PayPal Fucks Up Really Really Bad

Sorry to my faithful followers (I think there may be three of you) for not posting for a couple days. I was busy. So there.

We all know who PayPal is. They sync up with your bank account so you can pay securely on the internet without exposing your credit card number to Big Brother, or whatever paranoid theory you have about buying stuff on the intertubes. Some people have opted to take the fantastic convenience of PayPal to the next level and use the PayPal debit card. It works like a normal debit card and uses your PayPal account to pay for stuff. Juan Zamora of Richland, Washington had such a card with 90 dollars on it. He then filled up his 1994 Chevrolet Camaro with $26 worth of gas. Later, he got an email saying his card was maxed out. He looked at the figure they quoted. It read $81, followed by a comma and a 400, then another comma and an 836, then another comma and a 908. That’s 81 and a half BILLION fucking dollars. For some perspective, a Stealth Bomber costs 2 billion. The great part is not the massive computer glitch that multiplied his gas costs by 400 million, the great part is PayPal’s handling of the issue. You’d expect them, upon witnessing a ten-figure bill, to apologize hastily and humbly and reverse the charge immediately. They did not. They asked the man to prove that he did not, in fact, put 36,000 tanker trucks of fuel into his 15-year-old sports car. He had to go through several calls to customer service, produce his reciept, and go back to the gas station where he had purchased his fuel to check his reciept against their meters and make sure he hadn’t snuck away with the equivalent of 40 Superdomes of fuel. Here’s another comparison. An aircraft carrier, fully fueled, with all the aircraft it can carry on it, also fully fueled, costs about a tenth of that.

Here’s a hint for Paypal: if a customer claims a $200 bill is fake, look into it. Even if it’s a $2000 bill, look into it. If a middle-aged man in a shitty car is claiming that his weekly fillup costs less than Iraq (the whole country, not the war), HE’S PROBABLY NOT JUST FUCKING WITH YOU. GIVE HIM HIS $90 BACK.