Consumer complaint received 2022-07-08
Product: Credit card or prepaid card — General-purpose credit card or charge card
Issue: Problem with a purchase shown on your statement — Card was charged for something you did not purchase with the card
Company: SYNCHRONY FINANCIAL (OH)

I created a PayPal credit account, which is through Synchrony Bank, many years ago. 

This account was set to make automatic payments of {$15.00} every month and did not accrue interest. So, it was slowly being paid off. It was an older account that I was not actively using to make purchases. I hoped to pay it off when I could and close it. 

On XX/XX/2022 I received a letter from PayPal stating that my PayPal credit account has been maxed out. I was immediately alarmed because, to my knowledge, I had not made any recent purchases using this account. 

When I logged on I saw that someone had made thousands of dollars worth of transactions using my account. My initial reaction was to have a XXXX XXXX, so I was not able to call until the next day, XX/XX/2022. 

There were many factors that made that made viewing the transactions on this account extremely confusing. To begin with, it appears that there were many attempts at transactions that ended up being denied and refunded. So. Amongst the transactions on the account there are pages and pages of adjustments, which at the time I just didn't understand. 

When I called on XX/XX/XXXX I believed that I was making a fraud report. But I called back weeks later only for someone to tell me that there was no fraud report started. Whoever I talked to also did not send me a paper copy of my statement. So, I had to start again waiting for a paper copy to be sent. It seemed like every time I called I talked to a different person who had some different idea of what I needed to do to file a fraud report. 

It was all very time consuming and confusing. What's worse, they have a time limit of 60 days to submit a claim and their workers were making it difficult for me to submit a claim in that time frame. 

At one point I called because the paper statement was huge and I needed help understanding it. The person I talked to told me incorrect information. That I had to go through the statement and match all the adjustments with matching transactions and cross them out, which would have taken me at least a day or two. When I asked if I could talk to someone else she told me no. I was told so much incorrect information. 

Then I had to submit my fraud claim by listing out all the transactions amounts and dates to a person over the phone, which took 2 hours. There were so many transactions, this was a very confusing method for me. 

After all of this the claim was denied and when I would call to ask about it, I couldn't get any straight answers. It seemed like every time I talked to anyone they were always writing things down incorrectly and I couldn't get anyone to correct the information. It was like a game of telephone. 

First they told me that they denied it because I made the account, which is ridiculous because I had never claimed otherwise. I made the account and someone else gained access. Then, they said it was denied because I made payments on the balance, which I told them already it was set up on autopay and has been for years. Now, after months, they claim I benefit from these purchases. 

If we look at the PayPal credit account there were no transactions on it for over a year before this, just payments. Then suddenly {$6000.00} in purchases in a matter of 2 months almost exclusively to XXXX merchants, XXXX and XXXX. 

There were some purchases made on the account that I did make that I didn't try to claim were fraud, those were made to XXXX and XXXX. What I believe happened was that the person who made these fraudulent purchases gained access to my PayPal account and they changed my default payment method to my PayPal Credit card without me noticing. So. I did make some charges on the account that were not fraudulent without realizing it. 

The fact that I did make some valid purchases on this account does not mean that there were not also fraudulent transactions happening at the same time. This was a huge amount of spending in a very short amount of time. Very different than my normal spending habits.