How does "paypal" work? (1 Viewer)

[Andrea W]

They'll make two electronic deposits into your account, both for less than $1. You call your bank after a couple of days, get the amounts, logon to Paypal and enter that info in. This process verifies that you are who you say you are, and then you're good to go.

One note on this. My credit union combined the deposits (because they were made on the same day by the same entity I suppose). So when I checked my statement, I found only one deposit from PayPal (totalling less than a dollar). I had to call my credit union and get someone to lookup the individual deposit amounts.
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http://darius.mobius-soft.com/~andrea/ht/

 

[Frank_Lee]

I've been using paypal for a couple years now, mostly for small transactions like auction payments, but overall I've been pretty satisfied with it. The only problem I've had is trying to get money back from a fraudulent seller. All claims require at least 30 days of investigation before they'll give you a response. This investigation pretty much seems like they contact the other person to get their side of the story. If they find that the other person did not keep up their end of the agreement, they will give you your money. Here's where the problem is: the only way they'll give you your money back is to debit it from the other person's paypal balance. So basically, if the other person has already drained their account in the month paypal took to investigate, which I would assume most people committing fraud would do, you're out of luck. My recommendation with regards to paypal would be to make sure you buy from sellers who have very good feedback to avoid the situation I described. I don't think security is as much of an issue as bad customer service is.