My experience of withdrawing money from a blocked PayPal account

For about 3 years I have been doing Internet commerce. The work is mainly aimed at foreign sites selling electronics. I started the business by opening an ebay account and even then the question became an edge, because To work with ebay you need a verified PayPal account. I am a citizen of Ukraine, therefore, I had no chance to open my own account, because PayPal neither then nor now works with Ukraine, so I had to ask a friend who lives in the UK to open an account in his name. In principle, opening an account in England is a matter of routine. All that is required is a valid bank account, after which you need to go through several steps in order to confirm that you are the owner of this account. You also indicate your address, which may be asked to confirm. For this, it will be enough to send the so-called Bank Statement, i.e. bank statement. It looks something like this:

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In addition to verifying your address, they may ask for proof of identity, for this it will be enough to send a copy of your passport or driver’s license.

For a citizen of the country in which he opens a PayPal account, all these steps are not problematic, and a completely “ready-made" account can be obtained within a week after its opening. This happened in my case, the account was created very quickly, the data (password and login) was transferred to me, and a week after that I traded on ebay with a full verified account. There were a lot of operations on the account, about 200x-300x per month. After receiving money from the client, I needed to send part of the money to the supplier, while the profit remained to be on the account. At first it suited me. A friend wrote off the profit to the bank account attached to the account, then from his account made a transfer to my bank (Wire transfer).

Then, however, relations between us began to deteriorate on the basis of another joint business, and after a while we stopped communicating. By this time, in addition to an ebay account, I already had a full-fledged site that brought good profit. Naturally, the site provided for payment by credit cards, but still a large percentage of transactions (about 60%) went through my stealthPayPal account. What I did not know. I read on forums about how people withdraw to VCC (virtual credit cards), but in my case it was about other amounts of money and I did not want to risk it. And recently, PayPal completely banned the possibility of withdrawing to virtual cards - now you can withdraw money only to a bank account in your country. In general, the amount was accumulating, I read more and more about how accounts were closed just like that and funds were frozen on them, but I could not do anything about it, every day there was a risk that my account could be closed and the money was frozen.

The problem resolved by itself when I arrived in England to study. I immediately opened my own PayPal account, transferred money from the old accounts and withdrew it through my bank. It is also worth mentioning that during the withdrawal, although you do not pay a fee, you can still lose a pretty decent amount if we say the money on your account in US dollars, because according to the rules of PayPal.co.uk you can write off money to your account only in pounds. Say, if you have $ 10,000 and a British bank account to which you want to write off this money, then at the beginning this amount will be converted into pounds sterling, and then debited to your bank account. Admittedly, PayPal is far from the best course. But these costs cannot be avoided only if you have not opened an account in America.

At this stage, I actually come to the main topic of this post. I transferred the main amount to my personal account, but nevertheless left a decent amount on the old account for several reasons. Firstly, many business partners knew this address and constantly used it to create invoices that I needed to pay weekly. Secondly, most customers also knew this address and sent money directly. Thirdly, I constantly needed money that I could send at any time, so I could not just take and write off all the money to my bank account. In general, for these reasons, a fairly large amount of money remained on the old PayPal account.
Everything was fine, until yesterday, when I received the following message from PayPal:

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My old account was blocked due to the fact that my friend tried to open another account in his own name, and you can’t categorically do this according to the PayPal rules (maybe he didn’t do this intentionally, just forgetting that there is already one account in his name )
At the moment, I could not receive or send money, I could still write off money, but this option does not suit me for obvious reasons.
The following actions: I call PayPal support, try to explain that this is my account and that I did not open another account. I’m going through a small check, it’s good that I know all the details about the account owner, such as address, security questions, date of birth, etc. After checking, the support asks about 6 questions of the same type: “Did anyone have access to your account besides you?”, “Did you suspect that someone could hack your account?” etc. I answered all the questions in the negative, now I think, was it right to answer that way? In any case, after a few hours I receive an email:

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And also wrote below:
“Money in your PayPal account will be held for 180 days. After 180 days, we'll email you information on how to receive your funds. ”

After that, everything else was blocked from writing off money to the bank and making refunds (that is, returning money to customers). It turns out I wanted the best, it turned out even worse. I was thinking about trying to still ask a friend to withdraw funds, but now it was too late.
I sat on the forums and realized that PayPal does not touch the money, it just freezes them and after 180 days I will have the opportunity to write them off to a credit card assigned to my account. But I could not wait 180 days, firstly, I urgently need this money, and secondly, even if I wait 180 days, the only way I can return the money is to withdraw it to my friend’s bank account. So I came up with one tricky scheme.

