Re: OT: Completely OT: PAYPAL does it suck?

On 11/21/06, Sally Caves <scaves@...> wrote:
> Hi guys, I don't know what larger group to address than this one.  Is anyone
> familiar with PayPal?  Is it as sucky as I think it is?
I've had no problems with them in the past. However, I've heard of
people who have, and who complain about things such as having their
account frozen with no reason given and little recourse, or no support
in the face of fraudulent buyers. My one-sentence impression is "works
fine unless you're one of the people who has problems", though I have
no idea how high the percentage of users is who has problems with the
service (1%? 0.01%?)

> I keep getting what I think is SPAM from "paypal," telling me that someone
> else has added his or her name to my account.  Or that I need to update my
> account.  Since I hadn't paid through paypal for a year, I assumed it was
> SPAM.
Those are, no doubt, "phishing" emails forging the sender address, and
the links in them are likely to lead to pages dressed up to look like
PayPal's site in order to trick you into providing information to
unknown people.

Since a fair number of people use PayPal, phishers just target such
emails at anyone, rather than known PayPal users, in the hopes that
enough recipients will be fooled. (By a similar token, I get messages
supposedly from eBay telling me my account is about to be closed or
that I'm about to get an "unpaid item strike" -- invariable sent to
email addresses other than the one I use for eBay.)

> Recently, though, I purchased a book from them, the book arrived from
> England, and it charged me seventeen pounds.
I'm confused what "them" and "it" refer to in your sentence.

> Didn't PayPal pay the publishers????
If you ordered directly from the publisher and paid by PayPal, then
presumably, yes, PayPal paid the publishers -- and charged you first
so that they had the money. I'm not sure why you'd consider that a
problem (they're not going to pay money out of their own pocket, are
they?), so presumably I'm missing some piece of the picture here.

> Has anyone else encountered such problems from them?
Again -- not I, but sufficient people that there exist web sites such
as paypalsucks.com and paypalwarning.com.

> I'm afraid to update their file on me (they want my credit card number)
> because I can't tell if this is a fraudulent page or not.
Which browser are you using? Some browser indicate the name of the
site that's on the SSL certificate when you connect to a site with
SSL.

As a first approximation, though, if you went to
https://www.paypal.com/ by typing that address into your browser's
location bar (and not, for example, by using a bookmark or following a
link), and if you receive the page asking you to update your file
after logging in there, and the URL of that page starts with
"https://www.paypal.com/", then it's likely to be legit. (Modulo
programs that fiddle with your hosts file, pages that look as if they
contain browser chrome but they're just images, pages that put up
layers over the browser chrome, and/or forged certificates.)

> And there's no way to contact them.
Yes, that is a common criticism I've seen -- that they hide email and
phone contact information, making it difficult to contact them.
Googling for "PayPal phone number" does find some hits (though it's
your own guess whether the numbers listed on such sites are true or
fake), and PayPal provides a number at
http://www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_contact-phone .

> Help!
Good luck.

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>

Reply