Blocking accounts by PayPal for crypto activity

[lovesmayfamilis]

Well, the bad news about the blocking of accounts by PayPal began.
Someone here recently was so happy about the introduction of bitcoin into this system. I think PayPal will not do anything to its detriment but on the contrary.
News about the blocking of an account that PayPal suspects have generated too much crypto activity in a week.

https://coinmarketcap.com/headlines/news/this-user-had-his-paypal-account-banned-for-trading-cryptocurrency/

The account was blocked, and, as always, they demanded to provide documents and everything else. I think this is a very common practice of this system. I once suffered from their suspicion. Now the user who has been verified will not trust PayPal a second time. I think our joyful expectations about this system were premature. 

My account recently got limited and asked for like 10 explanations of "sales" which all were cryptocurrency dip buys and high sells (as is normal) all within a period of one week.

The system flagged my account thinking I was selling items worth $10000 in one week when I hadn't done so in the last 6 years I've held a PayPal account. (US account btw).

So I knew the developers didn't account for this shit when they released PayPal Crypto so I submitted the stuff for review with my photo ID and wrote "PayPal Crypto" for each crypto transaction BECAUSE WHAT ELSE could I say?

I called their phone and he said he's expedited the review. I went to sleep, the next day (today) my account is permanently limited due to ....

"After a review, we've decided to permanently limit your account due to potential risk. You’ll not be able to conduct any further business using PayPal."

180 days hold on my $462 in my balance.

No appeals. No explanation. No consideration that their reviewer may be an ignorant 60 year old with no knowledge of PayPal's own crypto service. Whenever I've called their support about PayPal Crypto in the past they had no idea what I was talking about (even after weeks after release).

Now I haven't called yet because phone support is offline, but I'm writing this thread because many others will be in the same spot as I am.

How do we start our journey to get them to understand what the fuck they did. I genuinely 100% know I did nothing wrong and its a misunderstanding because they think I made 50+ buy/sell transactions in a span of 1 week of items, when its just crypto.

I know how bad PayPal is in resolving these things and I've used them regularly for everything.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/k0rmtw/paypal_permanently_banned_my_account_due_to/

[Upgrade00]

What's the purpose of permanently banning an account and locking funds in it for 180 days? That's about six months and seems an awful long time to hold on to a user's funds without enough justification.

This does not really come off as a surprise, when you use a centralized platform, you technically waiver your decentralization and autonomy and have to conform to the ToS of that platform regardless how stringent they're.
Someone made a reply to that post and I think it would be useful for other users who plan on moving huge funds through PayPal;

PayPal isn’t a crypto exchange, their service is meant for people to hold bitcoin with and then spend it at their merchants when they turn on that ability. They’re currently paying all the trading fees when you buy or sell because they’re actually buying the bitcoin for you on ItBit so if you go and trade constantly they lose a ton of money covering those fees since they’re not charging any fees right now.

Their service is supposed to be more like a Bitcoin bank account, not a trading account. Maybe they need to make this more clear, but it’s really a service for people who want to hodl bitcoin and then spend it at PayPal merchants. So it only makes sense that if you’re doing high amounts of trading in and out that they’d kick you out since they’re just losing money.

[satonako]

PayPal is collecting a huge database with just added one more column-"crypto buyers" which it can willingly share with any government agency and block account for any reason.

[witcher_sense]

PayPal user now has his account permanently banned due to "suspicious activity", which is simply buying and selling cryptocurrencies... I wouldn't say I am surprised by this news. It has been expected from the very beginning that things will play out that way. Your bitcoin is not yours, you are not permitted to do whatever you want with it, it is a subject to seizure and censorship, it is not a decentralized and distributed system if the keys to it are not yours, and if you decided to rely on centralized platforms like PayPal, which bitcoin was meant to replace.

[20kevin20]

Welcome to the centralized world where PayPal's shown up few weeks ago as a crypto savior only to be the actual devil. Their limits of up to $15k per week sucks - you can't even trade one Bitcoin per week.

The easiest fix for this is: don't use their platform anymore. The more people who leave them, the better. Same goes for all those other corporations sucking all the information from your devices and using it all to their own good. Find a replacement, because there are many.

[thenextking]

Well, the bad news about the blocking of accounts by PayPal began.
Someone here recently was so happy about the introduction of bitcoin into this system. I think PayPal will not do anything to its detriment but on the contrary.
News about the blocking of an account that PayPal suspects have generated too much crypto activity in a week.

https://coinmarketcap.com/headlines/news/this-user-had-his-paypal-account-banned-for-trading-cryptocurrency/

The account was blocked, and, as always, they demanded to provide documents and everything else. I think this is a very common practice of this system. I once suffered from their suspicion. Now the user who has been verified will not trust PayPal a second time. I think our joyful expectations about this system were premature.  

