Paypal Claims

[polishdog90]

I filed a paypal claim against a guy who never gave me the product I ordered, and I was wondering what happens if they don't respond back. Does Paypal just automatically give you your money back or do they have to do it?

[jonfitzsimon]

paypal goes after them. If they dont respond, they send it to a collection company. it might take a while, but stay on paypal's @ss and you will get your money back. eventually.

[luminary pants]

Yeah, your claim doesn't even involve paypal at this point.
A claim is just a more strict letter from you, to the person that owes you money, through paypal. Paypal is not actually telling them to pay you yet.
You have to escalate the claim first, and then paypal will start doing something about it.

[Apples]

I used to work at PayPal and a large portion of my job touched on their claims area.


First and foremost, you should always fund your transactions with a credit card, despite PayPal's insistence on bank accounts. It will give you an added method of recourse if you get scammed. If the worst case scenario occurs, you will still have a chargeback available with the credit card company.

As for your claim, recovery of anything is not guaranteed. If the other party doesn't respond, they will find in your favor, but they can only recover what is in his account balance. (Meaning you can get nothing if they've already withdrawn the money.) There are also varous methods they can use to dodge claims, so there's a lot of uncertainty.

There's a certain percentage of the time where the recipient just made an honest mistake, and a claim will correct that. But that percentage is pretty low, and during the holiday time of year fraudsters come out of the woodwork like no other.


I am glad to be out from under their morally bankrupt roof. Their mess of policies aren't at all interested in protecting users from fraud, only in protecting themselves from lawsuits and chargebacks.