However, after three days it became apparent that the seller hadn't been paid, and at the same time I had an email from Paypal saying they had detected an "unusual transaction" on my account and had suspended it while they investigated. They said I should send them documentary evidence that i lived at my declared address in the USA, by sending utility bills etc (they weren't specific).
I should add that I am in Belize, my Paypal account and the corresponding bank account are in the US, the seller was in England and also called Jones, and I arranged for the camera to be sent to another friend in England who's coming over here shortly and can bring it with him. His name coincidentally is also Jones. So I can see that at a quick glance they might find the transaction confusing, but firstly it was only for just over $100 so it was hardly of any great significance, and secondly they have never asked me to explain the transaction. I am only assuming by juxtaposition that this is indeed the transaction they are balking over, because they haven't said.
Also noteworthy is that I have held this Paypal account for about 8 years and have used it extensively, with absolutely no problems until now. The bank account is only a couple of years old.
I wrote to them on their secure messaging service saying that they already had proof that the address I had registered was the address my bank used, and that I wasn't in a position to prove that I lived there. The reason I gave at that point was that to do that I would have to be at the address, and I wasn't and wouldn't be for quite some while.
It is of note that I have never lived in the USA and have never told eBay or Paypal that I do. I do have a registered address for bank statements and Paypal checked that out. There has never been any suggestion that to have a US Paypal account you have to live in the USA.
I received another message which I'm sure is computer generated even though it began "Hello, my name is Holly" or some such. I replied that the transaction had died because the seller wouldn't wait and I wanted my money back. I received an identically worded "reply", not even purporting to answer my substantive points and claiming to be from a different person.
I have since written to them three more times, using the secure messaging service because I know of no other way of contacting them, with identical responses. Except the last time I haven't received any reply at all, and it's now been 5 days.
Some two months have now elapsed since this all started.
So, my question is at several levels, but first and most importantly, does Paypal have any sort of physical corporate existence? Is there a physical address I can write to, or as I now feel inclined, deliver a writ to? They seem to be above any form of accountability. The amount that they have taken is only just over $100, but it could easily have been much more and they would still be sitting on it and stone-walling me. I regard their actions as possibly criminal and I want to take action against them, partly to get my money back and partly to expose them for the charlatans they are.
I should add that I had a similar experience, similar in some respects at any rate, with Washington Mutual Bank a couple of years ago. It emerged in that that although they provided a secure messaging service for a customer to contact them, those messages never went beyond the data processing department. I gave them instructions relating to a transaction that someone else had initiated and of course expected those instructions to be acted on. Instead they never reached my branch, who were the only people capable of doing anything on my account. This wasn't a one-off failing, it was structural and messages received via the secure website were NEVER sent on to anyone who could act on them. That bank deserved to fail and I'm glad they did, but I wonder whether this sort of preposterous internal structure is common in the US banking sector (Paypal of course being a bank).
Edited by peterbj7, 18 July 2009 - 09:56 PM.
