I will never recommend or refer anything I do not stand by.
All content on this site is to be human written with absolutely no AI generated content.
I’m not a financial advisor and cannot provide any financial advice.

Happy Money Monday!

Today I’m going to write about PayPal and it’s conveniences as well as some of it’s dangerous problems.

PayPal has several financial services. They have payment processing for online businesses, pay later services (which I’ll discuss another time) money transfers, and even international wiring, invoices

PayPal.com centralizes most of their services except for notably, Venmo which was acquired but has very similar features to the standard PayPal. Venmo is primarily for money transferring between friends and family, and such though it does have a business structure, such as for landlords and small businesses. The two products are not linked, but rather have different targeted audiences, where Venmo has a more social-media aspect to it, and even links to Facebook if you so choose, while PayPal is more structured for general secure transactions.

PayPal essentially defined the way we transfer money online, with quick checkout, linking your credit cards and bank accounts to allow for easy and secure payments. If a vendor has PayPal integrated with their checkout screen, you don’t need to enter in your credit card there, just click the PayPal button and you’ll be redirected there to pay. Make sure to stick to legitimate sites for purchases and make sure you are actually paying at PayPal’s website, as scams may try to get your account login with a phishing page.

Now for the problems…

Fees are everywhere, where some are avoidable and others are not. If you don’t explicitly send or receive a friends and family “F&F” payment, then the transaction will incur a goods and services fee to the receiver. Additionally, there are fees for converting funds between currencies. Fees for speedy withdrawals of balance to your bank account where they will try to get you to select the instant transfer option.

Scammers or even just people with grudges can take advantage of these fees and PayPal will do nothing to stop it. One particular scam where people will receive large payments from fraudsters, and then ask for the funds back, hoping you are unaware of this, is known as the “accidental payment scam” these days. They hope you will send the money back as a separate transaction, and then they will contest the first charge with PayPal support. When PayPal or Venmo will reverse the charge because they will side with the “buyer”, they will keep the transaction fee, potentially even putting your account into the negative due to “buyer protection”. On the other hand, if you report the fraudulently received funds to PayPal, they will again, reverse the charge and keep the transaction fee, protecting the scammers and hurting the victims who had no means of preventing the attack except not having an account.

PayPal has no incentive to actually stop scammers, because they keep the transaction fee from the victims either way as profits. Until regulations require actually helping the victims of these scams instead of the scammers or PayPal, I can’t fully stand by or recommend PayPal or Venmo as services. I personally still have accounts with them, but am heavily considering deleting my accounts or locking it down. Hence, my lack of a referral link on this post at the present.