PPC Submitter : Saturday, December 24, 2011, 5:47

Here is a fun letter I sent to PayPal :)

To Whom It May Concern,

On the 19th December 2011, an unauthorised charge was made against my PayPal account through an automated subscription payment for the sum of £75.00. A dispute was filed, and your finding was that this transaction was indeed unauthorised and you then refunded the sum of £75.00 using a bank Giro transfer.

At that time of refund by Giro, you were making an application for the sum of £75.00 by Direct Debit. The Direct Debit attempt was made to an account with insufficient funds to process the total sum of your direct debit request, which included a request for the sum of £89.99 for an item. Therefore, the Direct Debit was declined, incurring a bank charge for £70.

Under the Financial Services Authority regulation 61 of the Payment Services Regulations, section 8.101, financial services institutions such as yours, which is a registered bank in Switzerland, thereby acting as a financial institution in the United Kingdom, are required to make good an account to the state it was in before the unauthorised transaction was made.

In this instance you:

i) Continued your direct debit mandate for £75.00, despite that to your institution’s best knowledge, the direct debit was forfeit because it was unauthorised – this led to a total of bank charges not less than £70, incurred on 24/12/2011.

ii) Then made the refund after you had taken the charge, which is the reverse of what is expected under regulation 61 of the Payment Services Regulations.

iii) Santander Plc have previously filed for a court order under the Financial Services Act, ordering you to pay in excess of £200 in bank charges for the periods of October 2011 and November 2011 for the reason that you made in excess of 30 attempts to charge various bank accounts and credit cards, running up bank charges at £35 per attempt. At this time, you did not satisfy a minimum period of time before attempting each transaction – for example you charged a bank account, a debit card, and a credit card in less than 8 hours without waiting for any payment to clear. In your own Terms and Conditions, you clearly state that a period of not less than 3 days is allowable between continuous attempts to charge, however in recent history your repeated attempts have been starkly less than this.

iv) Are therefore in contravention of the Direct Debit Guarantee Scheme which requires all requesting institutions to act efficiently, with integrity, and to rectify problems cause by making an erroneous execution against a financial asset; in addition to regulation 61 where you may be prosecuted for your violations. The reason is because you knew that a transaction was unauthorised but did not efficiently control the flow of payments, which resulted in a monetary loss on my behalf of £70.00 resultant of your attempts to charge for this unauthorised transaction. Your remedy was inappropriate because the Giro refund was received after the charge was incurred – your institution should have forefeit the Direct Debit execution when it was reasonably aware of an unauthorised transaction.

v) Have continually displayed violations of regulation 61, and are therefore required to pay the sum of £70.00 to be compliant with regulation 8.101. Failure to do so could lead to prosecution. This is a letter before action, and you are required to respond appropriately within 8 weeks, which will set your maximum response time to the 24th February 2012, after which time a prosecution process will begin.

There is clearly a pertinent inefficiency with your automated system if you cannot control the flow of payments, and as such your system fails to meet essential economic policies and monetary law in the United Kingdom of Great Britain. As such, this letter is to demand that you correct your wrong doings within 8 calendar weeks, and to become compliant with economic policies and common monetary laws within 16 weeks. It is my intention to write to the Chairman of the Financial Services Authority and to the Financial Ombudsman Services to highlight that there are clear failings within PayPal to meet basic financial services requirements in law and policy. If your violations continue, then I will write to a Member of Parliament to request that a case be brought to the attention of the Lords of Appeal in Ordinary so that a judgement to order an inquiry into your violations can be made by Her Majesty’s Supreme Court of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – such an order can be requested for £300, whereas it would cost PayPal millions of pounds to provide the instruments the court need by law to make a judgement – I assure you that the best course of action for your institution and the British public is to be compliant.

I would appreciate your urgent response to this matter.

Best Regards,

Submitted By:: White Tiger

Location-: Manchester, UK

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