I’ve been locked out of PayPal for years because of their mistake

kinttach@lemm.ee to Mildly Infuriating@lemmy.world – 389 points –

About 3 or 4 years ago PayPal added the option to buy cryptocurrency, which I thought I’d try. (Dumb idea 🙄)

Part of the sign up process was glitched. I retried and clicked submit one too many times, I guess. Now I’ve been unable to use PayPal for years. They blocked me because THEIR SITE was broken, but the web page essentially accuses me of being a criminal and asks for my bank records. No way in hell.

This was just for me to pay others. I can only imagine how awful PayPal is if you are a vendor.

Fuck PayPal.

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Someone in Norway has the same name as me, and they made a PayPal account. They accidentally used my email during signup and I got some weird emails in Norwegian. So I called PayPal. I asked them to change the email. "You can't, because it's not your account, you just admitted". Uh, ok. Can you close the account? "It's not your account". Can you contact the account owner and tell them to fix it? "We don't have their email". Can I use account recovery and close it? "Then you would be breaking into someone else's account".

So what should I do? PayPal put a notice on the account in case they log in, and told me to just ignore the emails. I was baffled. Just ignore the emails? Stop sending them then! But there really isn't anything I can do. I tried account recovery anyway, but it didn't work.

They never logged in I think. They probably made another account with the correct details and never thought about this one. So I've been getting the "our terms and conditions have changed" email once or twice a year and ignoring them. They're still in Norwegian.

I just looked it up, this has been going on since 2015. Maybe I should contact PayPal again and tell them how ridiculous they've been.

Report them to the CFPB. They're forced to have an actual human review and respond.

I just wanted to share the story.

Oh, gotcha. Yeah they are shitheads. It honestly should be illegal to make an account for someone using an unverified email.

It may not be your account, but it is your email.

Dumb of them that they didn't just remove the email address.

Same thing happened to me. Someone created an account with an email alias i never use. After calling Paypal and getting the same answer you received. I was finally able to use the forgot password feature to log in and close the account.