I tried adding a new bank account to one of my PayPal accounts today and wanted it to be savings account in my name. So I went through all the steps and found that the Direct Debit mandate it wanted to set up was in the business name and not my name as I wanted it to be, with no way of changing this.

There was an e-mail address listed for help with the direct debit mandate, so I contacted them from my regular e-mail address @ my domain. I received this reply:

“Thank you for contacting PayPal. My name is Katherine and it is an opportunity to assist you today.

“PayPal works hard to protect our customers, and uses many security measures to help ensure your protection. For this reason, we can only send answers for account related information when the request comes from an email address that is associated with your PayPal account. We feel that this is the best way to ensure that your personal information is not compromised.”

Fair enough, I suppose. So I replied using an e-mail address of registeredpaypal account @ my domain. Imagine my joy upon receiving this reply:

“For security reasons, we are unable to answer all enquiries that we receive by email. In those circumstances, and in order to maintain the integrity of an account, we need to make sure that we are speaking directly to the account holder. In order to assist you, we recommend that you contact us by telephone at 08707 307 191 and we will be more
than happy to clarify the matter with you.”

So why couldn’t they say that the first time and/or amend their website accordingly?

And I won’t even start on the way they’re not currently adding VAT to website payments as they used to…

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