Is PayPal run by a bunch of monkeys?

Last week, I got locked out of my PayPal account "for security purposes." What this means is that I can no longer use my PayPal account until I go through a tedious verification process that will take up to 2 weeks. In the meantime, I can't buy anything with PayPal, and recurring transactions automatically fail.

PayPal's account verification process is senseless, and I will never use recurring PayPal payments for business transactions ever again (and you shouldn't either). Here's why:

PayPal's Account Verification Process

Why did this happen? I created a second PayPal account to use in testing an app. After creating the account, I transferred $1 from my regular PayPal account - you know, the one I've had open for 10 years. Well, this move triggered something at PayPal, and they limited my account. To get my account reinstated, here's what has to happen:

  1. Change my password
  2. Update my security questions
  3. Wait for verification of my location, by waiting 7-10 days for PayPal to send me a verification code IN THE MAIL. (PayPal has an alternate phone verification process, but they couldn't verify my location with that.)

Flaws in PayPal's Account Verification Process

Aside from the fact that I'm annoyed that my account got locked in the first place, I present several flaws in their current account verification process:

  1. If I'm a hacker who is logged into a PayPal account, how it changing my password going to solve anything?
  2. Also, if I'm a hacker, how is RESETTING my security questions going to help?! If anything, I should be challenged to ANSWER them, not reset them. This defeats the purpose of security questions.
  3. If I happened to be out of town for a while, or unable to check mail at the address on my PayPal account, I'd be screwed, since that's the only way to complete their verification process. What if my address were out of date?

Why I will never use recurring PayPal payments for business transactions ever again

You see, when PayPal decides to limit your account, any recurring transactions - you know, any payments that are processed monthly - straight up fail. You'd think if you had pre-existing recurring transactions, PayPal would run them, since they were set up before there was any "suspicious activity" on your account. Nope. Instead, several critical subscriptions for my business have now been cancelled. This includes my Springloops SVN subscription that I use to manage and check-in all of my code, a mission critical service for me (there were others, too). What a joke.

I thought it would be nice to use PayPal to manage recurring subscriptions when it's available, so I could manage recurring transactions all in one place. Instead, this little incident makes me realize that I can't even depend on PayPal for that. As if I didn't already hate PayPal enough, this puts the icing on the cake.

So the moral of the story is, if you run a business and charge recurring payments, don't even bother providing PayPal as an option. You and your customers will only end up getting screwed.