The dark side of PayPal
For many, especially those involved in international business transactions through platforms such as eBay, paying via PayPal for items won at auction is a common and almost unavoidable practice. With more than two hundred million claimed customers, PayPal is the largest Internet-based financial system for payments from one bank account to another in the world. Founded in 1998 and headquartered in Jan José, California, PayPal has grown since its purchase by eBay in 2002 to become one of the largest and most widely used financial payment services available, with customers in one hundred and ninety countries.
The European arm of PayPal is registered in Luxembourg and received its patent as a bank from the Luxembourg authorities in 2007, which resulted in the automatic transfer of all European accounts of their respective local companies under the PayPal name of PayPal registered in London (Europe) Limited to PayPal (Europe) S.à.rl & Cie, SCA It is regulated by the Financial Sector Surveillance Commission (CSSF).
Unlike other long-established and accepted banks, PayPal does not offer any of the values normally associated with the bank branch, and some of the services. Overdrafts, loans and insurance are not included, nor is there a personal customer relations department or a means to consult personally with a member of the bank on financial matters. The service is exclusively limited to transferring payment from one PayPal account to another and all customers must have their own established bank account and registered email address. Among the services offered to European customers is the automatic debit of a checking or checking account to settle invoices generated through various actions. For this service, PayPal receives the payment from the customer who receives the payment, depending on the country in which one or the other of the accounts is registered.
It is this automatic debiting of an account that, since its inception, has posed a series of problems and has shown the darker side of a company that pretends, on the one hand, to be a bank and, when the situation is difficult for them, simply be a financial transfer agent.
With an established bank, a direct debit from a personal account can be withdrawn within sixty days of your action, giving all customers a certain level of security against fraudulent claims and invoices. Then, it is up to the person or company that presents the invoice to make their claim by contacting the debtor directly and, if necessary, going through due legal process to obtain the final payment. With PayPal, this basic level of security is not there. Once PayPal has debited a checking or checking account with the sum of an invoice that has been presented to them, the transaction is marked as closed. Regardless of whether the sum debited remains in the recipient’s PayPal account or is quickly transferred to another account, the paying customer cannot claim funds. In this case, PayPal insists that the customer, in case there are reasons for the claim, contact the provider directly.
The only exception to this non-banking practice is eBay. Here eBay, as the parent company, assures all customers using PayPal services that their money is safe and, in the event of a claim, can be returned to their account immediately, allowing the normal legal process to proceed from the side. from the company trying to raise funds. eBay is the only company excluded from PayPal’s no-refund policy, everyone else gets paid with the added assurance of knowing that few, if any, of their customers, or the people they’ve let down, can afford the process. to make a claim. through the courts, once the initial contact and request for reimbursement is rejected, or are prepared to take on the complexities of fighting a claim in a foreign jurisdiction.
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