Ebay and Paypal

Help retire Australian sellers

During the past week Paypal have informed a number of australian ebay sellers that since their monthly takings are in excess of $10,000 they need to fill out this additional merchant information on paypal... All you had to do was to click on this link...

No Fishing(Phishing) here

My initial reaction when I received the first call was to believe this was a phishing tactic employed by some corrupt Nigerian president who happened to be related to me and some distant relative which needs my immediate help. However hovering over the link revealed a correct paypal address, so i copied the link to the address bar to check for redirection and there was no redirection.. so this must be genuine ....

Ebay sale

The users received this message to state that there were funds from a ebay sale and that the funds had cleared but they needed to manually accept the payment in paypal.
when you log into paypal you can see the funds but they were not in your account, the funds had cleared but not available...

all attempts to find where we needed to fill out the merchant information amounted to nothing. I suggested to the ebayers that they call the customer to inform them that there is a problem with paypal and to cancel the transaction and to pay by Bank deposit.

next morning the ebayers called paypal and they were told to send the item to the customer and that the money was there and that it will be clear in 24-72 hours later. NO way should any seller send without receiving the money...

ebay have now put up a notice indicating problems with echeques and that they are working on the problem....

1/ how safe is paypal
2/ is there a real problem with echeques and if so how did it happen what changed was implemeneted to make the system crash
3/ was it someone who had hacked the supposedly safe paypal system
4/ was this a tactic employed by paypal to start getting people to send items before payment has cleared and this was the first attempt to change the behaviour

I am guessing one of either 3 or 4 are correct, which one, ebay and paypal will never admit....


written by One on One Training

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