Avoid Paypal

Avoid Paypal

I’ve been using Paypal intermittently for years, but recently encountered a problem so severe that I am now trying to terminate my account completely. The fact that I cannot, and that they cannot tell me why (without contacting “customer service”, as if I expect that to be productive) is one of the reasons why.

What precipitated this was two things. First, I moved my primary bank account from the credit union whose only remaining branch was a 30-minute drive away, to one a short walk from work, and our credit card company “upgraded” (?) us from MasterCard to Visa. Over time I took steps to upgrade all my recurring payments and stored credit cards. Most organizations would let me know if they had been missed, and I’d fix it, and poof, it was done.

Except PayPal.

For months, every attempt to remove the deprecated (now closed) bank account produced a message “Sorry, you can’t remove this bank account because of a pending transaction. Please try again later”. Same for the defunct credit card. This continued for months. I managed to find the place where the primary bank and credit card were configured, I changed those to be the new ones. I found the place where the recurring and preauthorized transactions were listed, and I canceled all of them, and went to the vendors at the other end to update their payment methods to a credit card (happily, I have a leftover credit card from oldest child sent to college, he’s employed, married, and working on a retirement plan, and it is perfect for this – low credit limit, almost never used, this cuts the risk both to me and my credit card company should any of the recurring-payment people be less secure than we might want). So, those two accounts have been deselected from everything, all the recurring payments are shut down – and no change. Still can’t delete the dead accounts.

Note that nowhere in the message from Paypal does it suggest that I can do these other things; I did have one shot at “customer service” and they told me about making sure that they old accounts were not the primary funding source – but that didn’t work.

So, given proven incompetence on the part of Paypal, it seems pretty wise to sever all ties with them, how do I know my money is safe, it was foolish of me to ever give them access to any of my money. But when I hit the “close my account” button, I get:

Before you close your account
Sorry, there’s a problem. If you keep seeing this, please contact customer service.

I’m not entirely sure what to do next. I may talk to my bank; I really don’t like the idea of these guys having access to my money, and I’m virtually certain that in the EULA that I didn’t read I consented to binding abitration bullshit, and that’s just way the hell too much exposure to someone else’s incompetence.