PayPal dismissed my claim, saying I didn't provide evidence (yet I did)

Open an arbitration claim. Seriously.

The terms you agreed to states claims can be settled with arbitration. Opening a claim will cost a couple hundred dollars and will move them to action immediately.

Here is a great thread how this worked out for another person on HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31567673

Hey there, I'm currently banned from PayPal, and I actually went through what you did.

I filed an arbitration using a service called FairShake (https://fairshake.com/), and finally they decided to settle with me. They said they will give me my money, but I can no longer use any of their services including Venmo. I agreed and took the money.

Happy to answer any questions regarding my experience, feel free to telegram me @tdpae

Bought a game service from the company. It was down/not functional. Asked the company for a refund, got death threats in return.

Went to paypal. Attached death threats from company.

Paypal sided with the company.

Try your credit card dispute, if you charged it.

I know we submitted evidence that a car we rented was a minorly damaged vehicle (it was marked on the sheet during the checkout) and then tried to bill us for the repair after taking the car back. We submitted pictures of the damaged car in the rental lot, the paper work indicating the damage. The car company rejected our dispute. The credit card company didn't. I even enlisted our french intern (native speaker) to call said company and ask what is going on. They got the run around ("French bureaucracy is the worst")

They even blocked when said car company tried to charge again after the rejection. Good times.

I had a similar problem with a criminal complaint. It's impossible to get a hold of anyone at Paypal, and if you do, they will play dumb, or transfer you to an "account specialist" where you are just left in hold limbo (I've left the phone connected for about an hour before it was forcefully disconnected). In my case I had to talk to my credit union and credit card provider and both sided with me against Paypal and blocked the charge. Paypal is now trying to collect the money through a third party, so I have to go to arbitration. Paypal is on the side of criminals - not intentionally - because they make money on the fees and don't have to pay much for customer support to handle edge cases.

The FTC recently took Walmart to court over similar behavior, essentially profiting off of crime.

Your post is confusing.

It sounds like PayPal is asking you to prove you did not receive the cloud credits.

But what you should do is say you did not purchase cloud credits.

There is a difference between an unauthorized charge and goods not received.

Same thing happened to me over an eBay item many years ago. I bought a used SLR. The seller said two batteries would be included but the package contained none. It was an expensive camera with special batteries. I contacted the seller but they refused to ship batteries and refused to issue a partial refund. I opened a dispute with Paypal to obtain a partial refund. They denied my claim citing lack of evidence.

How can I provide evidence for an item I never received? All I had was the listing and the contemts of the package, yet Paypal sided with the seller. I quit using Paypal then and there, and won't touch them with a ten foot pole. A very consumer-hostile company.

Based on some of the follow-ups you've posted here, it sounds like the crucial factor is the 1200€ authorization and capture from PayPal.

With your initial dispute of "order not received", they pointed to the 1200€ credit and said, "here's what you ordered". This credit does indeed disprove any claim of "I didn't get anything for the 1200€ I was charged".

The problem is you don't want to receive any order; you want there to be no order at all, and no exchange of 1200€.

Which version of PayPal checkout did they use? I think there's a standard PayPal checkout, where you complete the transaction at a PayPal-hosted page. And there's an "express" PayPal checkout, where you login to a PayPal-hosted popup to complete some initial authorization, then complete the checkout process on the merchant-hosted site.

I think there would have been some point where you authorized a 1200€ payment on a PayPal-hosted site, do you recall that step? I think that step is critical to your claim here that they should return your money.

You mentioned "They had authorization for recurring payments, so they pulled those 1200 without my interaction." And also, "at no point that amount was shown to me" How did they get that authorization? Could you reproduce the checkout flow up to the point of PayPal authorization to see if the 1200 amount is shown in the PayPal-hosted part of the checkout flow, and whether it's hidden in the merchant-hosted portion of the flow?

I'm not surprised at either OVH's or paypal's behavior.

OVH has been on my shitlist (and email blocklist) for years, because of their tolerance of spammers on their network; abuse notifications are ignored.

As for Paypal, there are so many stories of Paypal scamming companies out of money by closing their accounts on some pretext, and just keeping the money. Just google it, this goes back decades.

Both are awful companies, avoid them like the plague. Dispute the OVH charge with your credit card company, generally not a scammy outfit.

I was a paypal customer since the 90s. I recently had an issue where a site using paypal sold me something and blatantly lied about the product. I filed a dispute with paypal. It was only for $30, was a digital item, and I had pretty conclusive evidence. I expected paypal to side with me, especially given how long I had been using them and had never once filed a dispute. Nope. Immediately sided with the scummy company. I've tried to avoid using them whenever possible ever since.

Communicating with big tech at least keeps the word kafkaesque alive.

I find your description vague and don't understand what happened.

How was OVH able to pull €1200 from your PayPal account? Did you go to PayPal's website (for example via a popup triggered by the OVH website) and told PayPal to let them pull €1200?

