Si's Story:

Hi, glad to have found your website.

My sister has recently setup on ebay & paypal. She sold some items then tried to transfer money into her bank account but paypal reversed the transaction & 'limited' her account...something about 'high risk'.

They are now asking for all silly info....of which she can't provide, business info, invoices etc. Shes not a 'business' & can't provide any 'invoices'. I've read on some websites about waiting 180 days & paypal reopen the account? Is this correct? What happens if the info paypal asked for can't be provided? Is the account 'limited' forever...if so then paypal are clearly corrupt! Please help!

I myself have been using paypal for about 4 years & once had a fraud committed against me & paypal never helped me with the problem, but now this has happended I'm closing my paypal account & signing up with another company...probably nochex.co.uk. They seem to be good. I never knew about these paypal problems until this happended to my sister a few weeks ago & now looking futher into it I can't believe how many people are conned by paypal

NoPaypal says:
Hi Si, you don't say what it was your sister was selling so I can't comment on whether it was a product that would pidgeon-hole her in to the high risk category by Paypal or not. It's not uncommon for people to have their Paypal account limited simply because the product they sold is deemed to be the type of product that could "attract" high risk buyers - in other words, you get penalized by Paypal because some stranger who is deemed high-risk buys from you! My experience of "account limiting" by Paypal is that they give you 180 days to prove to them that you are genuine, after which they either re-activate your account or close it and refund you whatever amount was in it when they froze it. Some Paypal users report that the money never gets refunded and Paypal keep it (a nice little earner for Paypal). Personally, I tried to reason with Paypal when they limited my account but they didn't even want to listen, so in the end I just ditched my "limited" account and forgot about it. It's still there to this day, years later, limited and unusable. It's interesting that you say Paypal wanted all sorts of invoices etc from your sister...Paypal advertise themselves as being a simple way to buy and sell - all that users are supposed to need is an email address and they can send money to each other. If they started limiting their service to only registered businesses who used invoices etc, then they'd lose the majority of their users (who are private individuals). Ebay would fall apart too if they did this...!