My experience of withdrawing money from a blocked PayPal account
I've been doing online commerce for about 3 years now. The work is mainly aimed at foreign sites for the sale of electronics. I started a business by opening an ebay account and even then the question became an edge, because To work with ebay, you need a verified PayPal account. I am a citizen of Ukraine, therefore, I had no chance to open my own account, because PayPal does not work with Ukraine now either, so I had to ask a friend who lives in the UK to open an account in his name. In principle, opening an account in England is commonplace. All that is required is a valid bank account, after which you need to go through several stages in order to confirm that you are the owner of this account. You also provide your address, which may be asked to confirm. To do this, it will suffice to send a so-called Bank Statement, i.e. bank statement. It looks like this:
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In addition to verifying your address, you may be asked to verify your identity; for this, it will be enough to send a copy of your passport or driver's license.
For a citizen of the country in which he opens a PayPal account, all these steps are not problematic, and a fully “ready” account can be obtained one week after its opening. It happened in my case, the account was created very quickly, the data (password and login) were transferred to me, and a week after that I was trading on ebay with a fully verified account. There were a lot of transactions on the account, about 200x-300x per month. After receiving the money from the client, I had to send part of the money to the supplier, while the profit remained on the account. At first it suited me. A friend wrote off profits to a bank account attached to an account, then made a transfer from my account to my bank (Wire transfer).
Then, however, the relations between us began to deteriorate on the basis of another joint business, and after a while we stopped communicating. By this time, in addition to the ebay account, I already had a full-fledged site that brought a good profit. Naturally, the site provided for payment by credit cards, but still a large percentage of transactions (about 60%) passed through mystealth PayPal account. What to do, I did not know. I read on the forums about how people are withdrawing to VCC (virtual credit cards), but in my case it was about other sums of money and I did not want to risk. Recently, PayPal banned the possibility of withdrawing to virtual cards - now you can withdraw money only to a bank account in your country. In general, the amount accumulated, I read more and more about how accounts are closed, and they freeze funds on them, but I could not do anything with it, every day there was a risk that my account could be closed and the money was frozen.
The problem was solved by itself when I came to England to study. I immediately opened my own PayPal account, transferred money from the old accounts and brought them through my bank. It is also worth mentioning that while withdrawing, even though you don’t pay the commission, you can still lose a pretty decent amount if you say money on your account in US dollars, because according to the rules of PayPal.co.uk you can write off money to your account only in pounds. Say, if you have $ 10,000 and a British bank account to which you want to debit this money, then at the beginning this amount will be converted into pounds sterling, and then debited to your bank account. The course, I must admit, PayPal is far from the best. But these costs can not be avoided only if you have not opened an account in America.
At this stage, I actually come to the main topic of this post. I transferred the principal amount to my personal account, however I left a decent amount on the old account for several reasons. First, many business partners knew this address and constantly used it to create invoices that I needed to pay weekly. Secondly, most customers also knew this address and sent money directly. Thirdly, I constantly needed money that I could send at any time, so I could not just take and write off all the money to my bank account. In general, for these reasons, a rather large amount of money remained on the old PayPal account.
Everything was fine until yesterday when I received the following message from PayPal:
My old account was blocked due to the fact that my friend tried to open another account in his own name, but categorically it is impossible to do this according to the rules of PayPal (perhaps he did it not intentionally just forgetting that one account already exists ).
At the moment I could not receive or send money, I could still debit money, but this option does not suit me for obvious reasons.
The following actions: I call PayPal support, try to explain that this is my account and that I have not opened another account. I’m undergoing a small check, it’s good that I know all the details about the account owner, such as address, secret questions, date of birth, etc. After checking, the support asks about 6 questions of the same type: “Did anyone have access to the account besides you?”, “Did you suspect that someone could have hacked your account?”, Etc. I answered all questions negatively, now I think, was it correct to answer that way? In any case, after a few hours I receive email:
And also below added:
“Money in your PayPal account will be held for 180 days. After 180 days, we'll receive your funds. ”
After that, everything else was closed the opportunity to write off the money in the bank and make refunds (ie, return the money to buyers). It turns out like the best, it turned out even worse. I was thinking about trying to ask my friend to withdraw funds all the same, but now it was too late.
I sat on the forums and realized that PayPal does not touch the money, it just freezes them and in 180 days I will have the opportunity to write them off to the credit card assigned to my account. But I could not wait 180 days, firstly I urgently need this money, secondly, even if I wait 180 days, the only way I can get money back is to withdraw it to my friend’s bank account. Therefore, I came up with one tricky scheme.
The fact is that among the people with whom I work, there are those with whom I have a rather good relationship and they transfer money to me on an ongoing basis. The idea was as follows: write to the client with a request to open a dispute for his last transaction, after which the money had to be returned back to his account and he, in turn, had to transfer the same amount to my new account. Thus, I expected that after successful communication with 10-15 clients, I would be able to “transfer” money from one account to another. However, it was necessary to take into account 2 points.
