860 Just disappeared into thin air never to be seen again

davebobsquiggle

Hi, I will keep this as short as possible; I had 860 Euros in a french Paypal account.

I sent this amount to my partner into her UK Nationwide building society.

The moneny completed on the Paypal end but never arrived in the UK account.

Paypal say the money was sent and Nationwide say the money was never received.

My partner opened a case with the financial ombudsman and the result of the review was the ombudsman claimed Nationwide had shown they received no payments. And subsequently the ombudsman could not ask Natiowide to refund the money.

Paypal and Nationwide will not communicate.

Paypal have been really obstructive in the sense it just goes around in circles, I have probably wasted 60+ hrs chasing Paypal over a 1.5 year period. 

Can anyone please offer any advice, my concern is pursuing one or the other and loosing and having to pay legal cost. And if pursue both surely il loose one case. The reason Im not convinced by the ombudsman review is I found a case identical to mine and in the end it was the bank at fault and not Paypal.

The solicitors I have spoken to breifly say its not worth going after one or the other as it will be cost prohibitive. I was trying to make a living selling my art and this basicially ruined me at the time.

overall Nationwide have been super helpful and done everything to try and help taking the situation seriously, For the first 40 hrs of chasing Paypal I was treated like a complete idiot. So many of the agents simply wouldnt help or even try, simply repeating the same stuff. and putting it off, then as I went up the chain the same thing happened.

In this stituation what can I do?

Many thanks,

davebobsquiggle

Paypal has a 1.3 star rating on trust pilot, 10's of thousand's of people complaining about Paypal conduct, truly appauling customer service rating. Why do people even use the service???

If you read the reviews literally thousand of people complaining about being scammed by Paypal !

Aylesbury_Duck

If the professional legal opinion is that it's not worth pursuing then that suggests they doubt a legal claim would be successful.

If you've satisfied yourself that Nationwide aren't the guilty party then you might wish to threaten PayPal with legal action.  It would cost you a stamp at this stage.  You never know, it might change their tune.  If it doesn’t, actually taking them to court won't cost a lot, either.

You'd need to be sure of the legal entity you were going to sue, and whether it's a company bound by English law (assuming you're in England).

user1977

Aylesbury_Duck said:

If the professional legal opinion is that it's not worth pursuing then that suggests they doubt a legal claim would be successful.

Not necessarily - 860 Euros doesn't equate to much lawyer time, and even if you win you're not necessarily going to get those costs back.

Aylesbury_Duck

user1977 said:

Aylesbury_Duck said:

If the professional legal opinion is that it's not worth pursuing then that suggests they doubt a legal claim would be successful.

Not necessarily - 860 Euros doesn't equate to much lawyer time, and even if you win you're not necessarily going to get those costs back.

True.  The DiY option is OP's best bet, then.

MyRealNameToo

Not sure why you went after Nationwide and cost them the best part of £500

Deal with PayPal and if you arent happy then check if you can take it to CSSF in Luxembourg which is the PayPal EU ombudsman

davebobsquiggle

MyRealNameToo said:

Not sure why you went after Nationwide and cost them the best part of £500

Deal with PayPal and if you arent happy then check if you can take it to CSSF in Luxembourg which is the PayPal EU ombudsman

Because of an identical case thats why. The bank was at fault so obviously Im going to do it that way. 

daveyjp

I've always considered Paypal akin to giving money to a stranger trusting they will at some point giving it to the intended recipient.

born_again

davebobsquiggle said:

Paypal has a 1.3 star rating on trust pilot, 10's of thousand's of people complaining about Paypal conduct, truly appauling customer service rating. Why do people even use the service???

If you read the reviews literally thousand of people complaining about being scammed by Paypal !

Vast majority have no problems with PP.

Altior

I do have some experience with working with PP professionally, from a banking perspective. Including portal access that a customer wouldn't see or have access to.

Stating the bleedin' obvious, but if there's a lot of activity in the account it could be missed. The most likely scenario is that the payment got rejected, and when it was bounced back, the amount received back doesn't match the original amount due to exchange rates and/or fees. 

Again, since you have spent many hours on this, it will more than likely have been done. But on the slim chance that it hasn't, export the activity around the payment date and a month forward. See if you can trace each action on the activity listing. You might just find a received amount that you don't initially recognise. Do this for each currency too (if there are multiple currencies in the overall account). 

born_again

Altior said:

I do have some experience with working with PP professionally, from a banking perspective. Including portal access that a customer wouldn't see or have access to.

Stating the bleedin' obvious, but if there's a lot of activity in the account it could be missed. The most likely scenario is that the payment got rejected, and when it was bounced back, the amount received back doesn't match the original amount due to exchange rates and/or fees. 

Again, since you have spent many hours on this, it will more than likely have been done. But on the slim chance that it hasn't, export the activity around the payment date and a month forward. See if you can trace each action on the activity listing. You might just find a received amount that you don't initially recognise. Do this for each currency too (if there are multiple currencies in the overall account). 

There is also the option that due to paying a 3rd party in a different country. It could have hit a fraud check...

Or the other option was paid to wrong account details 🤷‍♀️

Why not to OP own account which PP would have details for?