Consumer complaint received 2016-03-01
Company: Paypal Holdings, Inc
State: VA
Product: Bank account or service
Sub-product: Other bank product/service
Issue: Deposits and withdrawals

Complaint:
On or around XXXX XXXX 2016 someone used my Paypal account to make XXXX dollars in fraudulent charges against my checking account and credit card, maxing out my card and overdrafting my checking account, effectively leaving me with no money. I immediately canceled my card and had my bank place a stop payment on future Paypal transactions. I also informed Paypal of the fraudulent transactions. Some did n't go through because there was n't enough money in my account, and my bank issued temporary credits to cover the charges that did go through so I would n't be overdrafted and could access my money. Things seemed fine. Then, a few days later several new charges for thousands of dollars appeared in my checking account. Paypal later informed me that, whenever a transaction fails because there was n't enough money in the account to cover the transaction, Paypal automatically " represents '' the charges to the bank a few days later in an attempt to try again. Paypal did this despite the fact that I had already flagged the charges to them as fraudulent. My bank assured me that when the charges were done processing the stop payment would apply and my account would return to normal. But in the meantime, while those charges were processing my account was again overdrawn and I had no access to any of the money in my checking account ( at a time when I needed to pay my rent ). And if I had n't thought on my own to place a stop payment they would have gone through, using up the temporary credits ( and what if I had since placed more of my own money into that account? ). This is the primary reason for my complaint. Paypal knew the charges were fraudulent and tried to complete them anyway. Furthermore, wait times to speak to Paypal 's fraud department were at least XXXX minutes, and on one occasion I waited for over an hour. I had to take the equivalent of a day and a half off of work to deal with this situation, and much of that time was spent simply waiting to talk to someone at Paypal. Furthermore, Paypal failed to protect me from harassment. XXXX of the individuals to whom my checking account was used to make fraudulent payments, who had received my name from Paypal, began contacting me. He tried to friend me on XXXX and after I refused his friend request he private messaged me on XXXX. At first he was n't up front about what he wanted, then when I asked him directly he insisted I owed him money. After I repeatedly told him there had been a fraud and he should make a claim to Paypal, he started to threaten me, claiming I was an accomplice and ignoring my requests to stop bothering me. I notified Paypal of this behavior ( after waiting on hold for over an hour ) and they assured me that they would reach out to him to tell him he should n't be contacting me. A week or so later, XXXX notified me that someone had tried to hack into my XXXX account. I ca n't prove this was the same person but that would make sense. To my knowledge Paypal has done nothing to protect me from this person. I did report everything about this incident, including the harassment, to the XXXX and have heard nothing back from them to date. In the meantime, I saw that much of the money that had been fraudulently charged to my checking account had been returned to my Paypal account ( approx {$1900.00} ) so I transferred it to my checking account to reimburse my bank for the temporary credits, which I needed to pay back. Days later, I suddenly received multiple calls in one day from Paypal demanding that I immediately return this money to Paypal or they would send it to collections. They claimed that because the fraudulent transactions never went through I had been repaid twice. Paypal demanded immediate action so I paid them via debit card over the phone for {$1900.00} that day, without opportunity to review my account. Paypal was right, but its methods were coercive.

Company response to consumer: Closed with non-monetary relief