Paypal closed my account of nearly 24 years! I haven’t done anything different but their new most likely AI system flagged it.
I had to search for their number as always and argue with the chat bot to send me to a real person to speak with. Finally, I reached one after what seemed an eternity.
The lady was nice, putting me on hold a few times finally coming back to tell me that she would put in a request for a final review. She really couldn’t explain what happened. Shrug! But, I did ask if I could open a new account to which she said yes, however I should wait for the final review to come back in 7 to 10 days.
Sooo, needless to say I pulled up my trusted AI bot “Gemini”, and explained what was happening to see if I could get more clarity of what was happening.
Since this thing can see my open pages he (for lack of a better term) told me that my PayPal account had pings from IPNs that are from sites that are no longer allowed. Which just happened to be traffic exchanges and safelists.
He explained I should go into PayPal and remove those IPNs from there or go to each site listed by PayPal and either delete my PayPal address or delete the accounts.
What I found was many sites were in fact defunct, you couldn’t login as they no longer exist.
The other issue as I explained to Gemini was I haven’t used those sites in a very long time. He explained it didn’t matter because PayPal had a while back meaning years ago refused to keep doing business with those kind of sites. And because there were pings from them it raised a red flag.
Gemini said most likely I won’t get my account back even though I did nothing wrong. So now, here I sit to wait on PayPal to give me the final verdict before I do open a new account.
It really causes me more work if I do have to open a new account because I will have to change things on sites that I use and receive payouts in.
That brings me to another little pain in the tush. I had payouts going to PayPal that are now in limbo and according to my buddy Gemini, I will have to wait 180 days after they permanently close the account.
Granted it was not a lot of money, but with our finances in the pickle they are in due to all of the high costs living on a fixed income it is a bit of a bite.
I guess my point is if you have ever used a traffic exchange or safelist with PayPal, do yourself a favor and go make sure you change your payment methods in those things or try to remove the ipns from Paypals side.
Good Luck. I never would have thought in a million years that this would happen having had my PayPal account for nearly 24 years.