PayPal want £9000

[Deleted User]

In 2007 someone hacked my eBay and PayPal accounts and started selling stuff while I was out of the country. At the time eBay and my back accepted that it was fraud and reversed everything, but PayPal would not and kept demanding about £15000.

Needless to say I don't have the money (the scammer does presumably) and I have already sent them all the evidence I have. The bank accepted it, eBay accepted it, but PayPal won't.

Anyway, now for some reason they only (!) want £9000. I have no idea where they get these numbers from. The problem is I need a PayPal account to buy stuff on eBay which is vital to my fledgling business (I'm a sole trader). I tried setting up a new account but they just linked it back to the old one and limited it.

Is there anything I can do? Obviously I can't pay them. I have unpaid eBay items that I now have no way to pay for and an order for parts to a company in China worth nearly £500 which will be useless if I can't get this resolved. I can't afford to loose £500 so I have sent them an email asking them not to do anything until the situation is resolved. I just hope they have not started manufacturing or things could get really nasty.

Since all this was back in 2007 and I was seriously ill at the time and out of the country a lot of the detail has been lost. My gMail account filled up and old messages were deleted to make room for new ones and predictably they now only go back to a few months after it was mostly sorted out. I have been trying to find paperwork but I already sent it all to PayPal anyway.

Is going to the Financial Services Ombudsman worth a try? I think at the very least PayPal is guilty of obfuscation because the only email addresses they have provided (appeals@paypal.com and [EMAIL="complaint-response@paypal.com"]complaint-response@paypal.com[/EMAIL]) both bounce, they ignore letters sent to their official address and they make it extremely difficult to speak to anyone helpful on the phone. Even their fax number is engaged most of the time and their dispute department which is supposed to have an answering machine is too.

I feel like I'm banging my head against a brick wall :wall:

preable

I thought paypal owned ebay so if ebay accept it i cant see why paypal wont.

kprigg

Im sure there have been posts on here before with proper contact details for paypal. I cant remember exactly but will search & see.

I think that you will be stuck until you sort this with Paypal & it could take some time. They will not let you open another account while they still think you owe them money.

kprigg

This may be able to help
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=28733875&postcount=5

soolin

Firstly you need to do some immediate 'trouble shooting' so you don't make this worse. If you can sort this out you need to accept it is going to take time and you don't want to make it worse while you sort things.

So, the items you have won on ebay you must pay for, either bite the bullet and send a cheque or, hopefully a better solution get someone to pay via paypal for you and add your address as a gift address. If you don't pay you'll get NPB strikes and won't be able to bid on much in future and may even get suspended by ebay.

Secondly you may be wise to cancel your trade order in China if ti is posisble, the last thing you want is the pressure of £500 of stock if you can't get any paypal account up and running.

Unfortunately by breaking more rules, ie trying to operate a new account while suspended on another, you have just alerted paypal to the fact that you may be a scammer, or at the very least an undesireable customer. So even if you do sort out the initial issues you face the problem that you then already have a warning for breaking more terms and conditions.

As for the initial account and its problems you will have to sort this out and will have to retrace your steps and find all the evidence. If you cannot call them off about the initial problem you will never be able to trade on ebay. Yoursis not an uncommon story, an account goes bad for whatever reason and seller tries to walk away from it on the basis that paypal won't bother chasing for any debt, however accrued. Then a few years down the line seller decides to spend money and start trading again and gets caught for the initial debt.

paulofessex

Have you been chased by debt collectors etc, as l would have thought if you owed Pay Pal that amount they would be chasing you via the courts.

[Deleted User]

Yes, they did set the debt recovery people on me. I explained the same thing to them and they accepted it and stopped bothering me.

Actually the first phone call was quite strange:

Me: Hello?
Caller: Hi, I am xxx from xxx. I'm just calling to get this PayPal debt cleared. Can you confirm you name and email address?
Me: No.
Caller: Well I need you to confirm before I can proceed.
Me: Okay, bye then.

They expected me to give my name and email address to some random person calling me!

Anyway, eventually they accepted that it was identity theft and left me alone.

[Deleted User]

kprigg wrote: »

This may be able to help
http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showpost.html?p=28733875&postcount=5

Thanks, that was useful.

soolin wrote: »

So, the items you have won on ebay you must pay for, either bite the bullet and send a cheque or, hopefully a better solution get someone to pay via paypal for you and add your address as a gift address. If you don't pay you'll get NPB strikes and won't be able to bid on much in future and may even get suspended by ebay.

