PayPal glitch 'cancels 3 year old echeques'

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Several eBay sellers have reported receiving emails from PayPal earlier today, notifying them that echeques could not be processed by their buyers’ banks, and they should not post the goods. Not so unusual, except that the transactions in question were, according to PayPal, from 2005 and 2006.

My chum Tracey from had an email telling her that an echeque for £2.19 from 4th March 2006 had been cancelled. Aside from the sheer nonsense of taking two and a half years to tell a seller they’re not getting paid, the problem was that, digging back through her PayPal account, Tracey couldn’t find any sign of this transaction.

Further digging in fact revealed that there *was* a cancelled echeque to go with the buyer details PayPal had supplied, but it was from July 2008. Still far too far back to be being notified of cancellation now, but better than March 2006. Other sellers have confirmed they have the same problem. As Tracey says, thank goodness it was only £2.19 – but it could so easily have been £219.

This is just another in a long line of PayPal glitches over the last few weeks. With eBay doing their best to push buyers and sellers towards only using PayPal as a payment method on eBay, it’s about time the system became a lot more reliable.

10 Responses

  1. still waiting 2 weeks later for a £279 payment reversal investigation to be completed
    its only annoying to us,
    but could mean the difference between the mortgage being paid or not to many others

  2. So was any money deducted from their accounts or were these just stray messages? Every once in a while I get an email sent from years ago (headers and everything confirm it). Weird stuff.

    @ # 1

    Those can takes months to complete.

  3. I got one of those emails… I didnt notice any missing funds… maybe I should dig a bit deeper………..

  4. it’s about time the system became a lot more reliable’ 😛
    If one’s own bank was anything like PayPal,one would change it.Pretty darn fast too. But Hey,this is Ebay/ PayPal . Atrocious mistake filled service is considered the norm. And we all accept it.More fool us…. 🙁

  5. #4 – The funny thing is that very few people do change their banks, in spite of their shortcomings. That said, the effective monopoly eBay have created for their PayPal subsidiary is anti-competitive (probably against the law here too and not just in Australia) and does nothing to promote improvements in service.

  6. paypal cancelled my bank account linked to paypal, (which I had used with paypal for 7 years without a problem) claiming there had been ‘an error’ at my bank. I was unable to access or deposit funds until I’d set up a new bank account. I then had to wait ten days for paypal to make two small deposits to verify that I was the account holder.On contacting my first bank I was told there was never ‘an error’ and they had received no communication from paypal whatsoever…..

  7. #6 I had a similar problem, Paypal said my bank had “refused” a transaction, they said they knew nothing about it but they had “a lot of complaints” about Paypal transactions. And yes, Paypal removed the bank account from my Paypal account and it took all that messing around to put it back before I could get my money out of Paypal.

  8. same happened to us ,bank account removed because a software co attempted to take a subscription from the bank rather, than the balance,
    or some such bollocks,
    so paypal cancelled the bank account,
    we just re entered the account details,
    though now it stands as unconfirmed, and has done for years,
    no doubt this will jump up and bite or bum at some point,
    but We cant be bothered with the confirmation process all over again for nowt

  9. A similar but slightly different story :

    I needed to renew my credit card on file with both eBay and Paypal, the exact same card. eBay declined the newly updated card expiry date because according to TnS ‘Your card has been compromised – you can never use it for eBay again’ WTF I thought!

    So, I went to update it with Paypal to see if I got the same result – nope, it updated fine !

    The end result is I changed the way my eBay fees are paid, I opted for Paypal, and used the Paypal account that I updated the ‘eBay declined’ card on, as it is a ‘buying Paypal account’ it has zero balance, so any eBay fees will be CC funded from the very same card they declined 😀

  10. I really don’t know what I’d do without this site – I thought I was going mad when I got two of these in (too much packing, too little sleep and emails from the past) … then I log on here and all becomes clear – thanks guys 😉

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