I recently saved up $300 to order a nice gift for my 7 year old for Christmas. We usually can’t afford extravagances, but I wanted to do something special for him this year. My mother in law helped by sending us money from selling things and then depositing the money into her bank account to send to us (our bank account isn’t linked to our paypal).

I ordered his gift and it was to be delivered on Christmas Eve. I got a call from the store today saying there had been a chargeback and the item wasn’t being delivered. I called paypal and learned that the money had been returned to my mother in law, who didn’t open a dispute and even called paypal to tell them that the money belonged to us and she didn’t want it back. They gave me a lot of nonsense about “suspicious activity” and froze both of our accounts.

They wouldn’t explain AT ALL what the problem was and kept telling me they can’t release “secure information”. Now the money for his gift is frozen in my mother in law’s account for the next 6 months. I don’t have money to just go out and buy him another one until this all gets sorted, so maybe we’ll just let him unwrap a picture of what his gift was supposed to be and tell him he *might* get it in 6 months.

Thanks paypal for your gift of an unhappy child and a crying wife this Christmas!!

Submitted by JH

PayPal Holding Christmas MoneyI have been an ebay seller for 9 years, with perfect feed back record. I recently listed several items that sold on Ebay for over $700 total! I did this to get some Chirstmas money.....

Toll-free number withheld, simple problem takes too longTo start, my transaction number was not recognized by PayPal’s computer database.  Also, in my experience PayPal will not provide their toll free number up front, only the long distance number, from their website. So...