I contacted the seller but he will only accept PayPal, which is understandable with the massive amount of eBay fraud that goes on.

Secondly you may be wise to cancel your trade order in China if ti is posisble, the last thing you want is the pressure of £500 of stock if you can't get any paypal account up and running.

Unfortunately they have already started so I can either accept the order or try to challenge the payment somehow. Not sure how to go about this... Presumably I need to file in Small Claims Court against PayPal for loss of income. Any claim would be boosted by a favourable ruling form the Ombudsman.

Unfortunately by breaking more rules, ie trying to operate a new account while suspended on another, you have just alerted paypal to the fact that you may be a scammer, or at the very least an undesireable customer. So even if you do sort out the initial issues you face the problem that you then already have a warning for breaking more terms and conditions.

Well actually the reason I opened another account is that a guy from PayPal told me too. He said that my old account could not be re-opened but I could start another with a different address.

I had been using the new account for a couple of years without issue. It was only when they asked me to confirm my bank account details that this kicked off.

paulofessex wrote: »

Have you been chased by debt collectors etc, as l would have thought if you owed Pay Pal that amount they would be chasing you via the courts.

Well as far as I knew they had eventually accepted the situation because they never started any court action. I would have expected it if they really thought I owed them £9000/£15000.

[Deleted User]

I spoke to PayPal again today (they said they would call me back but never did). They are going to "review" the account again but I have been down that road before and it usually just leads to an email from an address that you can't reply to which states your appeal was unsuccessful.

I'm going to have to ask a friend to set up an account for me because if I can't use eBay my fledgling business will fail and I'll end up in debt. I will probably loose the eBay account due to non-payment strikes too, and with over 500 positive feedbacks it's quite valuable in itself.

PayPal said they would get back to me within 48 hours. If they don't I'll take it up with the ombudsman. It costs PayPal about £400 the instant you do that but they don't seem to care.

steven_garner

May help, don’t know the source of the info or how old it is but i copied this from another post some months ago.

Good luck getting it sorted!

[EMAIL="moldenburg@paypal.com"]moldenburg@paypal.com[/EMAIL] (Michael Moldenburg, Paypal Complaints)
[EMAIL="sthompson@paypal.com"]sthompson@paypal.com[/EMAIL] (Scott Thompson, PayPal President)
[EMAIL="mhentges@paypal.com"]mhentges@paypal.com[/EMAIL] (Mary Hentges, CFO PayPal)
[EMAIL="crme@paypal.com"]crme@paypal.com[/EMAIL] (PayPal Office of Executive Escalations)
[EMAIL="appeal@paypal.com"]appeal@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="harbor1@paypal.com"]harbor1@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="account-review@paypal.com"]account-review@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="ppelce@paypal.com"]ppelce@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="cardreview@paypal.com"]cardreview@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="complaint-response@paypal.com"]complaint-response@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="abuse@paypal.com"]abuse@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="Europeanservices@paypal.com"]Europeanservices@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="resolutions@paypal.com"]resolutions@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="appeals@paypal.com"]appeals@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="compliance@paypal.com"]compliance@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="escalations@paypal.com"]escalations@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="webform@paypal.com"]webform@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="service@paypal.com"]service@paypal.com[/EMAIL] (Unmonitored)
[EMAIL="spoof@paypal.com"]spoof@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="complaints@paypal.com"]complaints@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="aup@paypal.com"]aup@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="press@paypal.com"]press@paypal.com[/EMAIL] (Let public relations know you are filing complaints)
[EMAIL="apires@paypal.com"]apires@paypal.com[/EMAIL] (Amanda Pires - Media Relations Contact)
[EMAIL="chargebackresponse@paypal.com"]chargebackresponse@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="pending_reversal@paypal.com"]pending_reversal@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="global2@paypal.com"]global2@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="intl@paypal.com"]intl@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="ppe_courtesycredit@paypal.com"]ppe_courtesycredit@paypal.com[/EMAIL]
[EMAIL="BoEappeal@paypal.com"]BoEappeal@paypal.com[/EMAIL]

1984ReturnsForReal_2

So who was selling stuff from your address then?