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Comment by IAmGraydon | Hacker News Reader

I’m going against the consensus here, but why was this guy so concerned about the reversal of a transaction that never should have happened in the first place? It wasn’t his money. Someone at PayPal obviously manually reversed the transaction when they realized the mistake. These things happen.

I’ve been using PayPal personally for 10+ years without issue. I also own a company and have processed hundreds of transactions and withdrawals through a business account with them without a single problem. I’m not saying that dealing with PayPal is without risks, but it’s also possible that we’re hearing a vocal minority here.

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You don't have a problem with money flowing in to and out of your account, so long as it all balances out in the end? Really?

Then you won't mind if I borrow the keys to your account. You'll never notice a thing.

Even if PP is just covering their embarrassment over a mistake, it is still nonsense on stilts that they stonewall and bullshit about transactions flowing through your account. Who knows if they're even legal transactions? Someone could be playing a game.

Before you assert the belief that Paypal would never risk laundering money, you maybe want to look at Wachovia, HSBC and Deutsche. And it doesn't have to be "Paypal" in some formal sense; it could be employees there.

It is incredibly naive to play "what, me worry?" about sketchy things going on in your accounts.

Can’t this happen with regular bank accounts too? Cheques and transfers can be reversed or altered long after they’ve entered your account without any approval from you or even notification to you. Sure the PayPal support process here sucks, but I don’t think they did anything wrong by reversing the transaction.

The person writing about this isn't upset that the transaction was reversed. They're upset that the transaction was reversed without notification, and that PayPal is claiming that the transaction was reversed by the account holder and not by PayPal itself. If this happened to me, I would assume that my account had been hacked.

There's also the issue of this resulting in the account being suspended. If this was just a normal transaction reversal, they definitely did something wrong for it to result in account suspension.

For sure, but I've never seen a bank that notifies you when a transaction gets reversed, altered or canceled. It just happens invisibly. IIRC it's actually a feature, in that some companies will open a transaction against your account (for example - a deposit on a rental), and then cancel/alter it if the funds aren't needed. That part of the story is 100% normal for big financial institutions in my experience.

And yeah, PayPal support is legendary in just how incompetent it is - I won't deny that. But it seems like the author was originally upset about something that is a normal part of banking.

This feature doesn't really make sense if you combine it with PayPal's aggressive notifications about the original transaction. If I'm being notified about a relatively large transaction, I should also be notified if it's changed or canceled.

This is such a weird comment, reversing of transactions happens for mistakes on checking accounts too, such as a deposit to the wrong account.

On top of that the vast majority of people don't get a notification every time a transaction happens on their checking account. Some banks are implementing a notification feature for some transactions nowadays, but it's rare, new, and opt-in. The general case is money just flows in and out without much fanfare.

Some banks show you transactions that are pending. If a transaction never goes from pending to settled then it literally just disappears without a trace. Standard behavior.

I think the more concern is that it was withdrawn without notice to the account holder while denying it was PP who authorized it. I don't think the post was really worried about keeping the money but more or less, what if PayPal decided randomly to deduct a ton of money with no reason and no notification to the account owner?

>what if PayPal decided randomly to deduct a ton of money with no reason and no notification to the account owner?

Your bank could do the same thing, I don't get notified when an ACH transaction or check clears.

I'm guessing we have a failure in communication between the poster and ebay support.

Additionally, a seller on ebay probably fat fingered their ebay information, so when the item was sold, the seller accused the customer of fraud (I never go the money!) and the buyer thinks the seller is fraudulent (I sent the money!) and probably reported the "seller" which is actually the poster as fraudulent.

That, plus the increasingly irate phone calls from the poster and the refusal to ID themselves led PayPal to shut down the account.

You would never notice a bank correcting it's own error on your bank statement. They don't post it as a credit followed by a reversal - they remove the accidental credit. It just disappears from your statement.

It happens ALL the time, and you'd never notice or be notified.

no, it doesn't.

To me, how great a company is for a business is decided by how much they have your back when shit hits the fan, not when everything is working as intended.

You’d expect that Paypal would notify him of the reversed transaction. Or would at least be able to tell him it was reverted instead of accusing him of refunding it himself.

He made it quite clear in the article that he was not concerned about the reversal, he was concerned about the lack of notification of the reversal.

Because suspicious activity on your account could lead to your account being banned. Which it did.

Ok, play devil's advocate, but someone could be laundering money through his account. The laws and penalties are extremely severe and being naive is no defense.

I'm not a PayPal fan myself, but my POV was similar... It's kind of bullshit the guy just assumed it was free money.

He is not complaining about a reverse transaction, but a movement of money from his account without telling him

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