No, most people would not be this agitated about a mistaken transaction being silently refunded. At best they'd probably assume the notification went to spam or something and went on with their day
My bank doesn't notify me about any transactions, I have to check my bank book manually. Once a mistaken transaction showed up and disappeared a few hours later, with no trace left behind at all. I just assumed it was a mistake and didn't bother getting angry.
You're not agitated by being called a liar, nor being implicitly accused of fraud?
It sounds like PayPal, or someone, made a mistake that PayPal then processed a fix on. When the guy called to say someone took money from his account with no notification, "what happened?", they said _he_ had actioned the refunding of the money. Which he hadn't.
They lied, purposefully and deliberately. But there's a good chance that the person on the phone wasn't lying IMO, instead someone altered his account in a way that didn't show [to their phone reps] in their system ... which is IMO much more messed up.
So PayPal lied to him.
Then they asked for details of the transaction that they said he had refunded and "blocked" his account for not providing them.
Government financial services should impose heavy fines on things like this, not informing a creditor when debits are made on their accounts. His PayPal account should have a user traceable error (with doubled entries in the other relevant account entries) -
money paid from $ACCNUM with $ACCID
money paid due to PayPal error and refunded to $ACCNUM
I mean come on, is basic accounting beyond them?
If they could do accounting properly then they wouldn't have to implictly accuse him of fraud (demanding the transaction details).
My experience of PayPal has in general been pretty good, but I did have a person pay for something from eBay, then when I was sending it - like just about to head to the post office I realised I'd not checked the payment. On checking the transaction link in eBay the transaction didn't appear on PayPal .. uh oh, so I checked PayPal and I couldn't find a transaction for the amount in my account list. So I checked eBay and the buyer had asked to cancel the completed transaction ... so I said yes, very begrudgingly. Then a few days later the buyer asked for the money back, but I never had it, and they (assuming they weren't lying) had a transaction for paying me ... which should be impossible with proper accounting because that transaction should include an entry in my account ledger too his payment and my receipt are one transaction.
My suspicion is that their database processing is lacking and their account ledgers as displayed to users don't properly demonstrate the status of accounts.
Lied perhaps ... or somebody made a mistake. Support rep might just not have understood the information they were seeing on their screen. Why immediately say THEY LIED rather than, they were mistaken. I find it more fruitful in life not to assume bad faith from the outset.
Fair point, PayPal were possibly mistaken because they've designed their system badly. They have it in their power to ensure they're not mistaken. Choosing to tell a falsehood as truth ... now, there's a name for that ...
I'm assuming good faith on behalf of the OP primarily because I've had a similar experience of missing transactions on PayPal.
PayPal exists, by design, in a legal gray area where they do almost everything that a bank does, but aren't legally a bank and thus avoid all the regulations and liabilities of the banking industry. Removing funds from your account sent in error (something normal banks do) and not telling you why is fully within the realm of a non regulated money transfer service. Use fed wire transfers next time. They're irreversible.
Once a mistaken transaction showed up and disappeared a few hours later, with no trace left behind at all. I just assumed it was a mistake and didn't bother getting angry.
I had an unexpected deposit show up in my bank account last year and then disappear a day later. The bank sent me a letter in the mail explaining what happened.
years ago, when Wells Fargo first introduced the ability to deposit a check via their mobile app, there was apparently a bug that caused it to sometimes deposit the same check twice.
so, i deposited a $1000 paycheck (was working for a local guy, fixing computers) once and did NOT notice that i actually ended up with $2000 in my account. This went on for at least three months, when all of a sudden I lose $1000 from my account. Apparently Wells Fargo had figured out about the bug and found all the accounts that had gotten double deposits and 'fixed it'.
A friend of mine had declared bankruptcy, meaning he wasn't eligible for any kind of credit whatsoever, and his bank let a $10,000,000 withdrawal go through and put his account into overdraft. Naturally, this was on a Friday before a long weekend so he had to wait until Tuesday to get it corrected.
When the bank corrected it the transaction completely disappeared, apart from the screenshots he took there was no trace of it whatsoever.
> I just assumed it was a mistake and didn't bother getting angry.
No need to get angry, but you might need to get careful. It's a bit like seeing a single cockroach in a restaurant; you can't just kill and remove it then declare that everything's fine.
Contacting them and confirming that it was a mistake is basic CYA, it establishes with them that it's not your transaction and hopefully gets something on file.
(I've just got off the phone with EE after a mysterious charge appeared on my account. They couldn't tell me where it had come from or even when it was applied, so after putting me on hold for a while they agreed to just take it off again. But I only spotted it because I'm checking my bills carefully after a previous dispute ...)
Conversely, I'd be very annoyed if I didn't immediately get a notification from my bank about a decrease in my balance. However, I don't think either of us is qualified to speak for most people.
Receiving unintended funds can have all kinds of unintended consequences, including related to law enforcement.
