Consumer complaint received 2019-09-18
Company: SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL
State: TN
Product: Money transfer, virtual currency, or money service
Sub-product: Mobile or digital wallet
Issue: Unauthorized transactions or other transaction problem

Complaint:
I did a 3 min paypal credit I thought in XXXX via my XXXX account. On XX/XX/XXXX I got an email " reminding me '' that my paypal credit account was available for use. Notice that the email states that to see the balance I needed to " link '' my credit account to my paypal. The account would NOT link even though the information I input was CORRECT. So I was told to call 3 different numbers XXXX. I was kept on the line for 2 hours to finally be told that the account was linked to XXXX! This is NOT my " in use '' paypal account and it was apparently used only once in XXXX to pay with a prepaid card. I was eventually able to access the XXXX account and NO PAYPAL ACTIVITY IS EVER RECORDED ON IT! XXXX keeps emails and my welcome email is dated for today! So it looks like they created it today to explain why I couldn't link the XXXX account to paypal credit. From this experience it appears that Paypal and Synchrony Financial ILLEGALLY grant you a paypal credit account and then make it unusable until they can extract credit check information from you to make it legit. They then have you call in and pretend to " help you '' fix it and ask you a bunch of security question so that they can " run a credit check request in reverse ''! It culminates in them locking the paypal account and then them asking you to send in your picture ID to the never really used paypal account so as to seal the deal! I believe that giving people credit that they didn't apply for is illegal and hence doing a credit check approval in reverse is also illegal. On my XXXX is where you see the email was sent so there should have been NO WAY OR REASON that I would have applied to paypal credit using the XXXX account! You will see that after I REFUSED to provide ID and closed account they then " restored the use of the XXXX account ''! The first email said that the account was locked until I ran a virus scan, but when I logged on to the account it was actually asking for a photo id! I'm attaching the email that " reminded me '' of my paypay credit account CLEARLY sent to my XXXX account which I clearly use with them ; the email where they said it was blocked because of a virus, the screenshot that shows that I've not had any activity to the XXXX account with a " welcome '' dated from today ; the email that shows that after I informed them there would be no id sent and to cancel the account my account was miraculously restored, and lastly that I use virus protection. It appears that I had a bank on the XXXX paypal account so I'd been " verified '' already AND I use a virus scanner ALWAYS! I thought that it was XXXX where I had the XXXX attached account and the WELCOME email from XXXX dated from today substantiates that thought. 

In sum, Paypal and Synchrony Financial are illegally creating paypal credit accounts for consumers and making them unusable to get the consumer to call in so that they may perform a credit check in reverse to confirm the information. I did NOT authorized them to perform a credit check, and I didn't send in my id. I did confirm my account information. This needs to stop as it's illegal under the FCRA and punishable by a {$1000.00} fine per incident.

Company public response: Company has responded to the consumer and the CFPB and chooses not to provide a public response
Company response to consumer: Closed with explanation