Just asking for some advice in dealing with Paypal here.
Way back in 2003–full disclosure here–I used Paypal to purchase a subscription to a porn site. (Yeah, stupid, juvenile, idiotic, I know.) I never questioned whether this was legit with Paypal or not; I just saw the Paypal logo on the site and assumed it must have been OK. It was a one-time thing, time passed, I never did anything like that again, and I soon forgot about it. I continued to use Paypal, very infrequently, for other, more mainstream uses, like buying household items on eBay.
Fast forward to 2007, yes, FOUR years later: Out of the blue, I get an email from Paypal saying my account has been locked. When I log in, after much difficulty navigating the account limitations section of their website, I finally reach a message saying that the reason was a Terms of Service violation for purchasing obscene material. The cited offense was this website subscription back in 2003. After searching the internet a bit, I discover references to a change in their ToS at some point; supposedly they used to allow purchases for obscene materials but don’t anymore. I was unable to find out exactly when the change had occurred, whether my purchase was against the ToS as they stood at the time or not.
I tried poking around their website and emailing them, but was unable to get a personal response. Around that time, I needed to buy something over eBay againn, so I created another Paypal account with a different credit card, but they must have linked the two accounts because they locked that one too.
In the meantime, I had no use for Paypal and forgot about it. However, I recently became interested in buying something over eBay again, so I decided to look into getting my account unlocked. I called them, and the customer service guy was pretty nice. He said that in this type of situation, the people who get their accounts locked are the ones who’ve received payment, and since I never received payment for anything which violated the ToS, my account shouldn’t have been locked. He said he’d send my appeal to the account limitations department, with a note that I’d never received any payment, and they’d get back to me yesterday or today.
I just got an email from them. It reads as follows:
I’m wondering whether there’s any chance here. Should I keep trying, or should I resign myself to being locked out of Paypal (and by extension, the many eBay vendors who accept only Paypal) for life? I know that, provided the aforementioned change to their ToS occurred before my purchase, I technically don’t have a leg to stand on; I violated their ToS and that’s that. I’m tempted to appeal to the notion that I didn’t know at the time–who actually reads those 10-pages-of-fine-print ToS’s?–but of course that’s no excuse. There’s also the fact that they locked my account 4 years later, out of the blue, which seems unfair, but again, they can just say no, you violated the ToS, tough beans for you.
I’d keep calling to beg and plead, but I don’t know whether it would be worth it, nor whether I’d ever be able to talk to anyone directly who had any authority. Has anyone else ever successfully gotten their account restored after something like this?