PayPal is threatening me of "suspend your PayPal account privileges"

For the last 180 days I have ordered multiple items from Chinese vendors. Of course these get delayed because of the distance and to protect myself, what basically I do is I open a paypal dispute, like I have been advised to do. So last 180 days I opened 5 disputes. One was automatically closed because it was past due date. I closed 1 because I finally received the order after 2 months. Received refund for $3.98 sipik clone and $10.47 multimeter that I never received.
Now I am waiting for 2 batteries from Banggood for $8.24, I opened a dispute and the claim date expires in 2 days… so Paypal decides to send me this letter of threat below.
I used paypal for more than $550 last 180 days and was refunded $14.45 which is 2.62% refund of total amount. AND THIS THEY SAY IS “higher than average amount of issues”??? I am pissed.

Your PayPal Transaction History

We’ve noticed that you’ve had a higher than average amount of issues with your PayPal transactions. Such problems may include claims you’ initiated with PayPal or through your financial institution or bank.
We want you to be happy with your purchases, but we may find it necessary to suspend your PayPal account privileges if we continue to notice a high number of problems with your PayPal transactions. Pending further review, we may also suspend any outstanding and future claims, and we reserve the right to deny these claims.
We simply want to give you a chance to reassess your account activity for the future. You don’t need to take any action, and we don’t require a response to this message.
You can find additional information and tips about buying and selling safely on our Business Resource Centre at Business Resource Center | PayPal US.
Yours sincerely,
PayPal

Probably standard protocol for a certain number of claims within a certain timeframe. If and when they do access your situation they probably won’t suspend you with such a small amount of money. I think when you get refunds that they lose the money themselves, or at least a large percentage of the time, so they have to do something to try and keep the claims low as possible. Anyway, if you don’t make any new disputes anytime soon, you probably won’t hear anything else about it. Good luck.

I wrote paypal a mail asking to get their statistics straight before threatening me with suspension of claim/dispute. I may as well stop using their service if that what they want…life goes on… for 2.62% |(

That reminds me on a recent event with user of T-com fixed line service, getting automated warning when trying to use the line that service has been suspended because of the debt of 0 kn and 0 lp (local currency)…

Paypal is getting pretty handful…

It’s a huge business; I imagine you are correct. They likely have it calculated and down to a science to minimize risk through simple analysis.

PayPal at times needs to be told “Go Screw Yourself”.

Good luck with that (even though I feel the same way at times). Simply reviewing the history of shipment problems will likely be enough, and probably have better average results. :slight_smile:

Averages don’t represent reality - a boy and his dog have 3 legs each. The average is made of up those will be over the average, and others who are lower. If the higher than average experience is demonstrated to be reasonable, it normally won’t be a problem.

As the email suggests, there are ways to perhaps lessen the problem - one might be by bundling orders and getting tracking so everyone involved in the process has improved accountability. I’d much rather tell PayPal that my tracked order wasn’t delivered than to tell them to just look as someone else because it’s my word against a large seller.

In this forum I’ve seen some people claim that buying suspected scam items is PayPal’s problem. IMO, that approach runs up fees for everyone. PayPal is essentially reminding its users that they aren’t going to be alone.

I’ve only ever filed one claim, but I made sure the seller knew I would pay for it if it showed up and that I would wait longer if they could check with the shipper since I never got a trackable code. They did and found they didn’t have a confirmation record to back up their shipping claim. They immediately refunded and I reordered the same item which came with no problem. Paypal didn’t lose a penny.

I don’t expect PayPal to up their fees due to me or scamming sellers - I hope they do better on that side than I think they do.

Dude!

Were all those complaints over one vendor?

I wonder what would happen if you reply to PayPal, advising them that if they sent that message to the problem vendor( s ) instead of his victim, they wouldn’t have so many problems with you…?

No 3 of the same vendors for dispute.(IOS, Tmart,Banggood)
2 same vendors for claims.(Tmart,Banggood)
I think that I’ve been victim of the “Busy season” whereby parcels have a higher tendency to get delayed and lost.
The fact is that I open 2 claims/get refunded out of 20 orders or so upped to 10% of all my recent transaction.
5 disputes is more than 25% of all even though, one of the claims was not even open in the first place. It was automatically closed because of the dispute date was gone already.

By way of answer to my email to go screw themselves, paypal replied by an automated email.
I am starting to think that at Paypal there are no real persons only some Software applications replying and sending mails to piss off clients.
Don’t mind emailing to paypal, there are no one out there.

I’ve had decent luck threatening a few PP claims without actually having to file them. I used to just be a nice guy with some of these Chinese vendors but some of them don’t seem to understand nice, so now I often lead with something like “please refund my money by tomorrow morning or I will file a PP claim tomorrow afternoon” and that has worked famously. If anything at all is fishy with the seller (like they claim it’s in stock and the order goes straight to back order) then I just automatically lead with the threat.

