Thursday, February 13, 2014

Don't Use PAYPAL --- WARNING!

hI AII

I was sent this ... from someone on my list:
So there I was ... doing the entrepremanure thing in the US.

My company was pulling over $100k a month from our business and I was shipping $40,000 a month back to the UK as I was buying properties and land quite heavily back then.

Now, all our income came to us in the form of commissions paid to us by a fully registered and traceable US company that we used to do the marketing for. On the back of our marketing they would increase their subscription base and we would earn a monthly commission on all the subscriptions. The company was established for 22 years and turning over more than $1 billion USD before we came along - so in otherwords - a VERY VERY Reputable company.

All the subscriptions taken by that company were on debit or credit cards. No problem there.

So - this particular month - January 2001 to be exact - I shipped $41,500 to my UK Lloyds account from my PayPal account. Then I jumped on a plane from Seattle as I was coming home to see my old dad for a few weeks. I took off on the Friday evening (Seattle time) and So I fully expected the dough to be in my UK account by the following Tuesday in the UK.

Tuesday came and went and no money.

Much calling to the bank ensued who informed me that they had simply not had the money.

So eventually I started getting on to PayPal corporate which was located in Nebraska at that time.

Thats where the fun started! I never once got to speak to the same person - nobody wrote anything down on their system and everyone just passed the buck to someone else stating that it was someone elses department.

I won't bore you with the details - but let me tell you how I got my money EIGHT MONTHS LATER!

I began to hear online that many other people had suffered a similar fate at the hands of Pa(y)pal and so a "Class Action" was brought by those people (109 of them to be exact) against PayPal.

So - I wrote to the CEO of PayPal and made it clear to him that if I wasn't in receipt of my money in 14 days then I would b joining the class action.

Heard nothing so then an attorney friend of mine came up with a bright idea. He tabled the idea of creating a Subpoaena against the CEO and board members of PayPal dragging him into court under FEDERAL laws for Fraud and misappropriation of funds and about 6 or 7 other choice offences.

We then got another attorney as a second, went to the court house in district 57 of California (San Bernadino) where I lived and the Judge granted the Subpoena because he himself had a Pa(y)pal account and was frankly shocked.

So - with Subpoena in hand allowing us to drag the CEO out of his office and into a FEDERAL court in Nebraska we got on a plane to Nebraska.

We (that is meself and the two attorneys) then rocked up in PayPals reception and I trotted up to the reception girl and said the following. (I had it written down)

"I have come to collect my $41,500 in cash from your CEO, if I am not in receipt of those funds in less than 10 minutes I will be executing this Subpoena against your CEO and all board members of this company as failure to comply with this Subpoena to attend court now will result in formal arrest and arraignment by Federal Marshalls who will be called to forcibly and with all necessary force extract your CEO and any board members from this building and and all other PayPal offices in the contiguous United States for presentation into federal court to answer these charges, as a pretensor to any bail application Judge E. B. Marickels in the California District Court (57) has already set bail at $10,000,000 per person ... I suggest you get your CEO down here NOW!"


After I had picked her jaw up off the floor (and she was visibly trembling by this point) she got on the phone and after less than 1 minute the "P.A" to the CEO came down.

I was furious. I repeated my statement and added that having been notified of and shown the Subpoena she would be a culpable accessory to the fact if she didn't ensure he was down here with my money in less than 8 minutes.

3 minutes went by and she was back - she was holding a cheque for $41K made out to me ... but my Attorney stepped in and said - "no - thats no good - we could walk outta here and you could stop that cheque - go and get a Cashiers Cheque or a bankers draft and you need to do that in less than 5 minutes or we will be calling Marshalls."

with less than a minute to spare - she rocks up with a cashiers cheque.

Not one cent of interest on my $41,500 which they had for 8 months, not a word of apology ... no explanation - NOTHING!!!

I then got in touch with the law firm bringing the class action explaining what we had done to get my money refunded to me - I heard that some three weeks later 8 lawyers carrying Federal Subpoena's on behalf of 126 appellants entered the offices of PayPal to recover more than $1.7 million dollars of funds that "Pa(y)pal" had "seized" - It turns out Pa(y)pal issued cashiers cheques in less than ten minutes.

If paypal took $10K off 10,000 people this way then in my book thats nice work if you can get it!

I kept pestering the CEO by way of letter for an explanation and eventually by way of a complete shock I got one!

The letter said ... "funds were rightfully and lawfully witheld by our fraud prevention team as a security against possible chargebacks from the persons who had made the original payments".

This was bollocks ... we never took credit or debit card payments. Our funds were paid directly into our bank account from the company we were contracted to work for (The very respectable one) and then we transferred funds from our bank in the US directly to the PayPal account. So who were these people we were allegedly taking money from? The company actually taking the payments had been going 22 years and had been using their credit card merchant account for many years and had less than 2% chargeback rate on their merchant account - an acceptable level is 6% in the industry.

9 months after I got my money back - Pa(y)pal's offices in Nebraska shut without notice to anyone and I don't know where they are based now as they don't publish it. Their office in London is a mail forwarding company - if you ring them you end up speaking to someone in the Philippines.

They are without doubt the biggest bunch of crooked fuckers on the planet!

Vxxx

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

This story is a fabricated lie. PayPal is located in San Jose, Ca and its international headquarters in Singapore. If a class action suit was filed against them, it would be public knowledge and plastered all over the internet and media. So, let's see a copy of the Federal filing from Nebraska. Fact is, there ain't one. John, maybe you should start researching these stories before you post them.

Anonymous said...

This sounds like a perfect plan for all those who have been defrauded by MERS and the mortgage 'lenders' who do NOT loan you one penny - it's all phony baloney lending. Imagine BOA, WF, Chase and all the other scammers CEOs, Board of Directors and mortgage employees facing $10,000,000 bail bonds each, time in the courtroom and jail time!!!!! Let's get 'er done!!!!!!

Anonymous said...

HEAR HEAR!
A WORD TO THE WISE IS (SHOULD BE) SUFFICIENT! . . . .

Anonymous said...

I believe this story as I've known online entrepreneurs that got screwed in pretty much exactly this way.

Pa(y)pal will freeze your funds for 6 months to a year if they don't like what you are doing with your business venture.

People have gotten their funds back eventually after fighting for many months... what do you think pa(y)pal was doing with all the illegally seized funds? Investing them into the crooked market to generate crooked profits would be my bet.

PhilipCohen said...

The ugly reality of eBay Inc.:
eBay's crooked auctions marketplace ... http://bit.ly/11F2eas
eBay Motors (UK sampling): Auction Fraud Galore ... http://bit.ly/I2gTEU
eBay Motors XSS Redirect Scams in Action: video ... http://bit.ly/1d46NvE
eBay/Gumtree / Barclays Bank Motors Scams … http://bit.ly/1c9Uwck
eBay's clunky, unscrupulous "PreyPal" ... http://bit.ly/UVXx53
The ongoing joke of eBay Inc. ... http://bit.ly/YvxFEg
Fun quotes from the eBay executive suite ... http://bit.ly/12xvzyA
On Facebook ... https://www.facebook.com/groups/formerebaysellers/

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the warning!

Freewill said...

I have been doing ebay purchases using paypal since 2001 and never had an issue until a couple weeks ago. I was scammed by a seller for $800 and turned it over to paypal claims and as of 5 days ago, the $800 was returned to me.