Paypal : Conducting surprise account suspensions? Beware.

I have been a Paypal merchant for a very long time.. 8 years or more.

I do business daily via Paypal's Payflow payment gateway & all in all, have found the service mostly favorable.

Today however, for no reason and without any warning at-all, my account was suspended.

I was asked for a faxed copy of my drivers license, and proof of location, not a huge deal, except that during this "account review" period my account is unable to send or receive payments.

Actually I found out about this issue when a potential customer emailed me asking why he was unable to complete a purchase from my website.

So I phoned up Paypal, and maintained my calm despite a massive aggravation building inside my stomach. The woman was polite and friendly but unable to tell me why this suspension had taken place.

So I scanned a utility bill & my drivers license & sent it in, only to receive a second request for proof of inventory on some recent transactions.

Now I sell digital products, I have no inventory & so I called up Paypal again & was instructed to contact someone else at Paypal via email and explain the situation, which I did, only to receive a moronic reply asking me to log into my Paypal account and submit the information listed in my Paypal account resolution center ( the very information I had emailed them to explain that I could NOT submit due to the fact that I sell digital products and have NO inventory ).

I honestly don't think that this person even read my email or there should of been no way he/she could of possibly replied to it in that manor.

From my earlier phone conversation, I had gleaned the information that in-fact Paypal is systematically suspending all Paypal Premier & Business accounts while they conducted a review of the merchant and his/her products.

Anyhow... that brings me to this stage, angrily jotting down this post - waiting to see how this all pans out.

To sum up : in this writers opinion : this is a serious violation of the Paypal > Merchant trust relationship. Paypal is at this moment costing me money & they may do the very same to you.

UPDATE

It is now nearly 48 hours later & I have been on and off with Paypal phone support for nearly 3 of those hours (several times spending 15 minutes on hold, only to be dropped, to call back to be dropped again).

I have memorized the spiel the operator puts you through each time you call & I am sure that Paypal support thinks that I am some kind of mind reader as I provide them with my name, Paypal email address and last 4 digits of my bank account before they even ask for it.

Paypal continues to send me new requests for more information, including such things as:
- Average product purchase cost.
- Average month sales volume.
- Types of product that I am selling & from where I am selling them from.
- My suppliers contact information (assuming that I had one, which I do not)

Why didn't they ask for all of this information from the start? It might of saved some time that my business is unable to receive payments.

Anyhow,

Paypal also requested that all open disputes be resolved before they continue ( which was quite impossible to do, since sending and receiving money was disabled & I was unable to issue any refunds as a result. Some of the dispute issues, would of been a simple a matter of helping a technically challenged customer actually download his/her product - but due to the fact that I am out of business until my account limitation is removed, the poor customer will simply be refunded to save time ).

I have just finished what will hopefully be my last call to Paypal regarding this matter ( 45 minutes on hold this time ) to verify that all of these additional steps that I have had to take (since their system was not nearly setup to handle all the different types of products / business's they Paypal feels so included as to audit) had actually been received and I could finally relax and wait for my account to be released.

As a final insult, the support agent informed me that yet another 24-48 hours would be required, roughly the same amount of time required from when this whole thing started.

So all-in-all Paypal put me out of business for what will be nearly a working week, and this was without warning, or fault of my own.

I am making this post to (hopefully) publicly shame Paypal's decision to undergo this type of activity. Putting a business, such as my own, offline for this much time, with no warning, is simply unacceptable.