First, why did I start writing to clients so that they could open disputes themselves and not just click on the Issue refund button on the transaction page ?:
This of course would be much simpler and more convenient both for me and for the clients themselves. However, as I wrote above, the Refund option was blocked, i.e. the same fragment on the page looked like this:
Button Issue a refund was gone. Therefore, the only thing that remained was to ask the clients to initiate disputes themselves.
The second point is that you can only open a dispute for the transaction you have completed within 45 days after transferring money from your account to the merchant account. As I have already said, I knew many clients quite well and they made transfers quite often, unfortunately with less frequency than every 45 days.
As a result, I wrote to all the clients who transferred money to me in the last 45 days and asked them to open disputes. I waited a bit, and now, the first dispute came, and what was my surprise when I realized that I could not even return the money to the client, when I tried to just say: “Your account has been blocked and you cannot make a refund within 180 days . ”Immediately sent them a letter and a few hours later received an answer:
It did not suit me, since no one would send me the money before getting my money back, how long to wait until PayPal makes a refund is not clear, most likely for a very long timeas usual . The only way out was to call PayPal and somehow try to negotiate.
Before calling, I remembered reading a very informative forum on Ebay and Paypal recently and stumbled upon one post where one of the PayPal users managed to beg the support to remove the limit from his account. His nickname is missbesos, and even then his phrase made me laugh:
“I’m called“ again ”and I’m not allowed to go there ... rep. I like it, I heard it cry for my 1k + and worked! money in my hand within 7 days ”.
However, just before the call, I firmly decided that if I didn’t manage to agree on a normal one, I would cry and say that the poor guy from another country with his wife and children would need to pay for rent and food. Well, what would you do in my place?
I call in support. I start the conversation by telling that I have a large number of clients who transferred money to me, but I did not have time and could not provide them with services, due to the fact that the account was blocked, and that I really need the Issue option to work. a Refund.
The girl asks to wait and after 2 minutes informs me that the option has been unlocked and now I can make refunds for clients myself. I say Thank you and update the page. Indeed, in the box What can I do while my account is limited? Appeared item Send Refunds.
After that, I made refunds all to customers I trust and who have completed the transaction in the last 60 days. It is 60! I described a little higher that the buyer can open a dispute within 45 days, but the seller has 15 days more for a refund. I do not know what exactly is the difference in time. Consequently, I not only achieved that I could make returns myself, but I also had the opportunity to withdraw money from customers who made purchases 45-60 days ago. There was not enough.
A decent portion of the total was written off. However, the money still remained and I had no one to write to. That is, if I had written to a simple client whom I did not know, there would be a chance that after the dispute was closed, he would never send me a payment again. I was only interested in clients that I could trust and was sure that they would make a second payment. I was very much limited by the 60 day return limit. However, I decided to try to contact PayPal again,and with the phrase “cry if you have to,” I dialed the support number. There is nothing special to tell in detail, I explained the situation and said that I want to return the money to the client who committed the transaction 4 months ago and asked how to do it. I was asked a couple of questions about when exactly the transaction was made, how much money was transferred to me, and what is the name of the sender of the transfer. He waited on the line for about 2 minutes and the guy told me that the money was written off. That principle and all I wanted to tell.
Bottom line: Any system can be circumvented, and especially PayPal. I even read that they could be threatened and they could withdraw money themselves. I intend to try this option the other day - for this I deliberately left a small amount of money. If possible, I will tell you with pleasure what I did. In any case, you need to read and try yourself. I hope my method of returning money from a limited account will help someone.
')
In addition to verifying your address, you may be asked to verify your identity; for this, it will be enough to send a copy of your passport or driver's license.
For a citizen of the country in which he opens a PayPal account, all these steps are not problematic, and a fully “ready” account can be obtained one week after its opening. It happened in my case, the account was created very quickly, the data (password and login) were transferred to me, and a week after that I was trading on ebay with a fully verified account. There were a lot of transactions on the account, about 200x-300x per month. After receiving the money from the client, I had to send part of the money to the supplier, while the profit remained on the account. At first it suited me. A friend wrote off profits to a bank account attached to an account, then made a transfer from my account to my bank (Wire transfer).
Then, however, the relations between us began to deteriorate on the basis of another joint business, and after a while we stopped communicating. By this time, in addition to the ebay account, I already had a full-fledged site that brought a good profit. Naturally, the site provided for payment by credit cards, but still a large percentage of transactions (about 60%) passed through my
The problem was solved by itself when I came to England to study. I immediately opened my own PayPal account, transferred money from the old accounts and brought them through my bank. It is also worth mentioning that while withdrawing, even though you don’t pay the commission, you can still lose a pretty decent amount if you say money on your account in US dollars, because according to the rules of PayPal.co.uk you can write off money to your account only in pounds. Say, if you have $ 10,000 and a British bank account to which you want to debit this money, then at the beginning this amount will be converted into pounds sterling, and then debited to your bank account. The course, I must admit, PayPal is far from the best. But these costs can not be avoided only if you have not opened an account in America.
At this stage, I actually come to the main topic of this post. I transferred the principal amount to my personal account, however I left a decent amount on the old account for several reasons. First, many business partners knew this address and constantly used it to create invoices that I needed to pay weekly. Secondly, most customers also knew this address and sent money directly. Thirdly, I constantly needed money that I could send at any time, so I could not just take and write off all the money to my bank account. In general, for these reasons, a rather large amount of money remained on the old PayPal account.