My account recently got limited and asked for like 10 explanations of "sales" which all were cryptocurrency dip buys and high sells (as is normal) all within a period of one week.

The system flagged my account thinking I was selling items worth $10000 in one week when I hadn't done so in the last 6 years I've held a PayPal account. (US account btw).

So I knew the developers didn't account for this shit when they released PayPal Crypto so I submitted the stuff for review with my photo ID and wrote "PayPal Crypto" for each crypto transaction BECAUSE WHAT ELSE could I say?

I called their phone and he said he's expedited the review. I went to sleep, the next day (today) my account is permanently limited due to ....

"After a review, we've decided to permanently limit your account due to potential risk. You’ll not be able to conduct any further business using PayPal."

180 days hold on my $462 in my balance.

No appeals. No explanation. No consideration that their reviewer may be an ignorant 60 year old with no knowledge of PayPal's own crypto service. Whenever I've called their support about PayPal Crypto in the past they had no idea what I was talking about (even after weeks after release).

Now I haven't called yet because phone support is offline, but I'm writing this thread because many others will be in the same spot as I am.

How do we start our journey to get them to understand what the fuck they did. I genuinely 100% know I did nothing wrong and its a misunderstanding because they think I made 50+ buy/sell transactions in a span of 1 week of items, when its just crypto.

I know how bad PayPal is in resolving these things and I've used them regularly for everything.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/k0rmtw/paypal_permanently_banned_my_account_due_to/

I have no idea what this person is talking about, perhaps he need some verify? I had instant transferring tens of thousands from Coinbase to Paypal in a week and I used to have tens of thousands in a week in Ebay transactions, now Ebay just moved out of Paypal to Ebay Pay.
No problem here. He/she just simply need to talk to Paypal or verify his/her account, or just have too many fake accounts and Paypal found out about it?
Do whatever you like with Paypal as long you verify, simple as that and don't use many fake accounts.

[Wexnident]

In the end doesn't it all boil down to how Paypal is not an exchange? Based on what I understood, the account was blocked due to using it as some sort of exchange, buy low and sell high. I guess PayPal didn't like that, as said in the article it also indicated that Paypal bore the fees for those transactions so multiple transactions may damage them in the long run. Do they even indicate that such actions are not allowed in their ToS? or something? Since clearly, the ones at fault here are PayPal since they deployed that kind of model themselves, possibly without any warning of what to and not to do.

I have no idea what this person is talking about, perhaps he need some verify? I had instant transferring tens of thousands from Coinbase to Paypal in a week and I used to have tens of thousands in a week in Ebay transactions, now Ebay just moved out of Paypal to Ebay Pay.
Now problem here. He/she just simply need to talk to Paypal or verify his/her account, or just have too many fake accounts and Paypal found out about it.

There's probably no issue if you use it to buy something, but in the case of the blocked account, the user bought and sold crypto, letting PayPal act as an exchange themselves. Seems like there's little to no fee from what I understood, since if there was, I see no reason why Paypal would ban the dude from doing that since they profit in the end.

[jademaxsuy]

So, this is now we can say that there is really a problem with centralized exchanges in which paypal act like a exchange after bringing their platform for bitcoin ready and available to its users.  

The problem is that now if you are accused like the question is how will it be settled or how will investigation to be done and how much time it will take.

We have to promote the decentralize exchange instead and that could help us in transacting without any third parties involved that could be a problem when making the transactions.

[hd49728]

PayPal is used very well in the 2 month bull run. Good news from them, bitcoin took off and tried to break all time high. Bad news from them, bitcoin crashed to below $17k. PayPal is always risky to trade for newbies and it does not restrict to the payment method for bitcoin. Also on Paypal, people don't truly buy or sell bitcoin. They are a middleman and provide a service for PayPal users, open a middle gate for their users to crypto.

Not only PayPal, the bad news (margin closed) from Coinbase is around few days back.

What will come next with institutional investments?

[eaLiTy]

This is exactly the situation i went through back in the day and when you have huge amounts in your account they will simply lock your account and then ask to verify the source and provide all the necessary documents and even if you provide every documents it will take a long time for them to release them again and their customer care back then was shitty as you could get a response from them every couple of months for a query and it took more than 9 months for them to release the account and my money and luckily for me BTCitcoin came into existence and never used them ever since.

I was always vocal about their shitty business and i warned about them in all of my posts here and i am not sure how long it will take now to release the account even after furnishing all the documents, hopefully the customer service improved as my situation happened more than a decade ago.

