day).

Unfortunately the card processing gateway operated by a bastard negligent company called "PayPal" did not "close the transaction terminal" until 2010 January, effectively delaying card transaction settlement unbelievably long (it's an automatic process that worked with verisig, and worked with paypal as well. Why didn't it close the terminal ? Paypal messed up something internally - probably related to their fraudulent thousands of 0.01 USD transactions - another story ).

Unfortunately exchange rate changed in the meantime, 1 EUR = 1.4378 USD (627.97 USD = 436.76 EUR). On top of that, the cardholder bank apparently charged +1.66% = +7.2 EUR from the cardholder (worse than an average bank) account.

The whole money supply creation by private banks that result in:

total debt owed to banks > total money supply

which (although a simple fact) even economists are blind to conceive of (and the media never even discusses it!), is very bad to whole society (the whole world is in debt because of this, and will be, as long as money is created in this fraudulent way, by banks loaning it), but at least it usually completes transactions within a week or two.

This time the banks and their card system didn't work well at all, to any standards.

PayPal is the same well-known bastard company that operates the "easier, safer method to pay". They probably shouldn't even be trusted to operate a mail-server, yet financial services.

We never contracted with PayPal to provide card-gateway services. We contracted with VeriSign, and VeriSign actually worked reasonably well. Than PayPal acquired VeriSign, and things got worse. But it mostly worked for some time until it degraded to grave. We didn't expect that any card-processing gateway can be operated as poorly and negligently as PayPal succeeded (otherwise we'd broken up already, obviously).

We do not know exactly how wide this problem is but it's apparently only a problem of the negligent Paypal card-processing-gateway.

Other participants involved: Nova (and the merchant's bank, TDBankNorth), Visa and Mastercard don't seem to be responsible for these severely delayed transactions.

We sorry about the inconvenience the extreme negligence of PayPal card-processing gateway has caused to all of us. We will move to another card-processing gateway as soon as we can.

regards,...

(as of 2010-01-22) merchant has seen 0 (read zero) USD from this (and several similar) transaction (we sent out items more than 2 months ago in November). Although we are spending USD on chips and accessories. We hope to recieve in a few days if all goes well. That's how these "prompt" card transactions go in a completely broken banking system ruled by the FED (the privately owned USA central bank that creates USA dollar out of thin air - paper and digital money too - since 1913 December).

We are considering a legal case against the negligent card-processing-gateway company, PayPal. Unfortunately in reality it's almost impossible to win in court against the biggest mafia on Earth, the financial mafia. A better way - and the only way to help people at the same time - could be to teach people how a group of people and/or businesses can create convertible, non-inflating money, and operate a related clearing system based on modern technology and cryptography.

We are actively helping development of such system:

based on opensource epointsystem technology. Since governments will not solve this (they actually caused this) probably the only way to create a non-fraudulent money-supply - democratically created money without any central (=corrupted) authority. Luckily (unlike in 1929-33) the technology is available.

In short, paypal is the worst partner to handle your money. Very said. But good to know so one can make better decisions.