No. It is ALSO a problem that they are freezing accounts. They shouldn't be doing that. It's not really Paypal's job to pretend to be policing fraud in this way.
They have no business arbitrarily freezing accounts for months. None. It doesn't matter how much or how little customer support they have. That's wrong.
It is their job. They assume the risk, they have a responsibility to their shareholders and their legitimate customers and they have a regulatory responsibility to police fraud as best they can.
If paypal was letting chargebacks run out of control because they refused to police fraud they would have to raise the fee percentage to something like 10%, assuming they could even continue to have any sort of relationship with credit card processors. If that happened their customers would be screaming bloody murder and demanding they do something about fraud to keep things under control.
Not only that, but they would be shut down in just about every country in the world for helping to support terrorism and organized crime by failing at basic do diligence in stopping money laundering et al.
Every other payment processor does the same thing, dude. Especially when you go out of your way and violate the T&C (which as a practicing business, you have no excuse not to read and understand). If they say "You can't do X Y and Z" , where X is say, "Take payments for something that is greater than 20 days from shipping", and then you go ahead and do it anyways..
Welp. It's your own fault. Read the paperwork next time.
The freezes would be reduced to an inconvenience instead of an all-hands emergency if they didn't go out of their way to avoid talking to you. I cannot fathom what kind of boneheaded moron decided that an automatic system flagging your account means you are now persona-non-grata.
Not sure why you are using the words "you" and "your". I'm not the OP and never had my PayPal frozen. I just think they are being unreasonable. :) Also not sure why that opinion is being downvoted, but hey.
I reiterate: I don't care what their T&C says. It's not good business practice to freeze an account for months with no recourse. Period, paragraph.
I don't have a problem with them freezing accounts pending review, or with them going after fraud, etc.
What I do have a problem with is freezing accounts for 180 days with basically no input from their legitimate customers. Yes, I have had Paypal accounts frozen in the past. They are extremely trigger happy here and they do not work with their customers to unfreeze accounts or even get customer information for their review process. Every other processor I know of including ones which address high risk areas of processing (like porn sites), engages in such freezes largely on the short term while review is done in order to determine what steps need to be done in order to bring the site into compliance or terminate the account. In no case is money held for such a period of time or with so little feedback.
Hey! What's with all the down-voting in this thread? I understood HN was a place where down-voting was reserved for trolls, not disagreement ... and "good" down voters explain reasons not immediately obvious.
>Hey! What's with all the down-voting in this thread? I understood HN was a place where down-voting was reserved for trolls, not disagreement ... and "good" down voters explain reasons not immediately obvious.
It's also reserved for stupid, uneducated opinions. Saying that "no, they shouldn't freeze accounts, no matter what, full stop, regardless of how good their CS is" not only adds nothing to the discussion, it's completely silly and flies in the face of the very logical and sensical reasons why accounts are blocked.
I'll say it again here: The problem isn't the automated blocking (which all payment processors do), it's the lack of an appeals process.
They have no business arbitrarily freezing accounts for months. None. It doesn't matter how much or how little customer support they have. That's wrong.