Paypal banned, Ebay ok. Should I just wait for managed payments?
So a couple of weeks ago I got permanently limited by Paypal. Had the account for 14 years and used it to run my Ebay business. In all that time I never once had a case opened against me in Paypal itself and my Ebay account was 100% with 5* detailed feedback across the board with thousands of transactions over the last 12 month period alone. There was absolutely nothing wrong with the account and I'd never had any trouble before.
The other week I applied for the Paypal debit Mastercard and I fear a couple of admin errors at my end were the reason my business has now been completely decimated. I now find myself looking for a job for the first time in a decade. All I could get out of Paypal is I have an "invalid ID". One rep said I could appeal in 30 days and another said there was no chance
There are a couple of reasons I can think of as to why this happened. The first is, during the Mastercard application process, Paypal led me to the address details form and I wasn't paying proper attention. I accidentally updated my address details and omitted the number of my home address; the rest of the address was the same. The other is that my Paypal account has always been in the short version of my name I have gone by all my life. My passport has the long version of my name. The final thing may have been that I accidentally had a VPN switched on.
These are the only reasons I can think of for the ban. Since then I've done my best to talk to customer services and fire off e-mails to any higher up e-mail addresses I can find, but I'm not hopeful I'll be reinstated at all and that everything has come crashing down thanks to a succession of innocent mistakes.
Anyway, the thing I'm curious about is whether I can get away with just using a stealth Paypal account and sell elsewhere like Facebook groups? I can imagine there are lots of ways selling on Facebook could provide Paypal with links to my true identity? What I sell is pretty niche and I can price my stock to generate decent interest in a few specialist Facebook groups to tide me over whilst I wait to get Ebay back. I have been told by Ebay that I am welcome back once they roll out managed payments in the UK so it's just a mtter of time.
I don't really want to mess around with eBay Stealth if I'm not actually banned from Ebay. My fear is that if I do and I get caught I could permanently lose the ten years of work I out into my existing account. If I can eventually get my Ebay account back I can get my customers back as a lot of my stuff was done at auction and my repeat customers kept on coming back to the listings. I feel like I'm in a bit of a bind at the moment.
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