Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

Comment by _heimdall | Hacker News Reader

I had a horrible experience with PayPal earlier this year. I needed to send $500 to an individual buying our house, they were paying cash and on such a tight timeline for closing that the closing docs were written up before they got back their inspection report and asked for an allowance.

Paypal kept blocking the transaction even though it was just a simple person to person transfer. I was on chat with their support for nearly an hour. The person kept describing some black box of a security system that, for security purposes, no one manages or can see why transactions get flagged. I asked multiple times to speak to a manager or someone on the security team and was told consistently that managers won't have more info and there literally isn't a security team...

Needless to say I haven't used them since and will do everything I can to avoid it. I have no problem if a flag is errantly raised on a normal transaction, but to say they literally don't have a security team is mind boggling.

There was a time I was excited to get a PayPal account owing to all the (perceived) hype around it.

I made one and linked my card but rarely used it. Once I had to pay to an online merchant and for some reason the card didn't work so I hooked up my savings account. Months go by and since I never came around to using the service again, I wanted the account closed.

But before that, as a personal preference, I wanted to manually remove the card and account link. The card worked fine but it won't let me do it with the bank account. Took 3 separate chats over a week to get it done and I finally closed it to never look back. I have no idea of the dark patterns exist anymore.

Now I just use cashapp to send and receive money with my friends. Left such a salty taste in my mouth, I'll never give PayPal any business anymore, just seems sketch.

NO security team?!

So they literally admitted that they don't have anyone actively monitoring transactions? Working to watch for fraud? Theft? Hacking?

Wow, I may stop using them as well.

There is no security team which you may speak to.

It was a lie, of course they have all that, they just never speak to people. When was the last time you spoke to google support or manager? They collect notes and only when something escalates to a PR story or a high volume of complaints/failures/cancellations do they create some JIRA story and assign it to some engineer. A “business to consumer” internet giant will never let the consumers get passed the call center to talk to engineers directly, and engineers don’t want that either. It’s as much of a rule as that a business must be profitable. On the other hand, competent support is supposed to have tools to fix most issues.

I also had a bad issue with some unauthorized withdrawal via eBay, from my paypal, in about 2004, and spent hours on the phone with no result. I wished I could boycott them after this, but no one cares, I just learned no to trust them because they are a terribly run company on the consumer support side. And I think it is because they deal so much with fraud. I don’t think we can do anything about it, except promote these stories.

They have a whole department called "risk management" that is responsible for combatting fraud. (I worked for PayPal under that department in a past life.)

I'm sure there's a "security team" somewhere that responds to attempts to directly breach PayPal's infrastructure, though I never interacted with them. (Paypal has quite a bit of on-campus physical security, and I did interact with them almost every week.)

Circling back to the discussion at hand: PayPal probably doesn't have any digital/financial security staff at their call centers (why would they?) so as far as the call center reps are concerned, there is no "security team".

All I can say, to all the comments, is "whoosh".

Communicating badly and then acting smug when you’re misunderstood is not cleverness.

— https://xkcd.com/169/

Hey, great info. Unfortunately, you assert several things with your statement, which really are not true.

Try again? Do you have a better jab?

Maybe one that doesn't rely upon a comic, as your main argument?

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