This past Thursday I was luxuriating in my morning sleep, when I heard that familiar notification ding on my phone. The notification said I bought two tickets to see the movie Violent Night. I knew I didn’t, but I got so many notifications and texts that I just turned over and fell back to sleep. A while later I received a text from PayPal that there was suspected fraud in my account.
The irony is, that I use PayPal because I am trying to avoid fraud. This is the second fraud attack on my PayPal in a month’s time. Last time it was caught and in addition to changing my password, PayPal added a second security feature which was a pin sent to me each time I used my account. Great idea, but after a short time I stopped receiving the pins. The alert I got was not for the amount of the movie tickets, but an attempt at another purchase. When I again changed my password I saw the two movie tickets that were bought on Atom tickets for $50. They were bought for a movie theater in Waco, Texas. Now that would be a long way from New York to see a movie.
Another detail on the tickets was that they weren’t until the next night. I’m thinking canceling this purchase should not be a big deal. Well, even though PayPal knew I was a victim of fraud they would not credit my account for the $50. They would file a report with the merchant and if they agree I could be credited in ten days. Needless to say, this annoyed me. Particularly because they dropped sending me the pin for extra security. I couldn’t believe that in order to reverse a fraudulent transaction that it should take ten days.
Time to request the supervisor. After holding for 15 minutes, the supervisor got on and reiterated the exact thing the customer service agent said. He added, if I want to I should contact Atom Tickets myself. I love when businesses have the client work for them. Atom Tickets does not do customer service by phone. (which again is annoying). I sent them an email and pleasantly received a response that said they would cancel the purchase and credit my account. I am thankful for the quick and positive response.
As for PayPal I have been an active customer and now I am not. For those of you that use PayPal, please beware that this site is not secure. I would advise that even if you haven’t had a problem with PayPal that you request the use of the extra pin. Once again I will say WTH.
WTH Thursday Continued
After my waste of time phone call with PayPal I got a call from a credit collector. This was unexpected because I pay all my bills in a timely fashion and have never had a credit issue. This credit agency was calling about a purchase I made on Black Friday 2021 from QVC. The purchase was for two Dyson heaters. I remember this purchase, because it is the only one I ever made with QVC.
I asked the collection agent, how is this possible? I bought the heaters online and how could the transaction have gone through without a payment? She didn’t know and suggested I call QVC directly. Once again pursuing a task I didn’t ask for. When I questioned the customer service agent from QVC how this happened, she didn’t know and suggested I call Synchrony Bank. This is the bank that works with QVC. When I got Synchrony on the phone, they couldn’t help me, because they only handle transactions that were made on the QVC credit card. Needless to say, I never had one of those.
Once again I called back QVC to rectify a problem I had no idea existed. Since I was now armed with the knowledge that I did not use their QVC specific credit card, I felt like I was getting closer to a resolution of this problem. I was surprised at the result. According to this agent the reason I owed money on a purchase made one year ago is that somehow I had selected to pay the purchase out in payments. This is something I don’t do, but yet it was done.
In the course of paying this out of which I was unaware, I had to replace my debit card due to another fraud attempt. The last payment of $86 was not cleared, because the card they had was canceled. I must say that Citi told me when the card was canceled that they would put through any payments due, but of course that was not the case.
Once the problem was identified the customer service could not help me, because this needs to be handled by the finance department, Supposedly, I should receive a call from them within five days. If this happens I will be surprised. If not, maybe QVC will call me back again next year. If they call me again, I simply will say WTH.
2 thoughts on “A WTH Day”
Earlier in 2022, our checking account, from which receives our income and disburses a number of recurring payments, showed two $.01 deposits coming from PayPal. My wife regularly reviews that checking account, and the morning she noticed those deposits, it was instant evidence of a hack being initiated. We immediately went to the local branch of our bank, and after they confirmed that a hack was being initiated, the checking account was closed and replaced with a new checking account. We were told that a hack of that sort was prevalent and that an older customer of theirs had been likewise hacked but without catching it like my wife did, and had $75,000 hacked out of her account. Fortunately, the bank reimbursed her. Long story short, it has taken many months to update our income sources and the entities who take authorized payments with the new account information. It’s been a tremendous hassle, but worth it. We of course also called PayPal and they seemed to not care of our issue nor recommend a fix for like issues in the future. We closed our PayPal accounts (wife’s and mine) and any future transactions in which we engage which cite attaching PayPal, we will forego. We have automated monthly payments going to several charities, one of which has PayPal attached, and we’ve dropped our contribution to them because that’s their only process for taking automated recurring donations. It’s certainly a WTH situation that people believe PayPal transactions are all above board when so many of them are not.
You are right about being asked to do all the work from companies that are supposed to be doing the work for you. I dread calling any company about anything these days unless I have a few hours to kill – it’s a nightmare. Back in the day, customer service was a real thing and companies went out of their way to keep their customers happy and satisfied. Those days are long gone and are never coming back.