Sunday, July 18, 2010

Paypal Problem in the Philippines 5

The only question my friend asks about this Paypal limited access issue is that is this really necessary when the same procedure was done for his other card and there was no issue with that before?

Did he do something wrong?

Did he trigger an event to cause this kind of alert?

If yes, what is it?

Would Paypal release an official statement or guideline on telling its patrons what sort of actions will result to a limited access account and what can they do about it? What's the best possible way to avoid it? What's the worst case scenario if you can't fix it? I guess another reason why this can be frustrating is that there's really no live person you can talk to give you assurance that "hey, your Paypal account is not really hacked or that your money can still be returned". One has to correspond to an electronically-generated something that will give you a very general response.

The information available currently is not sufficient also to help a disgruntled customer. If you search for "Paypal limited account access", the first site you will encounter as of this date (July 19, 2010) is "AboutPaypal.org" and a letter from a person named "Joesphine" with an introduction of "Hi There Fellow Paypal Bitten Friends". My friend and I said that just from that statement we know that this will not be a pretty story or that we won't find that much answer as well. At the right side bar of the posts, similar stories about Paypal can be found with a very explicit title of "Paypal Horror Stories". That makes it a double whammy for us. Example of sub-stories under the title mentioned are "Beware of Paypal, Paypal steals money, Paypal Account Hijacked, Virus Alert". All my friend and I can say is "Oh no..."

Luckily, the second post after googling the issue offered a solution. It is entitled "PayPal Limited Account Access Solution" from Hongkiat.com. This site enumerates the following:
a. What’s PayPal Limited Access Account
b. Solving Limited Access Account
c. Information Insufficiency

The exact link where you can get information is http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/paypal-limited-account-access-solution/.

After reading this article, my friend says he felt hopeful. It seems there is still light at the end of this very dark tunnel. However, there are some information being asked to solve this issue that is quite sensitive. So my friend wanted to know if anybody has done what the people from Hongkiat.com suggested and how did it turn out from them.

The third site we found is from http://www.jayceooi.com. The site offered general information with a disclaimer from the author that said "Hopefully, this guide will help some of you. As I said, I did not face PayPal limited account access before. Not facing the actual problem will be hard for me to guide those are facing it now." We were thinking, hhmmmmm. Well, that's why the answer he provided was safe. However, there were comments below the article so we decided to read on.

One comment that we found interesting was written by Lelouch. It says "i read in lowyat forum that you can call paypal office in singapore.but why? what for? and how to submit those documents? can submit it through email (scan ver.) or you must send mail directly to them.and what if i fail to remove the limitation? what happen to my money? if my account is Premier account, is it vulnerable to limitation too? or the limitation is only applicable to Personal account?"

With a very brief answer after from Jayce, "Woo. You really got lot of questions. Sorry, I don’t know the answer for your questions."

Okay, well the honesty is appreciated. Anybody then? Any brave soul?

Nilai3 voiced our concern when she asked "mine affected also few months ago. Until now still not solve yet. I am scare when they ask for some evidence like IC or Driving license. Is it safe to scan over our important doc to them?". This time Jayce had a better answer when he said "@nilai3: I did scan and email over my credit card to my web hosting for verification. Just make sure that you cross 2 lines and stated that it is for PayPal use only." To which Nilai responded "Thanks for your help. I will apply a visa debit card and email to them. Still need to play safe"

Well the rest of the comments from the thread sounds really interesting. However, we thought of what Nilai3 said and we figured applying for a new visa debit card will be troublesome for my friend at the moment. My friend and I also cannot figure out also how is it safer since wouldn't he be using his personal information with that as well? And since according to my friend's Paypal account, he needs to verify his address, then how can a visa debit card help when no bank statements are provided with his address on it here in the Philippines. Well, that's the case of debit cards here in the Philippines as we are currently aware of.

Thus, we decided we to limit our search for people in the Philippines who have encountered a similar problem before. Watch out on what we found out on our next series of unfortunate events with Paypal in tomorrow's blog.

No comments:

Post a Comment