A few minutes after I sent gamesinwelt.com credit-card payment for a Wii via PayPal, I phoned PayPal asking them to cancel the transaction. Your payment did not go through, I was told. “Did not”. So there was no need to cancel it. I was safe. To warn others, I wrote my earlier post about this.
Well, I was misinformed. My payment was not unauthorized, i.e., dead — it was, rather, not-yet-authorized. When I phoned PayPal, it could have been canceled but it wasn’t. A few days later it went through. Maybe I am easily amazed but this is amazing. At PayPal customer service, the account history screen seen by employees does not distinguish between two meanings of unauthorized: “authorization failed” and “not yet authorized”. What is this, 1960?
I was pissed. I called PayPal and was told in part that this was somehow my fault. I should have known [something]. To file a dispute I must call another number. I called that number. I filed the dispute. You’re safe, I was told. Will I have to call again? I asked. No, I was told.
Well, I wasn’t safe. Although I won the dispute, there was no money in the seller’s account. A possibility that hadn’t been mentioned. Too bad for me.
So I phoned my credit card company. I was told I should get my money back from either PayPal or the credit-card company. Fearing more untrustworthiness from PayPal, I emptied my PayPal account.
Bonus PayPal helping scammers, from the comments:
Same story! $300 for a Wii and a Nintendo DS! The day after my husband ordered I tried to go back to the website and order some games. I got a message saying the company “could not accept PayPal at this time” I then emailed PayPal’s customer service and asked them if this meant that they were not a reputable company that I should not do business with. PayPal said, and I quote, “It does not mean that they are not reputable, they could be experiencing problems with their internet connection to PayPal.”
Paypal is a giant scam…a huge, unregulated, Wild-West pseudobank that would have been reined in years ago but for the enormous sums eBay (its owner) funnels into Washington through its army of lobbyists.
So I got a PayPal “one-use-only” credit card number. Used it once. Except then a couple of months later, someone else used it again. (It was a known scammer than makes small charges for web design.)
Emailed PayPal, went round-and-round-and-round. Never got a straight answer as to why a one-time-only number could be used more than one time. I finally got my money back, but then they dropped the issue completely. They did not want to know how it happened, would not look into it further.
I still use them because it’s convenient, and easier (and I think, safer) than throwing my CC# around the web, but I monitor it more closely. And I think it is probably a better idea to use the credit card companies. They at least look into fraudulent charges a little more closely. Usually, anyway.