Tag: PayPal Support

PAYPAL UPDATE

By on • ( Leave a comment )

A couple of weeks ago, I stuffed up and fell for a scam.
It’s been a little stressful to say the least and we are still currently out of pocket by £579.

The good news is that the second lot of £600 that was being taken from our account via Paypal, never actually happened because they realised we already paid the money back and the account balanced itself out.

Yesterday, I received a call from the bank, telling us they had investigated the issue and taken it as far as they can. They are happy that we had nothing to do with the scam and that it wouldn’t affect our account and apparently we were now OK because we weren’t ‘out of pocket’!!

ERM!!! I responded by saying that actually, yes we were out of pocket, by £579. This is where is gets tricky.
I had to explain that we’d had to pay Paypal back the money after they had charged back the money to the original 3 payees when they opened up disputes after realising they had also been scammed. Those people were protected by Paypal.

This changed things a little bit.
The bank said that we shouldn’t have been made to pay that money back because we were victims too. She said we needed to go back to Paypal to get them to investigate and get in touch with our bank directly.

Anyway, Paypal still refused to budge because as everything had been ‘authorised’ by us, and we had withdrawn the funds already, there was nothing they were legally obliged to do, So I got back in touch with Nationwide who promised to send an e-mail to Paypal and send a copy to us in the post. They re-iterated that WE were victims too. We had been victims of what is called ‘an Authorised Pushed Payment Scam’

I later got another call from Nationwide, from a lady called Nicola in the fraud team who was really nice and very efficient. She read what she had sent to Paypal and reiterated that she would be sending it to us in the post also… BUT…. she also had some more news for us. She had also been in touch with the bank attached to the fraudsters account that we had unwittingly sent the money onto. They confirm that partial to full funds are still in that account. This meant that there is still a chance we could get some, if not all of our money back!!

WOOHOO!!

Nicola said that at this point she couldn’t confirm anything. There is still a chance we won’t get anything back, but at least now we have SOME chance at getting something back.

I am feeling a little happier with the situation.
Not happy that it happened.
Not happy that I fell for it in the first place.
Happy that we are now being listened to and have the bank on our side.
Disappointed at the lack of protection from Paypal for this kind of scam.

Lesson learnt….. the hard way!!

WARNING TO PAYPAL USERS

By on • ( 2 Comments )

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!