Paypal Inc
Frozen Funds and Ended Auctions Left My New Store Empty

I started on eBay in 1998 when my brother told me it was a good place to sell baseball cards. That was the year I was getting married, and I ended up selling my entire collection, 8 huge boxes shipped UPS from Oregon to New Jersey to the same guy.

I received $1505.00 for my collection, enough to pay for our honeymoon later that summer. From 1999 to 2001 I used eBay to buy a thing or two a month, and I'd sell the occasional item I picked up at a garage sale cheap, or if I got a gift from an aunt that I was never going to wear. Then in 2002 Champion, the sportswear store, had an outlet store sale, and I bought 10 NFL football jerseys for $5 each. There were several big names, Jerry Rice, Brett Favre, etc. I listed those and barely got back my money. Disappointed, I listed the final two jerseys, which were of not-too-popular NFL players. Those two jerseys sold for $33 and $45! I couldn't believe it, and then I figured it out. The popular players get their jerseys distributed all over the country, and there is plenty of supply to meet demand, but the scrub backup quarterback for the Chargers isn't going to sell many jerseys outside of his town. He probably has fans all over the country who can't get his jersey, though, and those are the ones who will bid the items up.

So I started buying all the jerseys for the worst players I could find, even kickers' jerseys. I then moved into basketball jerseys and soccer jerseys. I'd drive 500 miles round trip in a day to pick up and pay for 400 jerseys in a single day, spend the following week listing and shipping them, and do it all over again. Then my sources dried up. The Champion Outlet store closed, and so did a Sam Goody where I was getting DVDs cheap and flipping them.

I accepted a job selling cars. From 2007 I sold used cars. I was salesman of the month more times than not, but despite selling more cars than anyone else at the dealership year after year, I refused to make any customer pay full price. Instead, I would tell them right off the bat to think of me as their agent, and if I couldn't get a deal done for them, then I didn't get paid. My wife and I (still married, it's now been almost 12 years) had another son, and with me working 80 hours a week, sometimes more, she said she was raising one son without a father and didn't want to make it two. So just like that, I left the car business. I walked away and didn't look back, even after being offered a nice raise to return. It wasn't worth the strain on my integrity and my family.

So I slowly got back into eBay, selling whatever I could find and liquidating years of things I had collected, making just enough to pay our bills. Nothing fancy. About a year ago, when money got tight for everyone, I started selling things for friends, just to help them out. I sold a "Hello Kitty" waffle maker for a friend. It sold for close to $100. When I gave her the cash (I only took out the eBay seller fees), she cried. She was so excited, and was hoping to get $10 out of it. So she gave me some more stuff, and then she told about 10 of her friends. Within a couple of months, I was back to selling 10 new items a day for other people, taking a small cut out of each transaction. That was fine, but now I have two boys and a wife and an expensive rental house we live in (I signed the lease when I was making more money being a car sales slave).

Then, out of the blue, bam. My eBay account is limited, and I can't list new items. I have no outstanding disputes and a feedback percentage of 99.8. And of course, they would not tell me why. We did some figuring, and one of my brothers had an old eBay account he didn't pay the closing fees on. It was, I believe, $158. So I asked if I could pay that for him and restore my account, since I didn't care about his. They said yes, and I transferred it to them via PayPal.

One day later I was limited again and told I can't get a new account or re-open this one, and that my eBay fees are due immediately, etc. So I tried appealing, using common sense. My brother, who lived with me in 1998 right before I got married, stiffed eBay for some seller fees, which I paid many years later, and because I was unfortunate enough to be related to him, no one in my family can have an eBay account ever again? What?

I asked how much money I paid eBay in fees the previous year, and they would not answer. But my bill ran between $200 all the way up to one crazy month when it was $800. I figured that in the 10 years I had paid eBay something close to $40,000, and that was with taking some time off and not listing anything.

I still had people bringing me things to sell for them, which I couldn't do because eBay banned my whole family, and these people had gotten used to me helping them out. So I did all that I could do: I would check eBay's completed auctions, and I would offer 50 cents on the dollar for what that item sold for in the past week or two. I poured every cent I had into all sorts of items that are of value on eBay: electric airplanes, a collection of 300 DVDs (I paid $1.25 each for them), portable DVD players, Columbia ski outfits, hardly used wrestling shoes, a 32-inch TV brand new in the box, a MacBook Pro laptop brand new in the box with receipt, even a boat and a trailer that transported milk (which I sold to a guy who turned it into a water pump truck trailer used to fight fires, which made me feel good and made me a few hundred dollars).