Seems like I only average about 1 actual claim a year-maybe two- usually from some place that just plain won’t respond. If PP ever suspends my account for too many claims, then it’s really their loss, so I’ve never been worried about that. No shortage of stuff to spend money on locally :wink:

My last job they wanted everyone to be under the average, they could not understand (or didn’t want to understand) that if everyone is below the average then the average would trend lower and you would still have people above the mythical unattainable ‘average’.
I think the point they wanted to make is that the average should somehow be zero and as the messenger your the one they would kill

I had this happen to a friend whose account was closed because he kept opening a dispute with each purchase. After 8 in a row, they suspended the account. Yes, the fact is, PP is automated and they will suspend or permanently ban an account if too many disputes are opened back-to-back due to statistics. And yes, they have it down to an exact science.

From reading your statement, it doesn’t sound like you did anything wrong, assuming you gave each vendor a chance to right the issue and didn’t just open disputes as standard procedure when the delivery date of a package drew near. You should only open one after threatening to do so, and very near to the cut-off date. If they see you are opening a bunch of disputes consecutively and you haven’t made an attempt to contact the sellers, then if it happens a few more times, you may get suspended. A lot of people at paypalsucks.com got in that situation. You can always call the PP hotline and speak to someone. I’d be careful.

These sorts of things do raise the blood pressure, don’t they?

If paypal wants to close my account then, it won’t be the end of the world.
It will allow me to save money. And I can still use that old credit card if I want to combine orders and have tracking.
I am already thinking of stop using paypal because of this mail… hmmm They don’t even have to suspend my account, I just stop using them. here.
:bigsmile: thanks for the link paypalsucks.com I didn’t know it even existed.

My account used to be occasionally suspended years back with reason regular review. And they stopped after I emailed them said it was annoying and troublesome as account couldn’t be used to pay winning bid on ebay on time.

when first time I used paypal, they sent a warm greeting by automatically reversing my payment to canadian vendor after 2 months without notice with reason fund was suspected fraudulent eventhough it was a credit card account which one I still use 6 years later.

so, I kinda agree, paypal feature is mostly automated. Even the address verification because they never reply to my email when I asked the supported doc needed.

as in case of PP claim, I rarely open claim. Maybe less than 3 a year (2 in this year) and all of them were ebay seller as I recalled. Me also agree with suggestion, threat seller first with PP claim without actually open it until day 44 if there is no reship or refund. However if high value trx, I prefer take risk being suspended rather than loss money without open claim.

Kill the messenger is sad but true. I think they understand the average will trend down, that is what they ‘hope’ for.

Problem is killing the messenger doesn’t solve the problem they probably don’t know how to solve - worse, they know how and decide that is too expensive so they go low brow and milk a cash cow.

The only good option is a better competitor - not that I see one, yet.

I’ve used PayPal for about 5 years. Have made purchases from all sorts of vendors even down to a one-man shop in Singapore. From a few dollars to a few thousand dollars. Have received everything I ordered, without fail, in working order as expected.

Have not opened a single dispute.

China can have slow shipping. This is a known fact. Not very long ago at all it was standard procedure for anything ordered from the other side of the world to take up to 6 months to arrive. 45 days? Laughable!

I have a XinTD V4 and some Noctigon pads out there somewhere coming from Intl Outdoor that I ordered on Nov 22. Either it’ll show up, or it won’t. Highly unlikely PayPal will ever know anything about it either way. If I was that worried about an amount of money that won’t buy lunch, I’d go to the local store for my purchases.

This.

It’s not worth opening a PayPal dispute on every purchase. PayPal wants disputes saved for when there’s a legitimate problem… not used as a precautionary measure on every purchase.

Don’t open disputes on all your small purchases. It’s not worth it. Either it will arrive or it won’t.

One thing that people forget is that there are tons of scammers out there. People who purchase with PayPal and then file a dispute, so that not only do they get the item they bought, but they get the money back too. That is one of the many reasons why PayPal has to control accounts and because of the volume, it has to be automated. There are many people I have met, who scam regularly and are proud of getting all kinds of merchandise and the money back to boot! It's getting worse too, so I am glad PayPal is handling that kind of thing. Maybe filing a dispute on every order is just a little too rash, especially when we consider all of the shipping problems China is having and that has NOTHING to do with the sellers. It has everything to do with the post offices.

You may not like what paypal is doing, but it is trying to protect both sellers and buyers from the millions of thieves out there and there's no good way to control people, they always hate it, no matter if that control is for the good or the bad. I have been with PayPal for so many years that I can't remember any more and I have had a couple issues, but I have only ever had to file one or two disputes with them in all those years. Giving the sellers the benefit of the doubt and realizing that the postal authorities are (many times), the real culprits here and there's nothing anyone can do about that except grin and bear it, is more like the reality behind overseas shipping times.

I agree.
Jerry

I think it should be mandatory to have tracking for every item over X amount of money. I find it of extremely bad taste and downright disgustiing to get a product and to ask for a refund too.

In my opinion, while this will happen anywhere be it in the US or Somalia, it is in the developing countries like India (for example) and the likes that this scam problem is more of an issue. I am sure paypal is aware of this and is paying special attention to ‘risky’ countries where cheap people will try to scam legit vendors for a quick win.

This ultimately leads to legit buyers and sellers being jacked.