In March of 2016 a client I have worked with for years had issues with her credit card number being stolen. Her financial company quickly came to her rescue disputing all charges they were not familiar with. I had just recently changed my company name which caused some confusion with the client’s financial team. Not realizing who I was, they disputed a months worth of payments from my client to me. The majority of my clients pays me through PayPal and has for well over ten years. I never had a problem with PayPal before so I figured this would be an easy fix when my client and I realized what happened.
The following day, my client and I called PayPal to explain the issue. PayPal told us what we needed to do to fix the issue. According to the representative, we just needed to fill out some forms, have the credit card company cancel the chargebacks and return the funds to PayPal. PayPal would then return to the funds to me. By March 28th, the credit card company released all the funds to PayPal. My client, her credit card company, her bank, and I made a group call to PayPal. We spoke to a supervisor who admitted PayPal had received the funds back along with the faxes they needed. I was told I would have to wait up to 70 days for the credits to my account. In the meantime, the PayPal supervisor waived all late fee charges on my account.
I wasn’t happy that I would have to wait 70 days for the issue to be corrected but I understand company policies. After 75 days had passed, only one chargeback was corrected. I called PayPal back spending over an hour on the phone trying to find someone who worked there that understood the issue. In the end, I was told to wait two more weeks and all should be settled. No one at PayPal seemed to know why it was taking longer than normal but assured me they were working on it.
A little over two weeks went by and one more chargeback was fixed. The two that were released to me were the smallest of all the chargebacks. I called back again this time spending almost two hours on the phone trying to find someone who had an idea of what was going on. A manager of the dispute department finally got on the phone with me. After 20 minutes, she told me she went through each chargeback requesting for immediate release of my funds from PayPal’s back end bank. She said within 4-8 hours my account should be back to normal. Finally! Or so I thought.
A few days passed and nothing changed within my account. I called PayPal back and went through the motions of being transferred to various departments. I finally got sent to a manager named Tracey just to be told that all the cases were closed and that PayPal ruled in the buyers favor. Supposedly, the funds were returned back to “the buyer”. What?! How can that be when “the buyer” cancelled out the chargebacks and had the funds issued back to PayPal.
I called my client and the financial team who informed me that the never received the funds back from PayPal either. Documents were provided to me to prove the funds were not returned to them. I logged into my PayPal account to see for myself what the cases say in the resolution center. I was shocked to see that all of the cases had disappeared. My account balance is still in the negative but none of the cases can be found. I did a search all the way back to January of this year but everything is gone. It shows no closed cases or open cases under my account.
If I don’t have the money and my client does not have the money, then where is it PayPal? Why did you delete all the case information? I did some investigating on this matter to find there are numerous amounts of complaints about the same issue. PayPal has some explaining to do. I have lost all respect for the company. Have you had a similar issue? Feel free to email me. I’d like to know if your issue was resolved.
- Kitty McCaffery