Everything was fine until yesterday when I received the following message from PayPal:
My old account was blocked due to the fact that my friend tried to open another account in his own name, but categorically it is impossible to do this according to the rules of PayPal (perhaps he did it not intentionally just forgetting that one account already exists ).
At the moment I could not receive or send money, I could still debit money, but this option does not suit me for obvious reasons.
The following actions: I call PayPal support, try to explain that this is my account and that I have not opened another account. I’m undergoing a small check, it’s good that I know all the details about the account owner, such as address, secret questions, date of birth, etc. After checking, the support asks about 6 questions of the same type: “Did anyone have access to the account besides you?”, “Did you suspect that someone could have hacked your account?”, Etc. I answered all questions negatively, now I think, was it correct to answer that way? In any case, after a few hours I receive email:
And also below added:
“Money in your PayPal account will be held for 180 days. After 180 days, we'll receive your funds. ”
After that, everything else was closed the opportunity to write off the money in the bank and make refunds (ie, return the money to buyers). It turns out like the best, it turned out even worse. I was thinking about trying to ask my friend to withdraw funds all the same, but now it was too late.
I sat on the forums and realized that PayPal does not touch the money, it just freezes them and in 180 days I will have the opportunity to write them off to the credit card assigned to my account. But I could not wait 180 days, firstly I urgently need this money, secondly, even if I wait 180 days, the only way I can get money back is to withdraw it to my friend’s bank account. Therefore, I came up with one tricky scheme.
The fact is that among the people with whom I work, there are those with whom I have a rather good relationship and they transfer money to me on an ongoing basis. The idea was as follows: write to the client with a request to open a dispute for his last transaction, after which the money had to be returned back to his account and he, in turn, had to transfer the same amount to my new account. Thus, I expected that after successful communication with 10-15 clients, I would be able to “transfer” money from one account to another. However, it was necessary to take into account 2 points.
First, why did I start writing to clients so that they could open disputes themselves and not just click on the Issue refund button on the transaction page ?:
This of course would be much simpler and more convenient both for me and for the clients themselves. However, as I wrote above, the Refund option was blocked, i.e. the same fragment on the page looked like this:
Button Issue a refund was gone. Therefore, the only thing that remained was to ask the clients to initiate disputes themselves.
The second point is that you can only open a dispute for the transaction you have completed within 45 days after transferring money from your account to the merchant account. As I have already said, I knew many clients quite well and they made transfers quite often, unfortunately with less frequency than every 45 days.
As a result, I wrote to all the clients who transferred money to me in the last 45 days and asked them to open disputes. I waited a bit, and now, the first dispute came, and what was my surprise when I realized that I could not even return the money to the client, when I tried to just say: “Your account has been blocked and you cannot make a refund within 180 days . ”Immediately sent them a letter and a few hours later received an answer:
It did not suit me, since no one would send me the money before getting my money back, how long to wait until PayPal makes a refund is not clear, most likely for a very long time
Before calling, I remembered reading a very informative forum on Ebay and Paypal recently and stumbled upon one post where one of the PayPal users managed to beg the support to remove the limit from his account. His nickname is missbesos, and even then his phrase made me laugh:
“I’m called“ again ”and I’m not allowed to go there ... rep. I like it, I heard it cry for my 1k + and worked! money in my hand within 7 days ”.
However, just before the call, I firmly decided that if I didn’t manage to agree on a normal one, I would cry and say that the poor guy from another country with his wife and children would need to pay for rent and food. Well, what would you do in my place?
I call in support. I start the conversation by telling that I have a large number of clients who transferred money to me, but I did not have time and could not provide them with services, due to the fact that the account was blocked, and that I really need the Issue option to work. a Refund.
The girl asks to wait and after 2 minutes informs me that the option has been unlocked and now I can make refunds for clients myself. I say Thank you and update the page. Indeed, in the box What can I do while my account is limited? Appeared item Send Refunds.
After that, I made refunds all to customers I trust and who have completed the transaction in the last 60 days. It is 60! I described a little higher that the buyer can open a dispute within 45 days, but the seller has 15 days more for a refund. I do not know what exactly is the difference in time. Consequently, I not only achieved that I could make returns myself, but I also had the opportunity to withdraw money from customers who made purchases 45-60 days ago. There was not enough.
A decent portion of the total was written off. However, the money still remained and I had no one to write to. That is, if I had written to a simple client whom I did not know, there would be a chance that after the dispute was closed, he would never send me a payment again. I was only interested in clients that I could trust and was sure that they would make a second payment. I was very much limited by the 60 day return limit. However, I decided to try to contact PayPal again,
Bottom line: Any system can be circumvented, and especially PayPal. I even read that they could be threatened and they could withdraw money themselves. I intend to try this option the other day - for this I deliberately left a small amount of money. If possible, I will tell you with pleasure what I did. In any case, you need to read and try yourself. I hope my method of returning money from a limited account will help someone.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/123866/
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