The stuff piled up, and I asked my friend, the same woman who cried when I sold her Hello Kitty waffle maker for almost $100 and was honest with her and didn't take out some for myself, if I could "be partners" with her and use her eBay account, which was over a year old and had a score of 11. Karma paid off for me, of course, and she let me. I started to list those items again and raised enough money to take the next step, which was telling my wife and family and all my friends that I was starting basically an eBay store here in my hometown.

No more people showing up at my house at all hours to have me look up what I could give them for stuff, and no more answering my cell phone 20 times a day with people offering quotes on things they are trying to decide whether to sell. An actual storefront, with display cases, windows, a neon OPEN sign, even its own bathroom. I didn't copy anyone else's material. In fact, I never once looked at how anyone else did it so that I wouldn't be stealing anyone else's idea. I came up with my own contract, and I would either offer to buy things for 50% of their value on the spot, or I would list an item for them and take a cut of 25% of the item's final sold price, but people wouldn't get their money for 8-10 days.

So I purchased a new computer, signed a 2-year lease at $450 a month for the store, bought display cases, that neon sign, and a large sign for outside the store, registered with the state of Oregon for a business license, and got a sign permit and a business license for operating within city limits.

I was decorating the store, literally set to open officially within a week, and bang. Another eBay account suspension. They IP hit me when I did some work from home rather than at the store. I wasn't aware of the IP thing.

Okay, so how in the world can I make this work now? Do I have to find a business partner and use his info? Should I try to sign up in my 10-year-old's name and social? Can I use the new business's Tax ID number? You would think I could start this business under the Tax ID number, especially when it has a different location, name, bank account, etc.

But then yesterday came the worst part. They froze my PayPal account. There was something like $1200.00 in there, more actually. I had made a $500 transfer to my account earlier in the week, and they reversed that back into my account!

I talked to them, and in 180 days, yep, in 6 months, they will release the money to me. What about the auctions I had going with furious bidding on them? Deleted by eBay. What about the people who owe me money for items they won and now can't pay because PayPal has limited that feature? The response I got was that I have to write them and tell them I am sorry. Now I have an empty store and twice the bills I had a couple of months ago. I'm trying to support my family and take care of others by paying double what the pawn shops pay them.

I would go down and take a picture of my empty store for you, but it just bums me out. The first time I got back on eBay, I treated it like a fragile egg. Everything was shipped by the next day, and I listed my most valuable stuff first, in case they ever decided to limit me again. You would think eBay would want to do business with someone like me, especially now that I have people asking me to sell their items for them several times a day.

Maybe I could send them my rental agreement for the store? Sure, I can get yet another account in another name, but what about when this happens while I'm open? What could I do then? When you sell an item for someone else, they generally look up that item constantly, a couple of times a day at a minimum. What about when eBay ends all the auctions? What will I tell my customers? And even now, with my money seized and rent due, each day I'm not on eBay costs me another $50 in debt that I can't crawl out of.

My father is a missionary in Singapore. My mother is the faithful pastor's wife. "There's no grace with this company, is there?" she said to me yesterday.

And yes, this story gets worse. Because I had transferred her and my dad money in the past couple of months for their Bible distribution efforts, their PayPal account was locked with close to $1,000 in it. Now PayPal is seizing money meant to spread the gospel to those in communist countries. Why? Because they are obviously related to me. My mom called them, shocked: "Even while I was on hold with PayPal they said, think of us as a safety deposit box. Well, what safety deposit box would hold onto your stuff for 180 days and terminate the agreement on a whim just because someone in your family made some wrong choices?"

People can declare bankruptcy, buy a new house and car, and get credit cards 6 months after a bankruptcy. And here we are, paying for our past mistakes in full and unable to catch a break. I haven't slept a wink since yesterday's discovery that all my auctions ended, my funds were seized, and my mom and dad's missionary money was seized, in full, not just what I sent them. I have all these bills, and my store sits empty and ready to go. I just can't open and be paying for items with no place to sell them. Keep me in your prayers if you will.

God bless. You are absolutely powerless if PayPal decides to hijack your funds, and eBay and PayPal share all their info and track your personal computer through cookies.

Company: Paypal Inc
Country: USA
State: California
City: San Jose
Address: 2211 N 1st St
Phone: 4083767400
Site: paypal.com

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