(no subject)

[plonq]

Lately I've started getting email from PayPal regarding my account.  The first couple I simply discarded as spam (or phishing) because, as far as I knew, I didn't have a PayPal account.  The emails continued to come though, with the latest one telling me that if I didn't agree with their new puritanical policies and swear my undying love for Jesus, they would suspend my account.

Yesterday I finally decided to follow up on one of the emails and learn what was going on with this phantom account of mine.  What the heck, if I didn't know that I had the account then maybe there was also a balance that I had forgotten about too.  I went to the PayPal site, plugged in my email address and then paused over the password.  Obviously I had no idea what my password was for an account that I didn't know I had, but I took a random stab at what I figured was a likely password for me.  It worked.

Hm.

I clicked "yes" for all of the asinine terms they wanted me to agree with and then jumped into my account profile.    No balance, alas.  There were some odd things about the account, though.  There was no bank information, no credit card information - nothing.  It was just a blank PayPal account with no financial links in or out.  Another interesting note is that according to the account information I live in Tennessee.  That puzzled me for a moment before it all came back to me again.

I'd tried to sign up for a PayPal account a few years ago so that I could donate money to the tiger sanctuary that had suffered a serious fire.  In spite of having no warnings about it on their main page, PayPal did not give accounts to us filthy foreigners with our funny money.  Everything went fine until I tried to fill in my address, and there was only space for a zip code.  I tried getting around that by putting in a zip code for Tennessee, but then it choked on my credit card number.  Their site flagged it as a foreign card, and informed me in fairly terse terms that PayPal was by Americans, for Americans and I should kindly fark off.

... and that was the last dealings I'd had with them until yesterday.  In retrospect I'm glad that the site didn't let me sign up my credit card and bank account the first time around because quite frankly, the more I hear about them the less I want to deal with them.  I've been meaning to thank them for not letting me sign up the first time.

Comments

[plonq.livejournal.com]

On the off chance that it was a phishing site, I fired up the browser and manually went to the PayPal site rather than clicking on the link in the email. Whether the email was legitimate or not, I DO have a half-assed account at PayPal. I'm mildly tempted to get a disposable credit card with a stupidly low credit limit and put the account to some kind of nefarious use.