[pooya87]

this is not new and it is not limited to crypto activity either.
they have been doing the same thing for years, banning accounts for very little to no reasons while there are thousands of scams happening every day using their platform such as charge back scams and they do nothing about them.
this is why centralized services, specially those located in US, suck so hard. and in fact this is one of the main motivations that led to creation of the decentralized payment system we are using today called bitcoin.

[gentlemand]

It's been like this ever since Paypal were aware of crypto. I guess many people won't understand the difference between Paypal's Bitcoin fun tokens and their arsiness if you use their services to dabble in the real thing.

I can imagine this is going to a happen a lot more often after tailing off over the years.

[lovesmayfamilis]

I have no idea what this person is talking about, perhaps he need some verify? I had instant transferring tens of thousands from Coinbase to Paypal in a week and I used to have tens of thousands in a week in Ebay transactions, now Ebay just moved out of Paypal to Ebay Pay.
No problem here. He/she just simply need to talk to Paypal or verify his/her account, or just have too many fake accounts and Paypal found out about it?
Do whatever you like with Paypal as long you verify, simple as that and don't use many fake accounts.

Sometimes it's helpful to read posts and links where everything is described in black and white. Then an understanding of what people write about will come. Just writing a message for the sake of the message shows the folly of the person who writes it.

[Bekuciwu9]

What a dirty tactic by Paypal, but it was expected because they cant change their habits over night.They just want people to hold bitcoin there,but not to trade and make profit.
I hope that more people will realise how shitty Paypal is and they will start using other ways to buy,sell and store their crypto.

[cheezcarls]

This is one reason why I am not going to use Paypal for storing cryptocurrencies. In the past, they had a history of freezing lots of accounts without any reason. Although I can still use them for some of my monthly subscriptions like Zoom, Canva, etc., I would never ever gonna deposit some crypto in their payment processor. Not your keys, not your coins.

[BIN-BIN]

I was so excited with the news if PayPal incorporating cryptocurrency into it platform in the last couple of week back but to wake up to this sad event of them banning accounts due to high inflow of crypto transaction may raise an eyebrows because that should have been a good pointer that the new development is actually working and digital currency is more flexible then fiant. Any way in the coming days the real issue will be clear to all of us to know what really went wrong.

[Smartprofit]

I read the comment of one expert on this situation. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/k0rmtw/comment/gdk3b8t?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

He suggested that since PayPal is not a cryptocurrency exchange, such clients are not beneficial to him.  In the situation under consideration, the client carried out transactions for the purchase and sale of cryptocurrency (for a large amount).  PayPal is ready to store customers' cryptocurrency.  However, PayPal is not ready to position itself as a speculation platform.  He suffers losses in the form of exchange rate differences. 

However, such moments need to be negotiated with clients in advance!  In my opinion, PalPal's actions have damaged his reputation. 

Bitcoin doesn't need intermediaries.  The situation under consideration shows once again that the weakest link in the cryptoindustry is centralized systems.

[imstillthebest]

This is one reason why I am not going to use Paypal for storing cryptocurrencies.
In the past, they had a history of freezing lots of accounts without any reason. Although I can still use them for some of my monthly subscriptions like Zoom, Canva, etc., I would never ever gonna deposit some crypto in their payment processor. Not your keys, not your coins.

this is a perfect example " of not your keys not your coins " phrase .

they can compromised your coins anytime they like but this wasnt the only reason why a person wont use paypal . a person will continue to use paypal because they are just like you that they are also using software that supports paypal and paypal is the easiest way for them to use to pay thier subscription  . paypal should introduce a rule on how much limit a person can do on their paypal crypto account and people must read it , there will  be no problems after that .

[Sultanar484]

Its a shoking news that Paypal ban account for cryptocurrency transactions. If they suspend or ban account related to suspected transaction, many verified members won't trust on Paypal for anymore and new members won't create account of Paypal for their bad practice after they declared 4 coin's acceptance.

[davis196]

What's the purpose of permanently banning an account and locking funds in it for 180 days? That's about six months and seems an awful long time to hold on to a user's funds without enough justification.

The 180 days locking period is supposed to be the time,in which all the users "scammed" by the paypal account owner have to refund their transactions.
By the way,the funds aren't locked for exactly 180 days.They are locked until the account owner provides all the documents required by Paypal-such as ID scan,bank statements,etc. and come explanation about the transactions.
Anyway,Paypal has an automated tracking system,which automatically reports active accounts with big sending/receiving volume for "suspicious activity".
This tracking system in combination with their slow customer support+the rules of blocking account funds for 180 days are the 3 reasons why everyone hates PayPAl.