Don't Use PayPal --- Warning!

My company was pulling over $100k a month from our business and I was shipping $40,000 a month back to the UK as I was buying properties and land quite heavily back then.

Now, all our income came to us in the form of commissions paid to us by a fully registered and traceable US company that we used to do the marketing for. On the back of our marketing they would increase their subscription base and we would earn a monthly commission on all the subscriptions. The company was established for 22 years and turning over more than $1 billion USD before we came along – so in other words – a VERY VERY Reputable company.

All the subscriptions taken by that company were on debit or credit cards. No problem there.

So – this particular month – January 2001 to be exact – I shipped $41,500 to my UK Lloyds account from my PayPal account. Then I jumped on a plane from Seattle as I was coming home to see my old dad for a few weeks. I took off on the Friday evening (Seattle time) and So I fully expected the dough to be in my UK account by the following Tuesday in the UK.

Tuesday came and went and no money.

Much calling to the bank ensued who informed me that they simply had not received the money.

So eventually I started getting on to PayPal corporate which was located in Nebraska at that time.

That’s where the fun started! I never once got to speak to the same person – nobody wrote anything down on their system and everyone just passed the buck to someone else stating that it was someone else’s department.

I won’t bore you with the details – but let me tell you how I got my money EIGHT MONTHS LATER!

I began to hear online that many other people had suffered a similar fate at the hands of Pa(y)pal and so a “Class Action” was brought by those people (109 of them to be exact) against PayPal.

So – I wrote to the CEO of PayPal and made it clear to him that if I wasn’t in receipt of my money in 14 days then I would be joining the class action.

Heard nothing so then an attorney friend of mine came up with a bright idea. He tabled the idea of creating a Subpoena against the CEO and board members of PayPal dragging him into court under FEDERAL laws for Fraud and misappropriation of funds and about 6 or 7 other choice offences.

We then got another attorney as a second, went to the court house in district 57 of California (San Bernadino) where I lived and the Judge granted the Subpoena because he himself had a Pa(y)pal account and was frankly shocked.

So – with Subpoena in hand allowing us to drag the CEO out of his office and into a FEDERAL court in Nebraska we got on a plane to Nebraska.

We (that is myself and the two attorneys) then rocked up in PayPal’s reception and I trotted up to the reception girl and said the following. (I had it written down)

“I have come to collect my $41,500 in cash from your CEO, if I am not in receipt of those funds in less than 10 minutes I will be executing this Subpoena against your CEO and all board members of this company as failure to comply with this Subpoena to attend court now will result in formal arrest and arraignment by Federal Marshalls who will be called to forcibly and with all necessary force extract your CEO and any board members from this building and and all other PayPal offices in the contiguous United States for presentation into federal court to answer these charges, as a pretensor to any bail application Judge E. B. Marickels in the California District Court (57) has already set bail at $10,000,000 per person … I suggest you get your CEO down here NOW!”

After I had picked her jaw up off the floor (and she was visibly trembling by this point) she got on the phone and after less than 1 minute the “P.A” to the CEO came down.

I was furious. I repeated my statement and added that having been notified of and shown the Subpoena she would be a culpable accessory to the fact if she didn’t ensure he was down here with my money in less than 8 minutes.

3 minutes went by and she was back – she was holding a cheque for $41K made out to me … but my Attorney stepped in and said – “no – that’s no good – we could walk outta here and you could stop payment on that cheque – go and get a Cashiers Cheque or a bankers draft and you need to do that in less than 5 minutes or we will be calling Marshalls.”

with less than a minute to spare – she rocks up with a cashiers cheque.

Not one cent of interest on my $41,500 which they had for 8 months, not a word of apology … no explanation – NOTHING!!!

I then got in touch with the law firm bringing the class action explaining what we had done to get my money refunded to me – I heard that some three weeks later 8 lawyers carrying Federal Subpoena’s on behalf of 126 appellants entered the offices of PayPal to recover more than $1.7 million dollars of funds that “Pa(y)pal” had “seized” – It turns out Pa(y)pal issued cashiers cheques in less than ten minutes.

If paypal took $10K off 10,000 people this way then in my book that’s nice work if you can get it!

I kept pestering the CEO by way of letter for an explanation and eventually by way of a complete shock I got one!

The letter said … “funds were rightfully and lawfully withheld by our fraud prevention team as a security against possible charge backs from the persons who had made the original payments”.

This was bollocks … we never took credit or debit card payments. Our funds were paid directly into our bank account from the company we were contracted to work for (The very respectable one) and then we transferred funds from our bank in the US directly to the PayPal account. So who were these people we were allegedly taking money from? The company actually taking the payments had been going 22 years and had been using their credit card merchant account for many years and had less than 2% charge back rate on their merchant account – an acceptable level is 6% in the industry.

9 months after I got my money back – Pa(y)pal’s offices in Nebraska shut without notice to anyone and I don’t know where they are based now as they don’t publish it. Their office in London is a mail forwarding company – if you ring them you end up speaking to someone in the Philippines.

They are without doubt the biggest bunch of crooked f-ckers on the planet!