I can't. I replied elsewhere in these comments that it happened to a client of mine. I made a lot of money in one weekend doing emergency "I told you so" payment gateway switching for him so he could take reservations.
But it's my recollection they're not a bank, and so they have no real obligation to act like one. So when they do this kind of stuff, I'm not surprised.
And I wouldn't want to be them. They probably deal with fraud and schemes on the scale none of us could possibly imagine.
I'm in the UK and one of my companies is in the typical start-up bind right now: we want to take on-line payments, heavyweight Merchant Account and Payment Gateway services are a bureaucratic nightmare to set up with lead times often running into months, but the cheap 'n' cheerful services like Paypal have terrible reputations for customer service and reportedly a tendency to steal merchants' money arbitrarily.
Does anyone here know anything about whether, in practice, such horror stories are mitigated in the EU by PayPal's registration as a bank?
We don't see them as a long-term prospect for handling our payments, but today we'd settle for something we can set up in hours rather than weeks so we can launch our service and get some sort of trading history going. If nothing else, that would deal with a lot of the headaches of applying for the more "serious" services, which tend to be very risk-averse if you approach them as a start-up with no trading history and wanting recurring payment authority on credit cards to implement your subscription model.
But it's my recollection they're not a bank, and so they have no real obligation to act like one. So when they do this kind of stuff, I'm not surprised.
And I wouldn't want to be them. They probably deal with fraud and schemes on the scale none of us could possibly imagine.
PayPal - the Mos Eisley of e-commerce.