Consumer complaint received 2021-04-11
Product: Money transfer, virtual currency, or money service — Domestic (US) money transfer
Issue: Money was not available when promised — 
Company: Paypal Holdings, Inc (WA)

I have been using PayPal services for about a year. Never had problems or charge backs associated with my account. Recently I had some payments go into my account for things I sold. There were standard external holds placed on the payments which is normal. My account was at the time restricted for the 3rd or 4th time demanding I turn in bank statements and business information ect ... The holds on payments are usually released after 21 days and proof of delivery. Three days before a payment was to be released, before it had been delivered, PayPal releases 5 payments into my account which set off an alert in there system according to them and the took the balance of $ XXXX and put it in a reserve in case of disputes or returns. This all happened within minutes. They then started telling me lies about who placed the hold on my account blaming another company and refused to tell me why they did so. After a few weeks of false statements and avoiding my concerns, a customer service agent admitted that the holds were in fact PayPal holds but refused to give me an honest answer why they released the holds early. It is also unheard of for them to release a rather large payment before the item was delivered. They told me many times they didn't have control over the external holds. About 5 days ago another customer service agent then told me that they did release the payments and then held the payments to set up the reserve. The money was never available contradicting the emails I received stating that it was available. The large payment for the item that was not delivered yet was also an item that a refund had been requested for 3 times and was ignored by PayPal. I believe state and federal law say if a return is requested it must be given within 10 days of the request. This is a brief explanation of the events and there is much more about the unfair, unethical and I believe to be illegal actions of PayPal. This was a malicious group of events to take/hold my money. This is there true business model. They take or hold users money to either invest it or lend it to other users. They do little vetting when users sign up to verify there business or identity so users can engage in transactions and acquire balances just so they have a reason to hold the money in the future multiple times. And if you don't provide satisfactory proof of the requests, they may keep the money for 6 months or indefinitely. They are not transparent at all about when and why they may take your money. Like I mentioned above, I never had problems with my account. No charge backs or disputes, I had received payments before of equal amounts with no problems so they had no reason to assume there was risk for my account as they claimed there was. I am sure there have been hundreds if not thousands of users this has happened to in the past. When I contacted the corporate officers I got not one single response. Customer service purposely makes it hard to contact them. When you do through the message system they hand you off to a different agent after every message you send so you have to go through the whole explanation again and again about your concerns. You get absolutely no help. I was willing to try some form of resolution process with escalations department but they only make the same false statements. After telling them they are violating the law by not issuing the refund, they have stopped replying to my messages and emails completely. How a company has gotten away with this for so long is beyond me. There is complaint after complaint after complaint all over the internet and it only gets worse with time. Consumers are not being protected from unethical activities and the horrible code of business conduct they have set up at PayPal. It is a toxic environment for all. They probably pay next to nothing in taxes for the amount of revenue they generate. They provide little benefit to our society besides what little services they offer. I can only hope that someday the world business model will change because its killing us all.