This blog is a word of warning for all PayPal users.

After 20+ years of loyal service we have been let down by shockingly bad customer service.

Last week we unwittingly fell foul of a scam via Facebook Messenger and linked to our PayPal account. This scam cost us almost £600.
When we realised what had happened, we did the right thing & reported it to both our bank and PayPal.
PayPal weren’t interest because, even though ‘we’d’ been scammed, we had technically broken the rules so they refunded the three people who ‘WE’ had appeared to take money from and our PayPal account was in the negative to the tune of £579 (minus the £21 PayPal had taken in fees)

We paid the money back out of our own funds to clear the PayPal account in the hope that the bank would be able to recover the £579 that we had already transferred to the scammers account.

Now we wanted to close the disputes on PayPal because we had refunded the money, but the system wouldn’t allow us to do this without ‘refunding’ the money to the customers.
We explained that we had already cleared the balance and the last thing we could afford was for PayPal to take the funds a second time and we were advised that this would not happen.
So to clear the disputes we clicked on the refund customer and close dispute option that they told us to follow because you could not use the ‘already refunded’ option.

PayPal took another £600 from our account!!! This includes the £21 in PayPal fees!!

We are now down to the tune of almost £1200 and Ian is having to take the day off work tomorrow to try and sort this mess out.

I had just come to terms with the possibility that we had lost £579 because I was stupid enough to fall for a scam, but the incompetence of PayPal and their support team is beyond words.
They don’t listen when you tell them that you’ve been scammed, they are only in it for themselves and want to make money and NONE of their online systems allow for this type of scam and there is no way to put feedback into the disputes.

So once this mess has been…. hopefully….. sorted, we will be closing our account with PayPal because we have totally lost confidence in them.

Word of advice. Tread carefully if you have a PayPal account, because as soon as something goes wrong they don’t want to know about it. They are unwilling to listen and are just in it to make money.

Finally, for a 24 hour, 365 day a year system, in the modern e-commerce world, to NOT have customer support after 18:30 in the evening is beyond belief.

Stay tuned for updates!