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tubman · 01-31-2020, 11:58 AM

I just posted this on the H.A.M.B. and got a lot of positive feedback, so I thought I should post it here as well.

"I am having a PayPal problem and found out that they DO NOT validate their own ID's on input. If someone makes a typo entering an ID and the ID doesn't exist, they do not notify the user, but accept the payment and put the money into their "Unclaimed Funds" account. The reason I got "bit" is that my ID had a couple of zeroes in it. A payee entered a lower-case letter "o" in one of those positions, and off went his payment to "Never-Never Land". After he notified me that he had paid and I had not seen his payment, I contacted PayPal. I suspected what was wrong and pointedly asked them if this is what happened. Their representative said that this could happen and that it was the source of the most frequent complaints about their system. They said they were checking into it, but that a solution was not imminent. They said that the only way to correct it would be to have the payee cancel the original transaction and re-submit it. I contacted my customer and this worked.

Since they do not seem to be too motivated to fix this, I decided to protect myself and set up a new PayPal ID with no confusing characters. I would suggest that anyone with a PayPal ID with ambiguous characters consider doing the same. Ambiguous characters include zeroes, the letter "O", lower case "L", upper case "I", the number "1" and perhaps a few others. My problem was made worse by the fact that my old Toshiba laptop presents zero and lower-case "O" as the same on the screen.

Once the payment ends up in "Unclaimed Funds", who knows what happens to it (but I can guess). I just thought people should be aware of this and decide if they need to protect themselves from PayPal's shortcomings."

01-31-2020, 11:58 AM	#1
tubman Senior Member Join Date: Dec 2013 Location: Minnesota, Florida Keys Posts: 10,320	PayPal technical problem I just posted this on the H.A.M.B. and got a lot of positive feedback, so I thought I should post it here as well. "I am having a PayPal problem and found out that they DO NOT validate their own ID's on input. If someone makes a typo entering an ID and the ID doesn't exist, they do not notify the user, but accept the payment and put the money into their "Unclaimed Funds" account. The reason I got "bit" is that my ID had a couple of zeroes in it. A payee entered a lower-case letter "o" in one of those positions, and off went his payment to "Never-Never Land". After he notified me that he had paid and I had not seen his payment, I contacted PayPal. I suspected what was wrong and pointedly asked them if this is what happened. Their representative said that this could happen and that it was the source of the most frequent complaints about their system. They said they were checking into it, but that a solution was not imminent. They said that the only way to correct it would be to have the payee cancel the original transaction and re-submit it. I contacted my customer and this worked. Since they do not seem to be too motivated to fix this, I decided to protect myself and set up a new PayPal ID with no confusing characters. I would suggest that anyone with a PayPal ID with ambiguous characters consider doing the same. Ambiguous characters include zeroes, the letter "O", lower case "L", upper case "I", the number "1" and perhaps a few others. My problem was made worse by the fact that my old Toshiba laptop presents zero and lower-case "O" as the same on the screen. Once the payment ends up in "Unclaimed Funds", who knows what happens to it (but I can guess). I just thought people should be aware of this and decide if they need to protect themselves from PayPal's shortcomings."