Even casual PayPal users vexed by PayPal’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad customer service

I’ve been a PayPal user for ages. If you mistake them for a bank, you do so at your peril, because they charge the highest fees, offer the lowest interest of all (zero, for the curious), and getting customer service is like trying to explain a card trick to Comcast over the phone.

Did I mention they are awful? Well, they are, and I’ll tell you why:

1. They pay ZERO interest. Back in the aughts, they paid money market rates for balances left on the account. They ended that around 2008, so any money you leave in PayPal is literally losing value, as inflation happens every day, thus the deflation of your funds happens every day that you leave it with PayPal.

2. You could have a million dollars in there and they won’t give you the degree of customer service you can get from your neighborhood banker with an overdrawn account. Back in the aughts my entire salary went through PayPal. I commonly had $30,000-40,000 in my account, but they wouldn’t give me the time of day any more than some random hacker who just stole a credit card and put in $5 off a prepaid Visa.

3. There’s NO phone number to call. If you want to find it, you have to go to Google. You can spend an hour roaming around the site looking for it, but you’ll never find it. But magically you type it into Google and 1/1000th of a second later, there it is.

4. Despite having a 15-plus year account in universally good standing, they ship your call off to India, assuming you can find the call number, where you’ll be bounced around, as I was, for over an hour. The first rep told me she’d fix it and it would be no problem, the second rep told me she had no idea what I was talking about. Both of them told me to try my transaction again, which failed as it did the first time.

Seriously, PayPal. Do you want our money or not? You charge the highest transactional fees in the business. I’m not sure if you’re too greedy, too stupid or just too indifferent to actually take my money.

I got permission to record the calls, so I’ll be posting them soon, but I promised Carla I’d share this, so it would be wrong of me not to.

Seriously, PayPal, make like Summer and get your shit together. Well then get your shit together. Get it all together. And put it in a backpack. All your shit. So it’s together. And if you gotta take it somewhere, take it somewhere, you know, take it to the shit store and sell it, or put it in a shit museum, I don’t care what you do, you just gotta get it together… Get your shit together.

UPDATE: After hours on the phone, I’ve been told my issue CANNOT be resolved, but they offered me a workaround which may or may not work. My confidence is limited. I’m taking my business elsewhere and you should consider doing the same.