PayPal Rolling Reserve - Anyone get hit by this?

Is anyone getting hit by the PayPal Rolling Reserve?

Examples: http://www.tamebay.com/2009/02/paypal-reserves-heres-whats-reall...

Apparently some sellers are getting hit by this where 6-20% of ALL incoming payments are being held for up to 6 months. For some big merchants, they're seeing $100k tied up by PayPal.

Just wondering if anyone on here has gotten hit by this. My SNAD/INR rate is very very low (<.1%) so I haven't seen this on my account.

That article was from the UK.

I just got hit with a 20% 60-day rolling reserve today, effective in 30 days from now.

I am very very very disappointed. 1/5th of all my payments being locked from my business's cash flow is very detrimental when my company receives only a 25% commission from being the middleman of contracted sellers through our business.

I am wondering if this is something that Paypal is implementing on everyone, or a select few with a chargeback history, or those selling in a certain industry?

It is not only the seller's money they are holding longer, they are also holding the buyer's dispute money longer.

A year ago a seller never shipped me an item and Paypal refunded me in a few days.

A month ago, a scamming seller never mailed me an item and Paypal still has not refunded my money. The seller's last page of feedback all says the same thing: "seller did not mail item, seller entered an invalid USPS tracking number into Paypal". If I click on the Paypal tracking number for my item USPS says it is an invalid number. Paypal's response is that the item is in transit and I have to wait for it to arrive.

update: it took 7 weeks for my money to be returned.

Was the original payment refunded or did the seller refund through the "send money" tab?

Getting Unhappy with Paypal. Looking for another company to do business with.

I would like to balance my accounting books, but the pay pal interface and transaction ledger make it very difficult to do so. Also the rolling reserve balance is frustrating because I have to account for funds being available at a future date.

Where is the standard running current balance column to the far right? That column is imperative as a marker to see when the account was last balanced with my own records. In addition, the Cash Back bonuses and the fees are hidden within expanding boxes, so I have to click the little plus button to expand each one. And! I can't have more than one expanded at a time.

Also, I am not in favor of the new rolling reserve. I could understand withholding some of my funds as insurance if I had a history of reversed payments/charge backs, but I have never had one! I accept payments for my web design services via pay pal. I have never sold anything on eBay. Seeing what others got hit with though, I am now happy that I only got hit with a 10%, 30 day rolling reserve.

What if I want to close my account and withdraw all of my funds? I can't withdraw all of MY money. I could understand a 5 day hold or even a 10 day hold. But 30 days is ridiculous. I am considering no longer using pay pal because of the rolling reserve and difficult interface. Paypal already deducts about 3% of my money for using their service, now I feel that they are holding my money hostage so that they can collect interest off of a fat rolling reserve account. Not happy.

Ha ha! Look what I found: http://www.paypalsucks.com/

Also, this seems cool: http://www.obopay.com

I just got hit with too - it's a whole new level of PayPal suckage. Oh well - if I get a chargeback, they're gonna lose a lot more than the 20% they hit me for - I'll make sure of it.....

A Big lawsuit is on the way as October 2009 because of the paypal rolling reserve scam, paypal may be making as much as 140 million dollars a month for the money held for 1 year. Paypal is doing many of these "reserve" scams for 6 months, here is the skinny:

It is impossible to use credit cards on eBay, with fear strategy which makes buyers believe that eBay purchases safe if using paypal. Try to use credit cards so you the nightmare, plus nobody will buy because of the fear monopoly strategy. If credit cards were not safe why people use them for so many years?

Any reserve applied has to be to cover a certain number of transactions, paypal is collecting money from sellers to cover hundreds of transactions per account, where have you seen that paypal or eBay will allow hundreds of transactions and the account still open? They have now started to show warning in many more accounts, taking up to 20% for 6 months. Nowhere in paypal or eBay a policy says 20% or 6 months, nowhere, when someone makes these policies out of the air and without any other choice for the merchant, that is monopoly, illegal and very dishonest for both companies.
About 80,000 sellers and buyers have been victims of this scam.
Why is this a scam? the rolling reserve has one purpose, to have a certain amount dedicated to cover any possible claims for merchants who receive many claims or with high number of transactions, paypal does not use the rolling reserve money to solve any claims, they take other money from the merchant to cover any claims using no money from the rolling reserve at all.

