Ask HN: Has anyone noticed an increase in payments failure through PayPal

20 points by poutinepapi 2 years ago | 15 comments

Pretty much what it says on the tin, more and more often Paypal hangs on me, quits, etc...

I'm in the middle of moving some money around and seriously considering just taking out the cash and paying a mate to transport it.

I've also noticed some weird peaks on other bank systems, all in different places: Panama, Switzerland, South Africa, and Japan.

My question is the following: Have you noticed anything? Extra traffic? Longer wait times? More failed anything? How about credit cards? Any failed transactions?

And well, I'm an engineer, I want to know why, actually I want to know if something IS actually happening or if it's just because I'm very active user and therefore more in contact with.

Cheers, keep your rifles oiled.

Slava Ukraini! Heroyam Slava!

bensonn 2 years ago |

I had a recent experience with Venmo, owned by Paypal. Not sure if it is related but it was very frustrating.

I thought I already had Venmo so when I customer asked I said yes. Turns out I had a Zelle account. So I quickly set up Venmo. They did a business and personal account by default. I went through all the steps and Venmo said everything was working and ready.

The customer transferred me the money and boom, my account was frozen for "violating the ToS", no more explanation. They transferred money to an account Venmo said was fine. Transferring money IS their business so I thought it weird that this violated their ToS. Also weird that nothing violated the ToS until they had my money.

There is no phone number to call. Chat doesn't help.

londons_explore 2 years ago | |

Small claims court

toomuchtodo 2 years ago |

Can’t speak to PayPal, but my transfers between TransferWise and Chase are instant now vs failures or slowdowns. Highly recommend Wise if you can.

weird-eye-issue 2 years ago | |

Ironically I have an important transfer that was just delayed several days with Wise that is usually instant (from a linked account), but yes generally it's very good

poutinepapi 2 years ago | |

Cheers mate, will definitely look into Wise.

RagnarD 2 years ago |

I shut down my PayPal account after many years because of their increasingly questionable business practices and apparent general software incompetence.

I strongly advise not carrying around lots of cash, especially within the U.S. Legal or not, you'll be an automatic target of Civil Asset Forfeiture from corrupt police. A lot of people use Amazon gift cards. There's also always crypto.

logicalmonster 2 years ago | |

> I strongly advise not carrying around lots of cash,

It's a dumb idea to carry loads of cash for many reasons, but this shouldn't dissuade you from using physical cash as a tool for many day-to-day purchases.

While it has some bad properties (can be lost/stolen/damaged, can't be transmitted digitally, government can inflate it at will) it also has some properties that are also very valuable (relatively private, easy to trade and interact with compared to crypto and other forms of money, and can be relied on when the power goes out)

RagnarD 2 years ago | | |

Sure, agreed. But a few hundred bucks in cash (maybe) is extremely unlikely to be CAFed, exactly because everyone would see it for naked armed robbery by cops. But the cops count on the unusual individual carrying thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, knowing they can get away it.

weatherlight 2 years ago |

I tried to buy something from Steam yesterday and it hung for a while, a gave up and tried again today. May be unrelated.

poutinepapi 2 years ago | |

I took a look at Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/stats/content/

It looks fine, dark areas are dark, green areas are green.

Still, my antenitas de vinil are twitching, someone, somewhere fucked up I think, probably not important and probably already fixed, but it was a weird one.

Because I just helped a client set-up their Monero and put funds into it, no problem, zilch, smooth as butter.

So are ETH, BTC, and even fucking DOGE.

For a moment I thought that the Serbians had rushed into fucking Kosovo and were pulling a DDOS, I mean... Not the Serbians obviously, but you know.

So yeah, probably nothing, meeting a mate next week in London however, he's BT so I'll ask him if he's seen anything odd.

ThePowerOfFuet 2 years ago |

Paying someone to transport cash? If you're running drugs and guns, sure. Otherwise, www.wise.com.

poutinepapi 2 years ago | |

XD! Sorry, I was just exagerating :P I'm just moving my personal and companies money around, but because my company operates in several countries, I interact with financial systems a lot, that's why I noticed a pattern.

But like I said in my other comment(which already has 2 downvotes, well done bots), it looks like a fluke, and nothing important.

threesevenths 2 years ago |

Anecdotally, after a fresh pi-hole deployment, I am having trouble with PayPal loading on American sites. I am from Canada. It’s not just one platform such as Shopify but it seems to be PayPal itself because the popup window is the one that hangs.

Giorgi 2 years ago |

Yeah, it stopped accepting subscriptions and refuses to validate card I used to use for a years.

str3wer 2 years ago |

they have very high amounts of fraud going on so they made their antifraud crazy strict and it makes more false positives than actual detections