With 184 million accounts (more than 73 million active), they're gonna have a few complaints. And most of these complaints are about accounts being temporarily frozen after sending money to or from a country with a high rate of fraud. Good fraud detection and mitigation is the only reason PayPal is here today where their many attempted competitors went out of business in the dot-com days and since. Generally a single payment that's detected as a risk is held individually, for a day or two where a human reviews the transaction and contacts both parties.. it tends to be only new accounts that are involved in several high risk transactions that get flagged at the account level, and even then nobody loses money -- at worst they hold the account's balance for six months which is the maximum time most credit card issuers allow a chargeback, and the same amount of time a merchant account provider would've held funds in the same circumstance.

Considering how many billions of transactions PayPal handles per month, the rate of complaints on sites like PayPalSucks.com is actually enormously small. The forums you mention haven't had a post in over a week, while millions of PayPal transactions occurred. By most standards they have a very good record for such a large company.

I've been using PayPal since June 2000, so almost 10 years now. It is the primary payment method chosen by my customers, doing over 40,000 individual transactions so far. I've dealt with just about every country PayPal operates in, have seen at least one instance of every type of fraud/chargeback/reversal/complaint possible, yet I've never had any type of problem with the account. I also get a human being on the phone as soon as I call, and e-mails get a response in about a business day.

Considering that they do a lot of the fraud detection work for you, charge no fees on refunds and reversals, dispute chargebacks on your behalf, AND charge less than many MOTO merchant accounts (after you add up all the AVS fees, statement fees, ACH fees, batch fees, gateway fees, recurring billing service fees, downgrade fees, etc etc), they're quite a nice company to do business with really.

This post paints PayPal as some kind of crime syndicate with no customer service, yet I don't think the author has had the experience to say such a thing. The mere existence of a site which originated long before PayPal was even owned by eBay is not evidence of some kind of mass corruption. Last time I had a problem (someone sent several $1 payments to my account then disputed them all the same day -- I had no clue why), I called up the customer service number. I didn't have to go through any kind of phone tree, the call was answered by a nice woman (with no foreign accent, for those who care about such things). She had empathy for my situation, she joked about how odd that was a bit, she looked at the transactions and closed the disputes for me, and I was able to simply refund the person the random $1 payments myself.

Just a few months ago I had some very specific questions about the impact of adding and removing Website Payments Pro service from a PayPal account. I used e-mail that time, through the "contact us" link on every page of the PayPal site. Every question was answered, in detail, the next business day. Not ignored, no form letter response.

I don't see how they could do customer service any better.