So, I was in Rite-Aid the other day, and I needed to get some cash back off of my Paypal debit card. So I was going to buy cigarettes and get cash back at the register, but they didn't have my brand, so I bought the cheapest thing they had, a pack of cheddar-peanut butter crackers and got $20 back. I few hours later, I decided to go back and try the cigarettes that they had, because they were on sale. But when i attempted to purchase them, they lady informed me that she couldn't sell them to me because my ID was expired. Frustrated, I went ahead and got another pack of the same crackers and another $20 bill. I bought cigarettes down the street and had about $1.80 left on my card. Well, the next morning, I got up and checked the balance on my card, only to find that I had $20.59 on there, the exact amount of the crackers and cash-back total. When I looked at my account activity, I saw that Rite-Aid had charged me three times instead of two, but then realized their mistake and refunded my money. What I don't understand is, why would they charge me a third time? And how did I end up with an extra $20.59 instead of going back to my original balance? If I had been using a regular bank card, I would have been really angry, because it would have charged me a $35 overdraft fee. But I don't understand, can a paypal account not go into the negative? I have my account linked to an old bank account that I don't use anymore, but even when I checked it, it was -$7.50, instead of being the -$19.00 or so that it should have been. What's the deal?
I don't know. The Paypal backup funding that's connected to my bank account is scary sometimes because I had a $6 transaction go through to my bank account that triggered $70 in NSF fees because they tried it twice. I would rather have had the Paypal debit card decline me for being $6 short at the post office than overdraw my bank account. Sometimes I don't know that I'm short because I have the correct amount when I leave the house and then eBay automatically deducts seller fees and I don't know it when I go to use the card.
If you have a checking/savings account associated with your PayPal account, they will take the funds from that when you hit zero. PayPal has cost me several hundred dollars over the past few years from screwing up and billing the wrong accounts of mine. Whenever I would switch banks, and try to enter in my new checking/savings accounts, they would not let me remove the older accounts for several weeks. And during this time period, any time I would try to use my PayPal account to buy something, half the time they would bill my new account, and the other half of the time, for no damn good reason they would try to bill my old checking/savings accounts, sending them into negative balances and causing a bunch of insufficient funds fees. Another time, I had taken out all of my PayPal funds. I had a domain with Network Solutions, which I would pay for with my PayPal account. Network Solutions sneakily tried to auto-renew it three months before it was even set to expire, but PayPal rejected the sale since the funds weren't in my account. I got the email from Network Solutions stating that the auto-renew sale was declined, and I figured "fine" because I didn't want to renew with them anyhow. Then, those bastards tried to process the payment AGAIN a couple days later, only this time, PayPal goes ahead and pays them even though I don't have the money in my account! This of course put me into a negative balance with PayPal, as well as triggering insufficient funds fees with my old bank. As if this wasn't all bad enough, PayPal was going to hit my bank account *two more times* over the next several days to try and get that money out of it, which was going to result in a total of THREE insufficient funds charges from my bank. Neither PayPal nor the bank would do anything to stop these even though I was contacting both of them in advance telling them to knock it off. Network Solutions wouldn't give me a damn refund either, because they said it was in their service agreement that they could auto-renew me at any time up to three months before my domain expired.
