Paypal froze $70k+ in my account.

Stripe has never taken a nickle from me that they didn't deserve. I've run low 6 figures without having a single issue with them. You start dealing with these more traditional merchant accounts and they will rob you blind on the backend.

Most of the financial policy around stripe is dictated by Wells Fargo (check the Stripe TOS..."Wells Fargo" comes up 27 times). Good to hear you haven't had issues, but it's probably more to do with your particular risk profile than anything else.

I'm not trying to be an ass, I've just had to do a lot of comparison shopping for merchant solutions. For online transactions, if you have reasonable volume, you can get a rate that equates to about 2%. For interchange plus, it's the actual interchange rate plus some flat fee or percentage. Interchange rates (for online/card not present) vary from "well under 1%" for transactions on debit cards to "almost 3 %" for high end reward cards. Your actual rate depends on your customer mix.

What bugs me about Stripe is that they give someone that does $99/month the same rate as someone doing 5 figures a month. They won't talk discounts until you're doing $1M/year. The "middle class" Stripe customers are subsidizing both the low and high end.

It's particularly odd since the Durbin Amendment went into effect. It lowers the interchange rates for debit cards, they now can't exceed 21 cents plus 0.05 percent. On a $100 transaction tied to a debit card, Stripe is charging 2.9%, and incurring 0.26% in costs.
 


What I do:

1) Withdraw in increments of $10k, so if they do this it's not a big deal.

2) Use Stripe instead, but slap a big "100% SECURE PAYMENTS" gold sticker and a PayPal logo on there. Even if you're not accepting PayPal, sheep will see it and think "oh ok this is safe(r)."

3) If you're doing that much business they should have set you up with a personal rep. I have a direct line to my rep and it's much easier to get shit done than emailing their general support. I'm guessing since your revenue shot up so rapidly, they wanted to investigate to see what was going on.
 
All Paypal is, is a middleman service that acts a a 'security buffer' for customers; in a sense, all they are is an escrow service.

I'm sure alot of fraud has happened over the years via PayPal...so they probably enforce their freezes as some sort of automated protection.

Unfortunately, PayPal is a big name and most customers trust them and their logo.

TLDR: Cut out the middleman and find an alternative
 
Yesterday I got an email that looked like it was from paypal saying my account was locked. There was some mistypes on it ect.

You sure you didnt get a bogus email?

I was like, wut my 452 bucks...
 
Thanks guys!

I got a call from someone at paypal who was directly reporting to the president of Paypal. They called to help me resolve the claim (Even though just yesterday they said it couldn't be reversed).

Hopefully we can get this resolved soon.
 
Paypal seems to have an issue with lot's of "micro" transactions. Pennies to ~$50, but a shit load of those all at once. I've seen another person get into trouble with this. Paypal definitely wants to err on the side of safety in their own interest, and we all know there are plenty of schemes that transactions like these could represent. It's the suckage and a lot of innocents go down in the name of hyper-vigilance, but I can't really blame them either.
 
Thanks guys!

I got a call from someone at paypal who was directly reporting to the president of Paypal. They called to help me resolve the claim (Even though just yesterday they said it couldn't be reversed).

Hopefully we can get this resolved soon.

I hope you learn your lesson, you need to ALWAYS be demanding:
"SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Paypal balance isn't money. Bank account balance is. Withdraw yo' shit yo'.
 
Ok, so here's my $0.02 from the experience.

Paypal has customer service in many countries, and they are usually completely independent, as long as there is not some big problem that concerns the base.

Here's the tip, if you have a chance at all, open up paypal on cousin's name or bank account in other country other then USA. Paypal support for me was always glorious and every problem has been fixed in a matter of 10 mins, plus I never had problems really with them. They are also aware that I login from all around the Europe, never even mentioned as a problem.

One time they did froze me temporary was when I logged in first time trough their app and transferred 3k dollas. All I had to do is call, and say what's up, they asked 2 questions and unfroze.

Notice: I hardly ever receive payments trough paypal, mostly use it for sending payments.
 
Thanks guys!

I got a call from someone at paypal who was directly reporting to the president of Paypal. They called to help me resolve the claim (Even though just yesterday they said it couldn't be reversed).

Hopefully we can get this resolved soon.

Good luck. Keep us updated.
 
If possible: Incorporate elsewhere. Here in the EU PayPal is defined as an individual bank and thus it has to stick to the regulations and restrictions that are involved with that.

Of course you have to submit business information, but once the paperwork is concluded, they can't possibly freeze your funds, unless there's fraud/illegal activities involved.
 
Paypal seems to have an issue with lot's of "micro" transactions. Pennies to ~$50, but a shit load of those all at once. I've seen another person get into trouble with this. Paypal definitely wants to err on the side of safety in their own interest, and we all know there are plenty of schemes that transactions like these could represent. It's the suckage and a lot of innocents go down in the name of hyper-vigilance, but I can't really blame them either.

Want to know something else that sucks about PayPal? They very often give you the wrong reason code for chargebacks, so you respond thinking it's for something like an unauthorized transaction but the real reason was item not as described. I still have 1 site using PayPal but I don't even waste my time replying to the claims anymore (too busy buying bitcoins).
 
Let's face it - only use paypal if you don't care about the money and it's slightly shady BSTs anyway. Otherwise set up a fucking real business FFS.

Ok - that sounds a bit harsh. I'll rephrase it: Paypal are a bunch crooked clowns at best. Don't deal with them if you don't have to directly. If you want to accept Paypal as a payment method - fine. Just don't leave any amount of money there that could in any way cripple your business!!
In fact - DON'T LEAVE MONEY ANYWHERE IF IT COULD CRIPPLE YOUR BUSINESS BY DOING SO.

And most importantly - don't rely on any other cunt on this planet apart from you.
 
Paypal and google cave so easily to social media pressure if you guys don't have an online presence then make friends with people who do and see how quickly you can get stuff like this overturned, assuming your account/transactions/clicks are in proper order of course.


Can we make this thread official, like when someone sees their account limited over nothing, we take it to social media until its resolved?