I made a transaction yesterday for a OnePlus2 phone using an invite (which is obv very hard to get). OnePlus2 only allows PayPal as the payment gateway. I made the payment of 402.99$ of which 167$ were deducted from my paypal account and rest around 235$ from my bank account. PayPal showed transaction as successful and i received a confirmation email with the transaction ID.
However the seller (OnePlus2) still showed payment as pending and there was no record of it on PayPal account page.
I called a customer care representative and shared the transaction ID with her and she said that there is some issue and she think the transaction is successful. I told her that the seller cannot see a payment received and my invite would be void in 2 hours. Before we could complete the phone got disconnected.
To my horror when i called again somehow mysteriously this transaction ID stopped showing any details for PayPal customer service as well as for me. I went through a pain of 2-3 hours from one agent to another repeating it, till my call was forwarded to a senior agent who refused to accept any transaction as he cant see it.
I asked him to justify the 167$ deducted from my paypal account and asked where it went and how is my balance zero. At this he realized the miss and put me on hold multiple times before giving me the best statement of the year – “Sir for now what i can say is we don’t know where your balance went. I will have to go through my engineering team”.
Since it was clear I was not getting a resolution soon and my invite would be voided I made the purchase again and this time the seller accepted the payment and an order was made with an order number. However next day i see 402.99$ deducted from my Bank account which is current but also a 235$ charge which is for the missed transaction and somehow two transactions show up on paypal page.
Calling the customer care again was painful as now they were arguing they can see two transactions (Obviously as they did something overnight) and asked me to call OnePlus. Now i called OnePlus and they were right at their end as they only have data for one because only one order was done and only one order number generated. And they suggested me to call PayPal.
Again i called Paypal and they finally said they could do nothing but dispute one payment. It was a two day nightmare. It does sound scary for your financial account holder to say your balance just vanished and we cannot see it. It is still resolved and not sure how much hassle i will have to go through in the coming days.
Source: http://www.paypalwarning.com/paypal-admitted-lost-money-return/