PayPal Why You Do This To Me?

The story begins in mid 2008 when I was on a 1 year contract position, working as Mobile Specialist in Germany. I opened up my first ever PayPal account and happily linked it to my German bank account. Everything was working flawlessly.

I made few purchases using PayPal, and also I managed to sell my Nokia N96 to get Nokia 5800XM (Nokia’s first touch input device) using eBay, and received payment of it in my PayPal.

When my contract was over, I started to roll my stuff, and found out from my German bank (Dresdner bank at that time which was in-transition to merged with Commerzbank) that I can keep my account open and use it from overseas via internet banking. I was really happy, that I can still use PayPal and my future European clients can pay to my German account easily.

I headed back to my homeland Pakistan in May 2009, and kept using PayPal for small payments for our web hosting services and domain name renewals. My same PayPal account is also used to accept payments from 99designs.com where my younger brother Najam has won some logo design competitions.

As some of my fellows in Flash and mobile developer communities know that we have recently published couple of apps for BlackBerry PlayBook, and we got quite a success from them so far. The payments of App World are also sent to my PayPal as it’s the only option for App World developers.

In last week of June 2011, I received an email from PayPal that my yearly money receiving limit is reaching (2500 euros) I was at 1800 euros from (August 2010). They asked my proof of identity and proof of address. I sent them a copy of my Passport and my recent German bank statement which shows my current address.

The address didn’t match the address in PayPal profile, as I never updated it in PayPal because Pakistan is not in countries list. So, I tried to add the address in PayPal profile and sent them the statement again. I called the PayPal (Ireland) support as well, as they deal with German PayPal accounts. They told me that I should wait for reply via email.

Now, I got a reply, that says:

After reviewing your PayPal account, we’ve determined there to be excessive
risk involved and would like to begin parting ways in a manner that is
least disruptive to your business.

I logged in to my PayPal account and found one additional note:

This limitation cannot be appealed.

Googled it and found that this is it. I cannot use PayPal anymore. Even I have a German bank account which legally allows me to use it from anywhere, and I am providing my proof of ID and correct address, PayPal don’t want to use my account anymore. There were no complaints filed against my account in past. It’s a clean PayPal account with limited number of transactions.

We recently planned that we exclusively target PlayBook device for our current development as there’s really lack of quality and good looking apps and games. Making our chances more than double compared to already filled iPad and Android markets.

We have been forced to stop here. It’s an unfortunate situation. PayPal for some reason does not support Pakistan, while they support many other Asian and African countries which are almost equal to or even worse than Pakistan’s political or stability situation.

I would have never used PayPal more if App World allowed to directly send funds to my local bank account. For now, I am thinking of asking a German friend who can accept my payments from App World for a month or two, then we are going to pull back from App World until they start paying directly to bank account.

I think it’s time that I start finding a job overseas again :/

Update “€œ Aug 2011

Okay, my PayPal account is now permanently blocked. PayPal opened it for 3 days again to let me withdraw my remaining fund to my linked German bank account. Now I’m done with PayPal.

I got the good news from RIM as well, as they agreed to offer me direct transfer of funds to my bank account. They sent me a contract, and it’s currently in progress of being activated.

We are now back on AppWorld development, and have couple of apps under development to the PlayBook. Thanks for RIM for listening to us.

// chall3ng3r //