Paypal will never look at the nature of these claims, even scam claims are used as excuse and they will extend the claims for many weeks just to keep additional money to cover the claim, never will use any reserve money, so sellers are getting screwed double. The money paypal makes in interest is in the hundreds of millions, they also use the money as collateral to sell the scam servics to other companies.
Paypal claims the money makes no interest for them.

Seller beware, Paypal is not a bank, is not a financial institution which guarantees your money, if they decide to do a bail out scam or go out of business, your money is gone, they are not a insured bank nor have any authorization to take people's money, no company in the USA can do this without following certain rules which protect merchants and users. Many people are now having enough money taken that is now worth it to sue them, please share your cases here and hopefully the admin of this blog can put a big single law suit as well. Do not allow paypal or eBay to make use of your hard earned money, you made them, they owe you. Do something, reseach or join forces if you are unable to do your own case, do not allow them to keep doing this, even if you are not part of the rolling reserve scam, soon you may and you want to avoid this. Thank you

tlaxson said: PayPalScum, rolling reserves are very common for merchant account holders. This is nothing new in the world of ecommerce, or B&M commerce for that matter.

Regarding the "where does it say the terms of the reserve", per the PayPal UA, if you are subject to a reserve you are notified at that time of the terms. Your account may require a smaller or larger reserve and a longer or shorter hold time.

You do not have to use PayPal. As you very clearly do not like it, go find yourself a merchant account. If/when you do, please let us know how the terms of the account compare. I.e., rates, and any reserve requirement, etc.
Rolling reserves exist for merchant account holders, but:

* they are not common,
* if you don't like the rolling reserves you can try switching to a different merchant account,
* the reserves are not as high as 20%,
* they are based upon your history, not randomly placed on accounts which have never had a chargeback,
* the imposition of reserves is discussed in advance, not after the fact,
* the reserves are a percentage of sales, sellers on eBay are reporting that eBay is demanding an immediate fixed sum payment. Large sellers have reported been asked to immediately send eBay $100,000,
* merchant accounts allow you to decline the reserve and to stop selling, eBay sellers have reported when they decided to stop selling, eBay has refused to refund the reserve saying that the reserve is a lifetime reserve.

And, when eBay goes bankrupt your money may disappear because your account is not FDIC insured.

They have put 20% on my account for 60 days. We are a UK company and i'm pretty sure this is illegal for merchant banks to do. We put £1M through our merchant bank each year and have never had a reserve put on our funds. We are a very good customer and they would never consider doing this. Paypal on the other hand have put this reserve on our account for no aparent reason. They will not respond to any emails ( 5 sent). This is pure greed as they are ONLY doing this to increase their own investment funds.
If they were doing this properly and were not doing it PURELY FOR GREED they could easily look at each accounts previous 6 month sales history and look at the % of chargebacks. I would guarantee that 99% of accounts would not be over 1% chargebacks - so why have we been hit with 20%.

Paypal are a monopoly on eBay and this needs to be seriously looked at. It is basically criminal activity and theft.

I have been hit with some kind of PayPal hold. I will not link a bank account to my PayPal account for security reasons, I can only make withdraws by check.

PayPal has demanded a copy of my driver's license, my credit card statement, and my telephone bill. I have Faxed them all this information to them, but they still will not send me a check and they will not respond to any of my e-mails.

I don't think PayPal is holding all of this money to receive a few percent interest on the money. I don't believe PayPal is depositing this money into a bank account. eBay is buying back a lot of their stock, they could be using the money to buy eBay stock.

Also, what are the benefits to switching to a merchant account.

I’ve been using Paypal since June 2001, got 100% eBay feedback, average monthly sales $5,000/month. How in the world I got 30% Rolling Reserves?
I need justification please…