Rob & Melissa from Flea Market Flipper talk about what to do if PayPal is holding your money.
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Reseller Hangout Podcast - What To Do If PayPal Is Holding Your Money
Melissa: So what do you do if PayPal holds your money? Well, we had them hold over a $20,000 of ours and we're gonna dive into what we did to get that money back.
Rob: That's right. And this was one of our, no, it was our largest sale to date, which was a $25,000 flip.
Melissa: And, I have to add that, eBay no longer uses PayPal.
So. We don't use PayPal as much as we used to. We obviously used it a lot more before, but you still use it for different things. So what do you do if they hold your money? Yeah. And we've actually had a lot of people reach out to us on this and then have similar stories that they held their money. So what was the item that in question, how, why did this whole thing start?
Rob: Yeah, so it was a actual parking lot tower is what we sold. Sold it in less than a month on eBay. The gentleman who bought it, it actually, he sent something down, picked it up, so we didn't really ship this one. It was a trailer. He received the item, paid for the item through PayPal, which I don't know why he did that, but he wanted to use his credit card to pay for it. Paid through PayPal.
Melissa: He wanted the, probably the security of going through PayPal too.
Rob: Possibly, but I think he wanted the credit card points as well on his credit card. So, anyways, cool guy. Absolutely cool.
We had to deal with him because of this transaction. We actually got closer to him. Got him on the phone and talked to him a couple times. So a really, really cool guy, but, as soon as that money went into PayPal, PayPal grabbed a hold of that and, they wouldn't let go of it. They told me that they have the right to hold onto it for, it was six months up to.
Melissa: 30 days.
Rob: Yep. Up to six months. And if they deemed it, that it was I don't know what word they used, but they could hold it up to a year if they chose. This is $20,000. It's like what, who in their right mind could let you hold onto $20,000 for six months to a year?
Melissa: I have to add too. This was a time, right when we went full time. We are just had baby number three, or right about to have him.
So like we're diving into this, like that's actually why I think you spent more money, you spent $5,000 on this tower, which is way more than we have ever really spent on an item, but he said, the profits are there. We got this. So, and you sold it within a month? Yeah. You proved me wrong, cuz I was very, very hesitant.
I did not want to go out $5,000, but you sold it within a month and this was right. Like when we were okay, we're diving into this, we're going gung-ho we got this. And then they held the money. We're like, crap, what do we, what are we gonna do? What do we do now? So, okay.
Rob: So you guys ready for this? This is our steps to what we did to get them to release the money.
And like Melissa said, PayPal's still a force to be reckoned with. Even if they're not in eBay people, they are known. People use them for all kinds of payments, whether you're sometimes marketplace sometimes, wherever you're doing any transaction, they are still taking payments and processing payments hugely.
So they still are a big force, like I said to be reckoned with, so, oh, what do you.
Melissa: Before you dive in, go ahead. What they did. They also came back and tried to take an extra thousand dollars off of your, they did account from like, it was tied to another account that you had years before, because it was the same email address or something.
No, what was it like? It was something.
Rob: They tied it together somehow.
Melissa: Yeah. They tied it with another account that you had opened.
Rob: And yeah, said it was in the negative, like a $1,000, $1,200.
And that was eight years prior or so eight or 10 years ago. Yeah, it was crazy. They were trying to go out back after a thousand dollars.
He's like, if you haven't come after me now, like, why are you reaching out right now? Or why are you tying this to this account? Yeah. Which I've always had good standings with PayPal. It was very, very weird, very, very fishy. And they knew it, they knew it was. So, oh, even before we jump into what we did.
Like I said, we got on the phone with the buyer of this item, who actually I got on the phone with PayPal and the buyer of the item on a three way call. I got to somebody's supervisor's supervisor. So I got up as high as I possibly could and said, hey, he's saying he will not come back for a refund.
Cuz that's what PayPal was saying is with up to credit card, six months to get a refund, they can, and they can push it back to a year. If he tries to push a refund, within a year, they could be responsible for it. So I got him on the phone with PayPal, the supervisor of a supervisor. I got as high as I possibly could.
And he said, I am willing to sign an affidavit. I received the item. It's in my possession. Now I'm a hundred percent.
Melissa: He was a lawyer too.
Rob: He was, I'm a hundred percent happy with this item. I am not coming back after this gentleman for this item, for any reason whatsoever, I will sign an affidavit and PayPal said, no, we can't absolutely not do that.
We are holding this money for six months and up to a year, if we deem it, we need to. Yeah, high risk or something like that. We deem it high risk or something like that. So that did not work. So then we jumped on, and Melissa can explain our next steps that we took.
Melissa: But that is a good point though, too, that like this getting to a supervisor does usually work or getting to the highest person that you can talk to that can make those decisions that works when we talk to eBay, works, when you talk to any company, really, you just wanna get to that supervisor, but it did not work in this instance. So you actually went to Google and what can I do now? PayPal's holding my money. What can we do? And we found a website.
Rob: Might even be the same way you're finding this podcast video, maybe.
