Consumer complaint received 2021-11-23
Company: Paypal Holdings, Inc
Product: Money transfer, virtual currency, or money service
Sub-product: Mobile or digital wallet
Issue: Managing, opening, or closing your mobile wallet account

Complaint:
To whom this may concern, First I would like to point out that I fully understand the need to limit accounts, especially with physical goods. We have thoroughly read your policies and User Agreement and can confidently say that we have not violated any policy or law. 

On the XXXX of XXXX I received an email telling me that my PayPal business account had been temporarily limited : ( VIEW FILE " XXXX '' ) I was not sure what exactly I had to send since my PayPal dashboard gave me the following reason for the account limit and told me to remove some products from our websites. 
So I decided to reach out to your customer support for help. In return I received even more confusion regarding my account : ( VIEW FILE " XXXX '' ) Now I am being told that it has something to do with drugs however the transaction ID that was given had nothing to do with drugs. The only issue could be the name for XXXX of the products that is called XXXX XXXX XXXX which is for a shower head so the water can come out. XXXX is not our first country so we unintentionally made a bad translation of the product. 
Aside from this response I also received a second response from your danish support team with a completely different reason for the account limit : ( VIEW FILE " XXXX '' ) Now I am asked to send invoices related to a certain product but not being told what exact product. This makes it impossible for us to know what exactly the issue is with our account. We are also asked to comment on past URLs linked to our PayPal account which we found to be no issue on our end. 

So in total I had now been given XXXX different reasons for getting my PayPal account temporarily limited : First reason given : We have found that you are selling goods or services that violate PayPal 's authorized use policies. Specific sale of goods that infringe or infringe any copyright, trademark, right of mention or personal data or any other property right under the laws of a jurisdiction Second reason given : A recent review of your account activity identified products/services on your website violate PayPal 's XXXX XXXX XXXX. Specifically, Drugs Paraphernalia are associated with and are not permitted on our platform. 
Third reason given : After a recent review of your account activity, we found that you were violating PayPal 's authorized use policy. 

The XXXX reason given also makes no sense as we dont sell branded or copyrighted products. Nor have we ever had any issue with other companies regarding the sale of goods that infringe or infringe their copyright, trademark, right of mention or personal data or any other property right under the laws of a jurisdiction. 

Now please note that we have been a long time user of PayPal and have always been happy with your service. So please know that we have never intentionally wished to break any of your policies. Though as you can see from the XXXX above mentioned reasons it is very confusing for us to know exactly what had allegedly been done wrong on our end. And after reading through your policies we could see we in fact hadnt done anything wrong. However we created a document with as much information that we could give based on the somewhat confusing information we had received. 

We noted in the document that you should reach out to us ASAP if there was any information missing so we could send it in. This is a procedure that you have done in the past when I was missing a document or XXXX however this wasnt done this time around. Because after some time after not having heard anything back from you I decided to go check my PayPal dashboard where, to my complete surprise, I could see that my account had been permanently limited without any notice sent by e-mail or PayPal inbox. I quickly realised that I had already lost from the very beginning. The various vague reasons for my account limit was to make sure I couldnt send the correct documents so my account would be permanently limited. 

Having seen a massive reduction in sales to XXXX XXXX where our business became unprofitable I decided to reach out again to your customer support to get this resolved in a professional manner. 

I called your support team and talked with a very friendly young man who confirmed that the limitation was due to the XXXX XXXX XXXX. I told him that it was a bad translation and after having shown him the actual product on our website he could confirm that there was nothing wrong with selling that product via PayPal. So he created a case for my account and sent it in for review. This was sent in on a friday and I was told that I would receive a reply on sunday. After having not heard anything for a few days I decided to reach out again to the support team for an update. This is where the lies started unravelling. 
( VIEW FILE " paypal XXXX mulighed for appeal.pdf '' ) As you can see from the photo above I was told that there was a possibility for me to get my account reinstated if I sent in a list of all the website where I receive money from XXXX as a clear description of how my company operates. That seemed to be pretty easy for me to do so I replied back asking where he wanted me to send this information. Shortly after I sent that message I received another message from a different support staff member completely contradicting your previous statements : ( VIEW FILE " paypal appeal modsigelse.pdf '' ) Now I am being told that there is absolutely NOTHING I can do and that it 100 % had nothing to do with the product called XXXXXXXX XXXX XXXX. In fact I had apparently broken several policies but, not surprisingly, she wouldnt tell me what exact policies. Now as you can see this is a direct contradiction from the message I had received days prior and the phone call I had with your customer support team. 

After being completely blown away for a few days by this whole situation I decided to call your customer support team again. Again I was met with a very friendly young man named XXXX who kindly told me that there was in fact a way to get my account reinstated by providing a list of active websites that I receive money from and a clear description of my company operations. He also confirmed with me that the water pipe product was noted on my account as being a problem. Again I complied and told him I would send in all the information I was asked : ( VIEW FILE " paypal XXXX mulighed for appeal.pdf '' ) This leads me to today with no update on my case and still no way of getting control over the money you have illegally stolen from me. Now I am left with no other choice as to file complaints with several authorities such as the XXXX XXXX, XXXX and Consumer Finance. I am also in the works of filing a lawsuit against your office in XXXX as it is illegal by XXXX laws to withhold my money for XXXX days. I have also read that you will withdraw my entire balance before the XXXX days has passed which is also very much illegal here in XXXX. 

I understand PayPals need for holding funds for credit card chargeback purposes, however a review of my account history for the last previous years will reveal a very low chargeback rate as well as a very high customer-satisfaction rate. I feel that any reasonable person would conclude that holding my entire balance for XXXX days is excessive and may be viewed by some as punitive or as already stated, an unnecessary abuse of power and perhaps even contrary to the laws of some states. 

Please be aware that replying with the standard this is part of the terms of service that you agreed to will not satisfy my request, or deter me from filing my complaints with the agencies listed above. It will be up to those agencies to determine if PayPal is operating within the law, abusing power, etc. I am simply seeking a resolution that is fair and in the best interest of both parties. 

Should you need more information or documents from me I will be more than compliant to send those. I hope that we can get this whole situation resolved without involving authorities and lawyers, however at this point I feel like I am left with no other options. 

Thank you for your time again in looking into this matter. 

Best regards XXXX XXXX XXXX XXXX Trading ApS CEO

Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation