"PayPal" Topic

I haven't ever seen this nonsence before. I place an order with a miniatures company in Canada, and PayPal decided to put a 72 hour hold on my payment to review my purchase. Here's what PayPal sent me:

To comply with government regulations, PayPal is required to review certain transactions. The payment you sent is currently being reviewed and we will complete this process within 72 hours. This review only involves this transaction and does not affect the use of your PayPal account.

Marry blank-ing X-mas PayPal.

I believe I was on the receiving end of one of those before when I was waiting for payment from an ebay sale.

Same happened to me as a seller. No big deal.

I don't get why it's necessary in the first place.

Probably to comply with some aspect of Anti-Money Laundering legislation.

Paypal started putting everything on my credit card (my back up funding source) instead of taking it directly from my account.
In some cases it takes 8 days for the payment to clear.
This started around Christmas.
I reentered my payment info and in a few days it was back to normal.
I'm still not sure why this occurred.

Paypal has a bad reputation for stuff like this. They've been known to freeze accounts and confiscate funds for any reason or no reason at all. People often attribute it to various sinister motives, but the bottom line is that all these billions of transactions are processed by Skynet and it uses random-ass algorithms to identify suspicious transactions. Then a human being has to intervene when it flags a legitimate transaction.

The exact same thing happens on Google or Facebook or pretty much anything else run by computers. Its tempting to say that humans should be responsible for this kind of stuff, but (setting aside the logistics of doing that) as faulty as they are, I still trust computers more than I trust humans. At least a computer screws people consistently and without malice.