C'mon PayPal - get your act together!

[MWmetalhead]

So, for the first time in a long time, I used my PayPal account for a couple different transactions over the past week.

I used it to transfer money from a shopping rewards app to my checking account, and I also used it to claim a free $8 from PayPal.

To confirm ACH electronic transfer ability, PayPal made two immaterial deposits into my checking account. Not at all unusual. This is rather standard procedure when setting up online banking or account transfer ability.

Here's where it gets interesting - the auto-generated email sent to my email address notifying me of the test deposits, and instructing me to go back to paypal.com to enter each of the two deposit amounts to complete the account setup process - contained two or three glaring grammatical errors! Immediately, I thought it could be a phishing email. As such, I definitely did NOT click on any link in the email message, even though the underlying URL (when hovering over it) came from the paypal.com domain.

Instead, I opened a fresh browser session, went to paypal.com, logged in as usual, and was given the option of confirming the two small deposit amounts that way. (A tile appeared on my dashboard page upon log in.)

The point I'm making is this - if you are going to use offshore help to aid in software programming, as PayPal is clearly doing, why not have at least some QUALITY CONTROL so that legitimate email messages cannot be mistaken for malignant PHISHING attempts? (Rant mode off.)

[km1125]

Yea, that's insane. Just a bit of QC is all that's needed. Maybe they did QC and the folks doing it were largely a result of the educational system.

I've had and used PayPal for a LONG time, but getting more and more disillusioned by it and wonder what other electronic payment system would be better to migrate over to.

[MotorCityRadioFreak]

And this is why I have Venmo instead of Paypal.

Ironically, I had a friend who was being phished all weekend by a Paypal spoofer.

[Graham Wellington]

And this is why I have Venmo instead of Paypal.

Ironically, I had a friend who was being phished all weekend by a Paypal spoofer.

Venmo is owned by PayPal.

[MotorCityRadioFreak]

And this is why I have Venmo instead of Paypal.

Ironically, I had a friend who was being phished all weekend by a Paypal spoofer.

Venmo is owned by PayPal.

That's true, but the scammers still mainly use Paypal as their spoofer, so yeah....

[bmw]

I have a grammar story like that from about 4 years ago. I received a 3-page notice (on yellow paper) from the state of Michigan alleging I owe them a bunch of money in sales and use tax. The grammar, spelling, punctuation, and letter spacing (multiple words crammed together without spaces in between) were so bad I thought it was a scam. It literally looked like someone prepared it on a typewriter. So I called the state (at a verified phone number I found online), and yep - it was legit. They were complaining that I didn't file my annual sales tax return (even though I had already filed each of my quarterly returns, making the annual return seem redundant, so I didn't even know I had to file one). They must have high-school drop-outs preparing these letters.

As to Paypal, I've been using it since 2000 (so 22 years now) and have never had any significant issues with them. I use them for ebay, newegg, and Vitacost purchases, and probably a few others I can't think of at the moment. I also use their Paypal Here service to process credit cards for my business - no issues there either except it is a bit of a hassle having to verify my identity by receiving a text message and entering the code from it every time I want to run a credit card.

[MotorCityRadioFreak]

Ninety percent of the scams these people try to pull are on email. The rest are text. Almost all of the time, the issue is rectified by going to Paypal's log in yourself and seeing the alleged fradulent charges are fake.