Now that they got the money, how is Paypal still part of it? Do you expect Paypal to go to OVH, knock down their door and demand the money back?

I would think that if you want your money back, you need to involve the authorities. The government has a monopoly on violence. If you want somebody to go and knock down OVH's door, thats a job of the authorities. Obviously, OVH would probably already give you your money back if the authorities demand that. Nobody likes to get their door knocked down.

It's interesting because I had to integrate Stripe's dispute API for a client once and I'm sure the opposite was true - we had to prove the customer was lying, as Stripe would side with the customer by default, not the other way around.

I might be wrong though, this was years ago and I had no involvement in the dispute process itself, but that was my recollection. I'd have thought PayPal would be more pro-consumer if anything because of how consumer facing it is - it's not like they're just doing anonymous CC processing on behalf of the merchant, which is largely what Stripe does.

if you're EU based, may be worth treating this as a consumer right to withdrawal

https://www.europe-consommateurs.eu/en/shopping-internet/14-..., instructions at the bottom for contacting your local european consumer center to complain. (Have heard this complaint process is very good + nearly automatic for airline refunds; not sure right of refusal cases).

If you're US based, you may be able to frame this as a gift certificate under the CARD act https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1693l-1, and at least dispute the expiration date. (But I'm not sure if this section gives you power to sue; you may have to contact your state AG).

(I'm not a lawyer)

Any chance you might have entered 1200 thinking you were entering 12? I've run into this situation more than once where there is/isn't a decimal where you think it isn't/is.

This is interesting because I run a SaaS service that uses PayPal for subscription payments (we don't do recurring payments, users must initiate each payment explicitly). Anyway over the years we have had various customers who for whatever reason decided they regretted paying us after the fact. Generally we just refund them but in a few cases the situation was pretty egregious and we felt the customer was not by any reasonable viewpoint due a refund. Guess what? in no case were we able to keep the money. In every single case PayPal gave our money back to the customer. So I wonder what magical power OVH has to get the opposite treatment.

Request a chargeback at your bank and accept that PayPal will close your account.

I have never once gotten a random invalid charge from OVH and it's been years. Do you actually have a 1200EUR VAT invoice with line items from them or was it just a charge out of nowhere?

I had similar issue with Venmo. Venmo told me it's my fault. I went directly to my credit card and after 2 month and a lot of evidence, credit card company sided with me. Venmo said I can't use their products ever again. Fine by me, I use ApplePay now (until they screw me over I guess)

PayPal is garbage. Every interaction I have had with them has been miserable. At a previous ecommerce company we basically had to accept that 95% of our fraud claims would be denied without reason, just denied and closed and money lost, disregarding our proof.

I run my PayPal account from a dedicated bank account. If they try and take more than authorised then they will fail because the funds are not present.

They can take me to court if there’s an issue.

I have been burned before. Unless it’s a bank and are heavily regulated they are not your friends.

Unfortunately, a 1200€ loss is nowhere near the threshold to get legal involved (usually around $50k is the cutoff). OVH may however, become more attentive to your complaint if the lawyer asks nicely with a letter on your behalf.

One thing I did notice with PayPal... is one often has little success if you are international account and deal with a rare crooked American seller. We literally had sand shipped to us before, and still ate the loss. lol...

In my country, Slamming or unsolicited services are illegal, and people are not obligated to pay the invoice. It is one reason a credit card payment through a merchant is superior to paypal in some situations, as they tend to play by rules set by the local account laws. ;)

The moral of the story is 1. Use credit cards that has limits based on your top ups. COMPANY CANNOT CHARGE MORE THAN WHAT CASH AVAILABLE IN THAT CARD. Card app can also temporary disable the card at any time as you like. 2. As public, dont give advice about seeking arbitration help. Do like BLM, boycott and viral spread the issue. Dox if possible. Bombard their c-suite with hate mails. Now I've seen this way more helpful and powerful than ANY legal means.

Company these days are way more powerful than individual in legal arena. They have the advantage of corporate lawyers and cash to burn you out. The only way is exactly what BLM did effectively.

You will get nowhere with PayPal, sorry. If you try to arbitrate your claim, they will spend obscene amounts on lawyers to make a point.

PayPal is literally one of the very worst payment processors out there. I really wish people would stop using them.

> Now I'm stuck with an absurd amount of credit on a cloud service I have no use for (and worse, it expires in a year), and apparently there's no UI option for me to contest this PayPal ruling. Phoning them I found no option to talk to a person.

Your best bet is getting OVH to refund your money. If the credit amount is in dollars, you should be able to withdraw it.

Whenever I can I use SEPA payment for subscriptions (which it looks like OVH accepts, most debitcards are SEPA in Europa), because it allows you to withdraw within 2 months directly from your bank application directly, no questions asked. (SEPA is EU based)

Much better then credit cards and paypal, where you have to open a request for refund etc. You only have this in the EU, but it's the best option.

I also had the flip side where customers would withdraw a few months in payment because the couldn't make their mortgage. Which we ended up resolving in a nice way.

