timboucher

Just in time for global financial crisis, my PayPal account has been temporarily suspended, and I can’t figure out for the life of me why.

When I log in, I am confronted with this screen:

PayPal is constantly working to ensure security by regularly screening the accounts in our system. We recently reviewed your account, and we need more information to help us provide you with secure service. Until we can collect this information, your access to sensitive account features will be limited. We would like to restore your access as soon as possible, and we apologize for the inconvenience.
Why is my account access limited?

Your account access has been limited for the following reason(s):

# Mar. 6, 2008: Our system requires further account verification.

I’ve been a PayPal member since 2003, so I don’t know what triggered the sudden shift - as there has been no unusual activity recently. My account page links me to a “Resolution Center” screen which informs me that I cannot:

1. send or request money
2. electronically transfer funds from your PayPal account
3. close your account

Luckily, I have less than $60 sitting in this account, but the whole thing is F-ing annoying. Anyway, a link from that page is labelled “Learn why your account access is limited.” Clicking on that link opens a pop-up with the same quote entered above about security, blah blah blah. On the “Resolution Center” page itself, it’s supposed to list open cases and how to resolve them, but the whole thing is blank.

After a little bit of looking around over the weekend, I found a contact form which I emailed them through. I received a response allegedly from (phishing?) the email address “webform@paypal.com” which reads:

Recently, we requested that you provide PayPal with documentation regarding your organizations status as a charity/non-profit organization. To date, we have not received this information, and now find it necessary to limit access to your account, pending the receipt of this information. Please provide the following (as they may apply) to restore access to your account:

1. Evidence of tax exempt status or registration with any applicable regulatory bodies, such as a §501 (c)(3) determination letter.

2. A brief organizational summary or Mission Statement.

3. The names of any charitable organizations for whom you are collecting.

4. Method(s) of disbursement to the beneficiaries.

Please provide the requested information to 1-303-395-2862 ATTN: Compliance – Due Diligence. Please remember to include your email address as registered on your PayPal account on any correspondence or faxed items. Once this information is received, reviewed, and found satisfactory, the restriction will be removed from your account.

If you would like to contact PayPal via telephone, please visit the Resolution Center. We thank you for your prompt attention to this matter. Please understand that this is a security measure intended to help protect you and your account. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Send any questions to compliance@paypal.com.

Your assistance and expediency in this matter is appreciated.

Sincerely,
Vanetta
PayPal Compliance Department
PayPal, an eBay Company

I did indeed receive two other letters prior to this about registering my non-profit organization. Since I do not have a non-profit organization and have not been posing as though I had one, I considered a response to be unnecessary and suspected the emails to have been fraudulently generated.

Immediately after receiving the above email, I also received three automated emails from “service@paypal.com” indicating the same thing in each of the subject lines: “Bank Account Confirmed Successfully” with the body reading:

Congratulations, your bank account was confirmed successfully through our instant confirmation process.

With your Verified account you can:
- Fund purchases directly from your bank account, in addition to using credit cards
- Improve your reputation by letting others know you’re a Verified member of the PayPal community
- Send money to friends and family
- Add money to your PayPal account directly from your bank account

Sincerely,
PayPal

During the intervening time period, I did *not* add or change any bank account details, so something is DEFINITELY wrong here, although I am not even sure in what direction.

Has anyone else had similar problems? How can a person verify whether or not a communication is truly from PayPal or not?

Perhaps this is becoming relevant finally?

Websites around the world are getting a new computerized visitor among the Googlebots and Yahoo web spiders: The taxman. A five-nation tax enforcement cartel has been quietly cracking down on suspected internet tax cheats, using a sophisticated web crawling program to monitor transactions on auction sites, and track operators of online shops, poker and porn sites. …

Xenon is primarily a spider: a program that downloads a web page, then traverses its links and downloads those as well, ad infinitum. …

Hardyson said web crawling is well suited to tax enforcement.

“The internet is wide open for tools,” said Hardyson. “It’s much easier to handle than the real world.” …

Once the web pages are screen-scraped, Xenon’s Identity Information Extraction Module interfaces with national databases containing information like street and city names. It uses that data to automatically identify mailing addresses and other identity information present on the websites it has crawled, which it puts into a database that can be matched in bulk with national tax records.

This is certainly making me rethink my use of PayPal as a financial service. Once upon a time, banks and financial service providers existed to serve and protect their customers’ interests. We’ll see if that still holds true with them…

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