In his case, he just got suspended and asked to provide documents he is physically unable to produce (contrary to presumption of innocence).
the next day, and after almost two weeks since the refund to place (but only one day after the long phone discussion) my account was blocked as "suspicious" activity and in order to unblock it I will have to provide original product receipts of the product I was "selling", something that I do not have as I do not even know what I was selling!
Yeah but it didn't here. Any negative consequence this man experienced was due to his anger and outrage. Calmly handling this situation would have resulted in a completely different outcome.
Yet again, emotion and anger are now somehow the company's fault.
If the customer’s emotions are affecting their account status, then it is entirely the company’s fault. If a customer is upset, a federally regulated financial institution should never be able to just shut down their account without recourse. That’s why we have regulations and laws, so some random customer service rep (possibly from a country with far different rules and regulations) can’t power trip over a customer.
This is incorrect and not how paypal handles refunds.
This is merchant 101: always refund suspicious payments before your payment processor has to do it, it'd be really bizarre if Paypal was somehow the only exception in the industry.
FDSGSG is absolutely correct. He should have immediately processed a refund on the $600 as soon as he saw the transaction. By not doing so he risked getting a chargeback and loosing not only the $600 but an additional $10 PayPal chargeback fee.
There is no risk of OP loosing $1,200 to two refunds if he went through the proper refund procedure. A transfer can only ever be refunded once.
The only way I see this going wrong is if instead of doing a refund you create a new transfer to send the money back, but you obviously shouldn't do that.
Id be pissed if a bank silently refunded money from my bank account without my say so, if money enters my account I want some input in it leaving.
I suppose the key is if Paypal put it in the wrong account then cleared up after themselves, I don't think that's a refund as such, you should be telling the account holder when they ask though. The other option is the payer paid money to the wrong account, in that situation this guy should be getting notified.
This isn't just an issue of 'not his money'. How are you supposed to know if your account is hacked, or some weird fraud is going on, or even just a straight forward, he sold something and thought he got paid for it.
I don't even have to have my say, but I sure as hell would want to be notified with an explanation (ie: refunded customer, money sent to incorrect account)
> Once a mistaken transaction showed up and disappeared a few hours later, with no trace left behind at all. I just assumed it was a mistake and didn't bother getting angry.
In many (all?) countries, your bank would've acted criminally. If money has been deposited to your account, only you or a court order can get it out again. If somebody "just does it", they are on a similar legal basis as somebody that forgot a jacket in your house and decides to break your lock and enter your house without your knowledge or authorization to get it back.
>A payor can attempt to reverse a payment made with an ACH credit only if the payor claims the beneficiary was already paid by a previous ACH credit entry, or the beneficiary was the wrong recipient of the funds, or the original ACH payment was in the wrong amount. Otherwise, the credit is considered final.
No clue how that works in different countries. Here it's pretty simple: once the money is in the account, you can't do anything. While the transaction isn't complete, you can cancel them obviously.
There's a good reason for that: nobody want's banks to take money out of accounts because they "feel that's the right thing to do".
There's one notable exception: SEPA direct debits getting reversed. Using DD requires a special agreement with your bank, however, and it won't happen that money ends up in your account without you requesting it - or if it does, you will get a phone call from your bank where somebody explains the situation, apologizes a dozen times and asks you to look into the matter and authorize a reversal. Acting on their own would be a criminal matter and likely be of interest to the regulators as well.
So if you decide not to reverse the mistake transaction you just get free money?
Unless it's a real lot of money going through the courts to get reimbursed would be impractical and if you transposed two numbers while typing an account number then you might not even know who the money went to.
> So if you decide not to reverse the mistake transaction you just get free money?
No, the law gets involved and at some point, a judge will decide whether you owe the sender the amount they mistakenly sent. It's basically the same for "I mistakenly sent you 100 that I meant to send to my friend" and "I mistakenly sent you 100 when I only meant to send you 50 that I owe".
And yeah, it's a hassle. At least you can generally find out which account the money went to, and with new IBANs, you need to mess up multiple digits, since they include a checksum. If the checksum doesn't match, the money bounces back into your account. Previously, some banks required that the account number and account holder match (within reasonable limits, misspelling the last name would work), but that changed with the IBAN system, only the account number matters now.
You're simplifying matters. If money was clearly sent in error, the bank can protect it from being spent (and subsequently refund it), unless the recipient disputes it:
> When you notify your bank or building society that you have made an electronic payment to the wrong account, your bank will commence action on your behalf within a maximum of two working days.
> Where your bank finds clear evidence of a genuine mistake, they will contact the receiving bank on your behalf with a request to prevent the money being mistakenly spent. As long as the recipient does not dispute your claim, you will subsequently receive a refund of the protected funds within 20 working days from when you notified your bank.
My bank doesn't notify me about any transactions, I have to check my bank book manually. Once a mistaken transaction showed up and disappeared a few hours later, with no trace left behind at all. I just assumed it was a mistake and didn't bother getting angry.