Maybe someone can recommend CC companies that tend to side on the Consumer side, American Express maybe?

Paypal has been literally doing stuff like this for over 20 years. paypalsucks.com was registered in 2000 but is apparently down now.

This isn't an excuse for their bad behavior but I don't understand why anyone continues to use them.

This recently happened to me on PayPal with another company. I don’t think they read anything.

OVH support is pretty terrible. In other news, they have had an outage for over 24 hours now and it took them around 10 hours to provide any update after it began. https://status.us.ovhcloud.com/pages/incident/59dd23da8827c8...

In general is there any reason to use PayPal? I think 15 years ago people were no used to using their credit card on the web but now its normal.

this happened to me. Part of an order wasn't sent as described. The merchant wouldn't accept a return. I opened a claim with evidence and they basically submitted a blank form for me. It was rejected. I called them again and explained that the evidence I attached wasn't considered. They resubmitted with a detail writeup on paypal's side and I was sided with.

I recently got in a fight with GitLab of all places. I setup SSO on my self-hosted instance so people could sign-up and report bugs in my applications.

I never even noticed that a bunch of accounts was created until GitLab wrote "we noticed you are X licenses over your limit. Will will charge your credit card on ". I didn't know it worked that way, and I honestly didn't think users with no permissions to do anything would count as a full license.

I nearly shit my pants. It was a lot of money. I contacted support and asked them to remove my payment details. They declined and forwarded me to a sales person.

I told the sales person about my issue, but she said I accepted their terms and conditions, so now I had to pay. But hey, if we had a quick call with some sales executives, then maybe we could resolve the matter...

Suffice to say, now I use one-time credit-cards for all online services. It is not the first time I've been hogtied by an online service with no recourse.

PayPal also refused to help me out when i was defrauded. I went to my bank and reversed the PayPal charge and then PayPal sent me to collections. I had previously spoken to them multiple times including the day of the fraud, when they could have stopped the transaction and refused. Fuck PayPal.

I’m in a situation where I have a half open account, they want me to provide ID which I won’t and they won’t allow me to close the account without providing ID. PayPal is a ridiculous company and in no way to be considered a serious partner or service in finance.

Post on BBB website, send the details and all relevant information to whatever your equivalent of the attorney general is and the one in Paypal and OVH's jurisdiction. Your best course of action is not to focus on PayPal but OVH. Send certified letters to both PayPal and OVH informing them of your contacting of the attorney general. Send to corporate offices and address of general counsel.

You can open arbitration but it costs money.

Be sure to clearly state what happened, why you think it is wrong, and your preferred remedy.

And this is why I closed my PayPal and Venmo accounts and will never do business with this awful company again. I had the same experience. Only lost $600 but lesson learned.

Take to social media. Plead your case to the masses. If you are cute enough (I suggest a puppy in the screenshot) it may go viral and get noticed by PayPal's marketing people. They have actual decision powers. That is how consumer service works these days.

These guys did eventually get they money after the morning news shows featured thier song. https://youtu.be/5YGc4zOqozo

https://us.ovhcloud.com/legal/terms-of-service "EU Consumer Policy"

OVH have a 14 day cooling off period for EU customers as required by EU consumer law. If you meet the criteria that might be a more fruitful avenue to approach OVH with, and to pursue enforcement.

In what country are you located? In France there's a "médiateur" https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F14373 It might apply in your case...

Credit card fraud protection? Try calling them and tell them how your credit card was abused by ovh?

What happened here is theft. OVH abused your connected service account to steal money from you, then claim you ordered a service that you did not order.

The correct proceeding from this point is legal restitution.

OVH blocks me from accessing my account because I used a virtual credit card (they demand a picture holding the card + ID!) AND a day later they proceeded to charge the card anyways.

The classic "I got ripped off by PayPal" thread is as old as the internet itself. It's amazing what you can get away with in this country with enough money.

Many of us have had similar experiences. My best advice is to move on and avoid using PayPal in the future.

wtf is this on the fairshakes.com website?

> DO I HAVE TO ARBITRATE?

> Many companies require you to resolve disputes with them through individual arbitration. The companies listed on FairShake’s website all include a clause in their contracts that prohibit you from filing a traditional lawsuit or joining a class action against them.

What? How is that valid/legal?

Oh dear. Both Paypal and OVH, in one claim!

If there is a small claims court in your jurisdiction, you might try that one...

I use OVH. Any interest in selling me that credit for a fair discount (if you cant get your $$$ money)

I'm assuming you are a consumer since consumer protection organisations were mentioned.

I would start by sending a GDPR subject data request for any personal data they have. There is a definite time limit for the response time. In case of inaccurate data, then there is right to rectification.

If there is no appropriate receipt for the 1200 EUR charge showing value added taxes charged I would ask for the receipt. Some tax agency might be interested if there is no such receipt.

Stop. Using. PayPal.

CFPB

If your country has sensible laws, you should have the right to withdraw any credit. In that case you should ignore PayPal and deal with OVH.