PayPal Customers Angry Over Variable Fraud Protection
from the it-all-depends,-see... dept
If you're buying stuff on eBay using PayPal, you might want to more carefully consider which credit card you use for the transaction. It turns out that if you use Visa or Mastercard, you're protected against fraud. However, if you use Discover or American Express, you're not. Of course, PayPal doesn't tell you any of this. Even worse, PayPal says that if you do contest a charge directly with your credit card company, they can close down your account. They claim they only do this if there's evidence of frequent chargebacks, but there are plenty of people who lost their PayPal accounts just because they went to their credit card company to get back money they sent to fraudulent auctions. PayPal doesn't want people going through the credit card companies, because the charge comes back to them - instead of the actual scammer. Of course, if PayPal did a reasonable job tracking down frauds it might not be a huge deal, but people claim that they're awful at it. They also only insure deals up to a certain amount, and if you spend more than that, you might just be out of luck.
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