PayPal Freezes Over 4 Million Accounts

I currently use Paypal and have for the last few years and I have only experienced them freezing my account once and all I did was call them and the problem was resolved immediately. I overall do not have any problems with Paypal.

If the frozen accounts belonged to scammers, then more power to them.

Woah, that is quite a lot. I've been with Paypal (too loong!) and have never had anything like that happen before.

Mine was frozen 2 times last year and I was able to resolve the problems both times without incident.

It's still a crappy feeling, though.

I have only ever had my account frozen once and that was when I was in the US and decided to transfer some funds into Paypal with the bank account that was connected to Paypal.

When I went to use the money the account was frozen - when I asked them why they said I had to prove I was laundering money. It was a few hundred dollars and I said it came from the bank account connected to you. I had to wait 6 weeks till I got back to Australia because they wanted a copy of my passport and drivers license but I had let the license in Australia. It took another few days to get them to release the funds. Really inconvenient.

I had my Paypal account frozen due to a sudden increase in income. I phoned them up and it was all sorted within 24hrs. There's a lot of bad press about their support but I found it prompt and their staff were effective.

maybe the accounts were inactive anyways thats why they are frozen. i dont think they will freeze an account with no valid reason. you can create a hundred account with the same given name but with a different surname. maybe thats why they froze some accounts.

I run 30k to 50k $ a month through with no problems. Back in the 90s before eBay bought it was when it was a nightmare for me. I don't have troubles now. Am starting a new project and thought i would scope out getting a second account (not allowed it seems).

The new project is selling digital product and might be problematic. Most of my transactions now are paying affiliates via masspay etc, so there's not tons of transactions like there would be selling to individuals. Will take some study.

I had my account "paused" for logging into my paypal account from brazil. But it was fully resolved after i showed them my credentials and that it wasn't compromised.

I have my accounts frozen 2 times and I have to go through many troublesome process to get my account activated back again. Now I will try to draw out my money whenever it has reach a certain amount.

Not wise to leave a lot of money inside the PayPal as they might frozen my account overnight.

I never had any problems with Paypal, but that number is alarming. I imagine the bulk of those were scam accounts.

That'll be bad if those accounts belong to legit online business men

I've had a few issues with them freezing my paypal account throughout the years but luckily it has always been resolved pretty quickly.. Within a couple hours or a day..

I've never done $10k a month on paypal or a pretty big # like that though so maybe that's why but i hope to be there some day and it would suck to go through some of the horro stories i've read about them..

2 percent is a fantastically high number in and of itself. No wonder so many people hate PayPal. But the actual number is much worse.

Start with 100%. Then deduct all the accounts that are never used. Then deduct all the accounts that are barely used. Then deduct all the accounts used to send a few bucks to family members. I'm guessing those accounts do not have issues.

That 2 percent suddenly got a lot higher.

Essentially, using PayPal is a high risk endeavor.

Then, what percent of accounts in the "Internet marketing" field have been frozen?

What I think is really bad in these cases is that, there's no bad end to it for PayPal.
I haven't ever had any problems with them, but if this happened, I'd want to complain about it, if it did ever put me in a situation where money was tight.

There should be a watchdog to stop this from happening to innocent people, or companies get a black mark against their name. If they get a lot, they get a fine, or something.

Might make them sharpen up their game.

So what else would you use, as PayPal seems to be almost on par with credit cards?

That is crazy. However, considering their volume, I am not surprised at all.

Other paypal alternatives are getting more and more popular, I just can't wait for a permanent replacement of paypal.

I & associates have had about 10 paypal accounts frozen

no scams. if anything, I lost omney b/c paypal's 'buyer protection' and 'seller protection' failed me in multiple instances.

I have various ways I can get accounts with them but honestly have moved on to 3rd party services.

I would have thought the figure was bigger than that.

I have no problem with that figure because having your account frozen is generally part of the growing process with your Paypal account.

If they were NOT freezing accounts that had abnormal activity, then I would be worried.

The fact is we use Paypal to accept payments because so many of our customers trust and use Paypal also. If Paypal were not so strict in their rules then there would be a lot more fraud on their network and less of our customers would trust it as a payment option.

1 in 50 doesn't sound too high, considering how popular PayPal is. It's terribly difficult to put together good fraud protection systems in place, and though PayPal doesn't do a great job of it, or the communication, I can see why they are so aggressive with their policies.

I read somewhere, a month or so ago, that they are working on their policies for freezing accounts, etc. this year (i.e. 2013). I think that their new CEO (David Marcus) has been pretty good in this aspect, too. There was a case of someone on twitter (I think @goodonpaper) who got his PayPal account frozen and then that was reversed. The entire process was very interesting.

So it's me and 4,639,999 other scammers

I've yet to have any problems with Paypal (**Knock Wood) but I've heard some real horror stories...

As a processor that's an aggregator grows larger (like PayPal, ClickBank, 2checkout, Plimus...), they become less accepting of risk. You see evidence if this all the time when they freeze funds/ suspend accounts without warning or suddenly stop accepting sellers with specific types of products.

Unfortunately one of the more common causes is that the seller has actually had some success, or launched a new product and their sales volume has spiked, raising a red flag and causing the processor to "investigate".

This isn't going to change or get any better, thats one of the reasons why we built merchee.

I use to do free websites to get free money through paypal. It's been awhile since I have used paypal and my paypal account is limited due to the fact that an off shore seas bank account tried accessing my account trying to withdraw over $300 dollars from my account when I never linked a bank account before with my paypal account ever! I am telling yall the truth. But I want my paypal account back so I can use it for Internet Marketing ( accepting commission payments from various affiliate networks ) What should I do? I would have to give them my ssn and bank account info though?

It's news that like this that freaks me out at times. Just imagine waking up to a mail from Paypal informing of your account being shit. Dayam!

P.S. Since I'm in India I suffer from some of the worst restrictions Paypal has concocted. Sigh. The short end of the stick I guess.

How about the innocent ones that got caught up in the fight, that is what bothers me most.

I had my account suspended back in 2004. It cost me a membership site. I was doing something wrong on my sales letter. I advertised a 2nd tier commission, which was a no, no,

After removing that info from the sales letter my account was reinstated. However, I lost all my subscription payments for the membership site.

It was my fault. One cure for that would be to not take your customer directly to PayPal to pay. Take them to an intermediate order page where the order is confirmed.

This way when PayPal radomly checks the pages that send customers to PayPal to pay, they only get to see the order confirmation.

Even though they have frozen my account and have suspended several individual sales from time to time, I have build my business model around PayPals Adaptive API with parallel and chain payments.

I'm currently waiting for approval of a chain payment Application ID. This is a very nerve racking period because I don't want to be denied. This process takes about 15 days and I only at the half way point.

During the development of my software I think I have talked to people at PayPal every week and we are now starting to know everyone on a first name basis.

You need to just follow the rules as best you can and don't log into your PayPal account if you are out of the country. After all your account should have as your bank account as a backup. So take care of things before you leave the country. You can check things out after you get home.

Take their contact phone number with you and call for assistance. Don't login.

Use your head, just how many people say they got into trouble logging into their account when out of their country?

They are one of the best known by the public to pay. If you are not taking PayPal as an option, you may be leaving money on the table.

Best regards,
Steve Yakim

Kindsvater makes a great point about association and being suspect with out evidence. If you have an ongoing e-comm concern you should step away from Pay Pal as your sole source of shopping cart provider. Since they are not a bank they are not subject to banking laws. Hence your rights are granted and limited by them as they see fit in the agreement you digitally signed when creating the account.