Melissa: Yeah. Google search, because you're looking for it. I don't even know if the website, I should have checked before we hopped on here, if the website's still there, but it was screw paypal.com and they had a whole thing. So they had this whole thing happen to them and they did these steps. And so we just did it after them.
So it told us to go and find our local Congressman local Congressman and they can do something. So you're actually the one who found it.
Rob: And, oh, I don't remember, but so we went to our local Congressman, he had a local office in our town. We went to the office, and said, hey, we were told to come to you guys and file a complaint or do, I don't know what they said, fill out something.
And they said, you have a complaint against somebody? And I said, yes, they gave us a form that we just filled out. The form explained exactly what happened. That we took a payment and they were holding $20,000 of the payment. And they took the complaint form and I believe it was in, within 72 hours.
All of the money was put back into our account, including the thousand or the $1,200 that they took out, cuz they tied it to another account and that was it. They released all the funds. It was available immediately. So I don't know what happened on the back end, no idea whatsoever, but our Congressman reached out and I guess somebody wrote a letter, ruffled some feathers.
Yeah, they got their office on a letterhead.
Melissa: They wrote something, got it taken care of. And they, obviously something shady was going down. Yeah. Because we got the money right away and then it was okay. And you took the money right out of PayPal.
Rob: Pulled it out, immediately learned our lesson, but and not to say that we didn't use PayPal for years after that either. So is not, this is not a bashing PayPal. No, it was just a really weird situation through the whole process. And I honestly believe, I know processors take a lot of risk when they're tr when they're processing this type of money and they don't wanna lose $20,000 for sure.
And I think that was really what it boiled down to be is it could have been a shady situation, but the thing is we got on the phone with, and we have a great standing. We've always had a great standing with PayPal, with eBay, with everybody. And this lawyer who purchased this item got on the phone with us and was willing to sign an affidavit and they still would not do anything for us.
So, that was all really, really a crazy situation. But the complaint to our local Congressman, if you're in this situation right now, that's what we'll urge you to do is go to your local Congressman, let them know what's going on, and they have a form that you can fill out. You can tell 'em whatever, if it's PayPal, if it's something else you can fill out that form.
And then they will actually on your behalf contact the business, the, whoever it is, they'll contact them, on your behalf and try to work out the situation if you have totally been done wrong. And it worked out great for us, for sure.
Melissa: Yeah. And I will say that that was our largest transaction to date. Think the total was $26,000 and or $25,000. And I mean, it does throw a red flag when you have such a huge transaction at once. So that, that was one thing that we had going. It was a big thing. Now we sell a lot of, you know, $2,000, $5,000, $10,000 items. So we, we don't really get that flag as much, as we, that, that one big, lump of, of money coming in at one time.
Yeah. So, but they should have held it and reviewed it for 10, 14 days. You could see that happening. Yeah. And that would be okay, but for six months holding your money like that crazy it's and we're living off of this money. Yeah. And we just had a baby and this is just crazy. We need this money.
Rob: Especially when you have an affidavit signed from the gentleman who paid for the stating that he would not come back for any reason whatsoever and come after me or come after PayPal, he was willing to do that and he was a lawyer.
So you knew he knew his stuff. But he was willing to do that. So, we don't know the whole situation what happened, but we do know it was resolved within 72 hours after we filed a complaint and it all got taken care of and we got the, the funds back immediately.
Melissa: And we did still use PayPal.
Rob: So absolutely for years after this.
Melissa: And we really have had a great relationship with them. They've been great with us for the most part minus a couple little things like this one, but, and I would actually say we probably prefer them to eBay managed payments right now because.
Rob: I would second that.
Melissa: Yeah, they're a little bit easier to work with than managed payments.
Yeah. But just, you know, this is another thing that things happen in business sometimes and you just have to be a problem solver. And like that stressed us out a lot at that time, especially, I mean, this was our income. I mean, it is our income. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. We've got three little kids at the house.
It was really scary and to think, okay, this money could get tied up for that long. So yeah, we just figured out a problem, figured out a solution and be a problem solver and took action. So that's it. So if something happens, you know, take a minute, reflect. And then figure out what you can do because there are other ways out there.
So, and there's probably other ways that you could go through, different departments to get your money back. But, the Congressman, the letter worked and I don't know, it wasn't, was it a full letter or did we just fill out the form?
Rob: It was a form. It was a, a form that we filled out and it wasn't even online.
We actually filled it out in person.
Melissa: Now it's probably online.
Rob: Yeah, probably is. And we wrote out our complaint what the deal was, how much the funds, I think they even have, how much funds is involved in this transaction and stuff like that. So we were able to do that for sure. So.
Melissa: So don't give up, you got this.
Rob: You got this.
Melissa: You, you can be a problem solver.
Rob: All right, guys, if you found this podcast helpful to you, please take a minute rate, review this podcast. We love doing these guys and it'd mean the world to us. If you guys could, help us grow this podcast. So if you did find it helpful, please take a minute and do the rate and review for us.
Melissa: Thank you so much.
All right, guys, check out this next video.