So I recently went to go and use paypal and my account had been permanently limited.
In the last month, I made my normal purchases through ebay and places like t&t, tcgplayer, etc. Nothing out of the ordinary with the exception of transferring funds over from my paypal to my business banking account…I did this due to ebay’s policy. I planned on kind of slowly using my paypal funds or transferring it over before the end of the year and now all my money is on hold for 180 days!
paypal customer service can’t provide me with any information on why they made their decision and told me in the end that I can contact the legal department by mail and subpoena them. After 180 days, paypal will make a decision but nothing is guaranteed.
I feel as though paypal is pissed because they recognize that I’ve been slowly moving my funds out of paypal and shutting down the account and therefore decided to freeze my account.
Anyone have a similar experience or have advice?
they definitely don’t care about YOU specifically. your transaction or account was flagged by an algorithm. that’s all that happened.
ive never heard of permanently limited, but i have heard of limited where you must provide some more information and then the account becomes unlimited.
I’ve had this issue but you to provide ID and a Bank statement (which is the easy way to do it) then after all that bs is accepted the account goes back to normal.
Ive never had issues, and ive transferred 10+ upper valued payments just this month to my bank account.
However, I don’t do F&F on it. So I have no issues. They limited me once, I showed them the bank statement, and it was removed by the morning. So im not sure.
edit- it requested it on paypal, i didnt hear anything about 180 days, nor a permanent limit.
@uponeagleswings ,that’s the exact email I received. I think I’ve used one f/f payment for like $10 randomly a month ago to someone in europe for some promo card I couldn’t get in the US but other than that I have thousands of transactions either through ebay or just as business payments, none of which are f/f.
The only thing I can come up with is the fact that I became a LLC in November and I’ve been transferring money over to my business banking account, however, I didn’t change my paypal account to a business paypal account. I never really knew what that meant until a few minutes ago and well…I’m still not sure. It does seem though that If I have a business paypal account I would be charged $1.50 for bank transfers which I wouldn’t have been paying otherwise. Paypal’s algorithms must have noticed I was a business (either by noticing my sales through ebay or by noticing my transfers to a business bank account) and realized I was operating under a normal personal paypal account…to which I was oblivious to the fact that I needed to change over. That is literally the only thing I can think of.
they say they will hold the money up to 180 days… It’s crazy they can hold thousands of dollars for half a year… my expected date was in June 2021…without giving me a reason. Luckily, I’ll be okay but it definitely messes with how I planned on operating and definitely adds to anxiety because they are very careful with how they word things and don’t say that I’ll actually get my money back.
Has anyone had an issue with not switching over from personal accounts to business accounts? The guy in the video above solved his problems by issuing a bunch of refunds and pissing off paypal but I’m not sure if that is the best or safest way to go about this. It looks like I need to wait it out or have my lawyer get involved but I really don’t feel like paying money only to find out that I can’t get my money
I hope this isn’t just a vent sesh but actually helpful to someone who might experience something similar. The guy’s video above is exactly what happened to me and it seems like in the past year it has been happening to a lot of people. He later admits that he was probably sending a lot of f/f payments. Anyways, It has potential to wreck a small business. Really glad to be moving away from paypal thanks to ebay’s new changes.
I’ve gotten hundreds of f/f payments and only 4 or 5 goods/service payments in the last 2 years. My acct is alive and well. Maybe it’s because I was one of their first 20 sign ups 20 years ago. In fact, unless I recall wrong, I got a congratulatory email from none other than Elon Musk lol.
It’s odd to see accounts getting banned so easily right now. When I was most active with my Pokemon purchases making gifted payment was totally normal ( especially in case of repeat purchases from other trusted sellers ). Never received any kind of warning from Paypal.
It’s very confusing to me to have been seeing PayPal not doing this in the past few years. PayPal used to block people almost immediately even if they merely assumed that a purchase had been made using F&F - to the point where I remember sellers encouraging people to add notes like “Please accept this as a donation.” and silly things like “Happy birthday!” to try and persuade PayPal that it was in fact a gift.
It seems like they don’t care as much as they used to 7 or 8 years ago (or their user base is just too high now to moderate effectively). In reality all it takes is one person to report you to PayPal and your account will be locked - a seller can report you for sending a payment as F&F and a buyer can report you for asking for a payment to be sent as F&F. Best thing to do is use G&S or find some other platform with lower fees.
@pichufan
I forgot to mention most of those purchases happened between 2014 and 2018. All I can think of is the ratio between G/S and F/F payments hasn’t been bad enough so they’d have to step in.
You’re totally right G/S should be preferred, I’ll certainly take experiences from this & other threads as a lesson.
A business account does not charge $1.50 to transfer to bank, it is the same as a personal.
Your issue is most likely selling as an LLC without a business account. How are you operating as an LLC without an EIN??
It may just be that w2’s are due to report and your business name is registered through your SSN & not your EIN. Which is an issue when its time to do taxes. Hard to declare sales through your LLC and write offs when you legally are not selling through your LLC.
However, locking your money does not solve this. So i have no clue why they locked you up.