The fact is that among the people with whom I work, there are those with whom I have pretty good relations and they transfer money to me on an ongoing basis. The idea was this: write to the client with a request to open a dispute for his last transaction, after which the money should have been returned back to his account and he, in turn, had to transfer the same amount to my new account. Thus, I expected that after successful communication with 10-15 clients, I would manage to “transfer” money from one account to another in this way. However, here it was necessary to take into account 2 points.

The first is why I began to write to clients that they themselves open disputes, and not just click on the Issue refund button on the transaction page ?:

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This of course would be much simpler and more convenient for me and for the clients themselves. However, as I wrote above, the Refund option was blocked, i.e. the same fragment on the page looked like this:

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Issue a refund button disappeared. Therefore, the only thing left was to ask customers to initiate disputes themselves.
The second point is that you can open a dispute on a transaction you have made only within 45 days after transferring money from your account to the seller’s account. As I said, I knew many clients quite well and they made translations quite often, unfortunately with less frequency than every 45 days.
As a result, I wrote to all clients who transferred money to me during the last 45 days and asked them to open disputes. I waited a little, and now, the first dispute came, and what was my surprise when I realized that I couldn’t even return the money to the client, when I tried it I just got the inscription: “Your account is blocked and you cannot make a refund for 180 days . ” Immediately I sent them a letter and after a few hours received an answer:

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This did not suit me, since no one would send me money before getting theirs back, how long to wait until PayPal makes a refund is not clear, most likely it will take a very long time as usual . The only way out was to call PayPal and somehow try to negotiate.

Before the call, I remembered how I read recently very informativeThe forum on Ebay and Paypal stumbled there on one post where one of the PayPal users managed to beg support to remove the limit from his account. His nickname is missbesos, and I was still very amused by his phrase:
“So i called“ again ”and asked about my money, they said 180 days ... so I played the victim and told them“ I really need this money for my kids / rent / food and i am unemployed blah blah »... rep was nice, heard me like crying, cry if you have to..i did it for my 1k + and worked! money in my hand within 7 days ”.
However, even before the call, I firmly decided that if I suddenly couldn’t manage to agree on a normal one, I would cry and say that, they say, a poor guy from another country with his wife and children and I need to pay rent and food. Well, what would you do in my place?

I call in support. I start the conversation by saying that I have a large number of clients who transferred money to me, but I did not have time and could not provide them with services, because my account was blocked, and I really need the Issue option to work a Refund.
The girl asks to wait and after 2 minutes informs me that the option was unlocked and now I can make refunds to clients myself. I say thank you and refresh the page. Indeed, in boxing What can I do while my account is limited? The item Send Refunds has appeared.

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After that, I made refunds to all clients whom I trust and who completed the transaction in the last 60 days. Exactly 60! I described a little higher that the buyer can open a dispute within 45 days, but the seller has 15 days to return the money. I don’t know what this time difference is specifically related to. Therefore, I did not just achieve that I was able to make refunds myself, but I also got the opportunity to withdraw money from customers who made purchases 45-60 days ago. There were quite a few of them.

A decent portion of the total amount has been deducted. However, there was still money left and there was no one to write to me. That is, if I wrote to a simple client that I did not know, there was a chance that after closing the dispute he would never have sent me a payment again. I was only interested in clients whom I could trust and was sure that they would make a re-payment. I was very much limited by the 60-day return limit. However, I decided to try contacting PayPal again, and with the phrase “cry if you have to”dialed the support number. There is nothing special to tell in detail, I explained the situation and said that I want to return the money to the client who completed the transaction 4 months ago and asked how to do it. I was asked a couple of questions about when exactly the transaction was made, how much money was transferred to me and what is the name of the sender of the transfer. He waited on the line for about 2 minutes and the guy informed me that the money was debited. That’s the principle and all that I wanted to tell.

Bottom line: Any system can be circumvented, and especially PayPal. Readeven that you can threaten them and they themselves can withdraw money. I intend to try this option the other day - for this purpose I specially left a small amount of money. If there is an opportunity, I will tell you with pleasure what I did. In any case, you need to read and try it yourself. I hope my method of returning money from a limited account helps someone.

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