It used to be you could send money through PayPal on a guest account. It was a one time use account where you entered your credit card information and who you were sending the money to.
But I just went to PayPal and I can’t find that option. The only choices are log in to your account or create an account. I tried googling but the most recent page I could find that talked about suing guest accounts was from 2015.
Have guest accounts been discontinued? Or if the option still exists, where can I access it?
Yes, I think I’ve seen this. If the person who you’re sending money to has a PayPal account, they can set it up to receive money from people using guest accounts.
Even if you send someone a request for payment they will need to create an account to pay it if they don’t already have one.
You used to be able send payments via Paypal without creating an account but AFAIK that is no longer possible from any country. For a while you still could from the US and a few other countries but it seems they’ve stopped allowing it anywhere.
There’s really no meaningful difference though. Previously as a ‘guest’ you still had to fill out a big form with your name, address, email, phone number, CC number, etc. Even if they didn’t create an account for you based on that information you were still giving all of it to them in order to use their service for the one-time payment.
So now you have to fill out that exact same form but with the addition of choosing a password and they create an account whether you want it or not.
In doing my treasurer work with the rescue groups, and often donating to other groups, I noticed that Paypal was irritatingly - and in my opinion, deliberately - obfuscating that feature. Sometimes I could send money without logging in or creating an account, other days the link just was not there. Maybe they’ve permanently removed the link by now, I don’t know. However, the vendor can email you a Paypal invoice that you can then pay without an Paypal account just by entering your credit card info. This does of course put the onus of the payment on the vendor (which is fine for businesses, not so much for someone who just wants donations).
Another little bit of evil is that they allow you to send money to an invalid email address. The funds get socked away somewhere, and if the payee realizes what happened and knows the email address you sent money to, they can then attach the fake/mistyped email address to their account to finally receive the funds. I can’t help wondering how much in revenue Paypal gets from mis-sent funds that are never retrieved like this, though.