First off, let me say that I have about a handful of Paypal accounts due to family members. For me personally, I have 2 Paypal accounts – a personal and a business. The business one is the one that receives payments via Ebay purchases. The personal one is the one that I use to buy items on Ebay and other web sites. The reason I do that is because my business one always has a balance due to my Ebay volume, and I don’t withdraw it that often. If I try to make an Ebay purchase using that Paypal account, it will always default to making the purchase with the balance, thus foregoing any benefits of using a credit card. Both accounts, I had been loading with MyCash last year. Eventually, they sent me 2 warning emails back in November and December. That’s when I decided my Paypal accounts were too important to lose over the little manufactured spend benefit.
Well, yesterday morning, I woke up to this email on my personal Paypal account:
We recently noticed an issue with your account. What's the problem? We would like to learn more about some of your recent transactions. Case ID Number: PP-xxx-xxx-xxx-xxx Because of this issue, your account has been permanently limited. We understand this may be frustrating and inconvenient but you'll still be able to see your transaction history for a limited time. You can get more details about your account limitation in the Resolution Center. For more information, please contact us and we'll do our best to help. You'll be able to withdraw money from your account within 180 days. We'll email you when it's available. We just want to make sure that you have money in your account to cover any payment reversals.
Calling up Paypal
So I called up Paypal and sure enough, the 1st rep told me my account was limited due to MyCash abuse. I then asked her what about the gift cards that were stuck in my account? A quick aside here – my Ebay and personal Paypal accounts are linked because I also use it to ship Ebay labels. A consequence of having these linked is that when I buy something on Ebay for $75 and I use a $100 Ebay gift card, then $25 remainder gets saved to my Paypal account for the next time. This was great until today. So the CSR told me she’d forward me to the gift card team. I told the 2nd rep my situation and she looked at my account and said, “Oh, let me send you to the security group and they can help clear your account.” I don’t think she knew how to help me, so she figured my best shot was to restore my account. She then forwarded me to my 3rd rep in the security group. He took a look at my account and noticed that I actually hadn’t loaded MyCash since the 2nd warning in December. He then tried to get someone from the compliance team to look at the account and restore it. He told me that he couldn’t clear the account and only compliance could do it. I waited on hold for 5 minutes, and when he came back on again, he told me that he couldn’t reach the compliance group but double checked my account and said it shouldn’t have been shut down. He told me he’d submit a ticket to the compliance group and that I’d hear from them within 24 hours. He also told me that the compliance group put a note in my account saying my business account was not affected due to this shutdown (thank goodness). He mentioned other people were mistakenly shut down today as well. My guess is that this was a programming sweep.
The Morning After
So I woke up this morning and checked my email:
Our review is complete and we have restored your account. We appreciate your patience and thank you for your help in making PayPal the safest and most trusted online payment solution. Thanks, PayPal
Conclusion
Man I seriously have a love/hate relationship with Paypal. I can’t wait until Ebay spins them off as a separate company. Maybe then Ebay will accept other payment processors like Square or even Amazon payments. That’ll also help with the 20K/200 1090 restriction where if you receive over $20,000 in payments AND 200 transactions, you’ll get a 1099 which you WILL need to declare on your taxes. The way I get around this currently is to just have my Ebay transactions sent to my wife’s Paypal account once I near that threshold. If they allow Square, then I could send $20K in payments to Square in my account or whatnot.
Moral of story – if you value your Paypal account, STOP LOADING IT WITH MYCASH!
Paypal and ebay have been split for a couple of months now.
Only reason why they split is so when there are lawsuits they dont get dragged in together to court.
Cant name them both as plaintiffs now.
I think they split for other financial reasons. I just can’t wait for the day Ebay will accept credit cards directly or use some other provider that isn’t Paypal.
ugggh they just banned me and i’ve been reading other ppl’s issue on being banned as well. One of my earlier issue with them is that I loaded mycash to my paypal debit card. they got confused and said i loaded mycash to other companies’ debit card and ristricted me.. i’m like what? you can’t even recognize your own debit card?
When was your last MyCash load? Did you ever get warnings? Did you stop after the warnings? Good luck getting it back.
well i don’t use debit card anymore and the restriction on that was lifted. but now i’ve been banned from using paypal. they say i’m a risk and i’m seriously the most law fearing citizen. they say i can’t appeal and i can’t find out why because that info is proprietary… I don’t know what to do, i just hope this doesn’t effect my background checks if i ever needed to have one done.
Nah it won’t affect your background checks.
Give it some time and get a new IP address and possible new address, email, and phone and you should be able to get back in.
thanks for your reply. it makes me feel a bit better.
Hopefully eBay will accept other payment methods. Apple pay is one that we are dying to have implemented with them. PayPal is starting to soil themselves for what they do now.
It looks like they have already. When I listed an item recently, they had 2 other payment methods that were NOT Paypal. However, I had never heard of them before, so there was no way my buyer would. They would need someone big like Apple Pay or GWallet for it to be a viable alternative to PP.