Consumer complaint received 2023-09-12
Company: Paypal Holdings, Inc
State: WI
Product: Money transfer, virtual currency, or money service
Sub-product: Mobile or digital wallet
Issue: Unauthorized transactions or other transaction problem

Complaint:
In XXXX, someone gained access to my PayPal account. 
They sent payments to my account using someone elses paypal account. Then they transferred the money from my PayPal to their own bank account that they added to my PayPal.

I contacted Paypal, and they fixed all of it, except they did not remove the bank account. 
It happened again 11 days later. 
I again contacted PayPal, but this time, they refunded the payments to the other peoples accounts, but did not reverse the withdrawals. 
They filed my complaint incorrectly several different times, and are now telling me that I need to try to fix the situation ( that happened in its entirety on PayPal ) outside of PayPal. 
They have taken all incoming payments that I have received during this time as well. 
I have gone through their appeal process, and filed complaints both online, and by phone, and not once have I been contacted by a person that was working on my case directly. 
After the appeal process, I was told that I would be given a copy of the documents used to decide my case upon my request, but I did not receive those, just a copy/pasted form message that still had the generic terms in them rather than even including the proper information, and no actual documentation, and a screenshot of an XXXX transaction that had nothing to do with this situation. 
There were several phone calls between myself and paypal, but I do not have access to the transcripts or recordings of those calls. 
After about 45 days, the paypal system stopped letting me connect to a person at paypal, and instead, it would always auto connect me to a third party collection agency, limiting my ability to gather information, or work on my case. 
This happened 2 times in the course of 11 days. Paypal recognized the first batch of transactions on XX/XX/XXXX, that happened over the course of just a few minutes as fraud, and immediately reversed and refunded everything. However, they did not remove the bank account that was added to my paypal account, and when I tried to remove it myself from my account screen, it did not work. I spoke with someone at paypal, and they told me that the account could not be removed, as it was a part of an open investigation. A few weeks later, a different representative at paypal removed the account with no issue. 
The second time this happened started on XX/XX/XXXX, and concluded on XX/XX/XXXX. The money charged was in very similar amounts to the first time, and the withdrawals went to the same bank account. If you look at the time stamps, several of these transactions happened within minutes of each other. 
Each time that I contacted paypal, I had to speak with a different person. 
Many of these people did not speak great XXXX, and thus may not have had the best understanding of this complicated situation. 
each person that I spoke to, would take down notes, that then got passed along to someone in another department. 
I NEVER spoke to anyone that was the person working on my case. No one ever contacted me back for additional info, no one asked me anything, even though I repeatedly asked for that to happen. 
The first person that opened a case for me, opened that case to resolve all of the payments that were sent to me fraudulently, but did not open a case for any of the withdrawals. 
The next person opened cases for the withdrawals, but for some reason that case was closed without any info from me, and not in my favor. When I asked why, they mentioned IP addresses, but did not go into detail The next person, asked me when these transactions happened, and proceeded to pen a case for every transaction I had during that time frame, OTHER THAN THESE WITHDRAWALS The next person told me they understood what my issue was, and said they had it all set, and that I would just need to wait a few days. They denied me again. 
The next person told me she understood, but she then did a Trace of Funds which just verifies that the money came out of my account, and went to the bank account ending in XXXX, but totally disregarding that my complaint was that I did not authorize the transactions.

Company response to consumer: Closed with monetary relief