Should I accept payments through PayPal Family & Friends?

I've heard you can't chargeback, but apparently still some way if you pay directly through your card?

 

Never accept paypal unless its from a trusted customer. It is always possible to chargeback paypal payments.

 

They can always chargeback via PayPal.

 

It's certainly a very common misconception.

I will state a bit further than "yes it's able to be recovered" though, and as mentioned above yes it is. It is very common for users to pay via debit/credit card, in this event if they feel that they want to have "happy time" if you will, they just ring their bank and claim it as unauthorised.

By law, your bank has to look into said issues. Being that it's online currency/in game items etc, they class it as entangled goods which basically leaves you with no actual coverage. This is of course fraud, but people still do it despite breaking fraudulent claimed laws. The same applies with goods and service, but of course is much easier to get back.

And then it takes you to the whole "balance is safe" criteria. The same as above, it can still be recovered, it's not AS EASY to recover, but literally just takes a phonecall to paypal themselves to say oh I didn't notice the transaction or I believe someone else may have had access to my account and so.

 

Thanks for the detailed reply, its helpful.
So in short, don't use PayPal

 

Pretty much yes.

My first trades consisted of PayPal for the longest time ever, then I started getting very picky with who I traded with which typically lost me a lot of sales in the process. Naturally understandable, but like many I wanted to avoid the risks, at the time I started doing it I was playing RIFT (another MMO, was very popular at the time) and I would sell GP to buy in game items on there, 2/3 of my first trades and disputes I won after all 3 of them tried to recover luckily. Since then I tried UKBT, got my bank account closed because although it was seen as "not able to be recovered" a year later, someone recovered their funds and got my bank account closed along with a lot of money lost due to not letting me cash it out.

Crypto is the do all and be all still, unless you're in another country other than where I am and you're fine with taking other forms like revult/zelle etc. I think it does vary on the given person though, some people are happy to use PayPal still at say a higher fee etc (such as major gold sites) and I do still occasionally use it with my customers if I have known them for an extremely long time.

 

Imagine payments going through a network of middlemen, one of them being banks, the credit card, paypal and you, the merchant. At any point the transaction could be charged back, if the customer contacts paypal they can ask paypal to reverse the transaction, if they contact the credit card provider, they can reverse the transaction. Paypal being downstream in the chain will see that their income was reversed, and they will do what's in their power to avoid losing money.

It's typical for disputes to fail in favour of the customer with these types of payments, as they are geared towards commerces, which have an assymmetric power dynamic.

So F&F transactions can be charged back by reversing the cc transaction. But as mentioned above, they can probably also be charged back with paypal. However the user interface for doing so will not include options relevant to commerce. The most important consequence of misusing F&F is that accounts may be locked due to 'suspicious activity'.

There's two basic types of accounts on paypal, people and businesses. People can still charge for services.

As a merchant using Paypal or any high-fee payment processor, you need to have margins high enough to handle the risk of any type of chargebacks. While the system Paypal is based on was designed for purchases of tangible assets, support for digital goods was also added. However transactions for digital currency like RS gold or bitcoin don't fall neatly into any of those types of transactions, and they do not benefit from the customer friendly dispute system.

Consider a chargeback in the case of the purchase of a physical good:

Either the merchant didn't send the object, or they sent it and the customer wasn't happy. In the second case the customer can return the object, and the merchant can return the money. In the first case, the use of couriers can act as a middleman to ensure whether an object was sent, that and a reputation system will swiftly find scammers of physical objects.

For the cases of digital goods like software or subscriptions:
These services have very low marginal costs, and huge margins. A chargeback won't hurt the merchant so they are the default option:

For the case of digital delivery of digital assets by a third party:
Unlike Jagex selling membership or gold to a customer, each sale has a very high cost, and the margin is very small. So a chargeback doesn't mean the same.

For this reason, most merchants in this space simply do not use paypal. And opt for USDT, BTC, or RS gold itself.

That said, there are situations where the margin of a transaction would be high enough, the risk of the transaction is low, or the price is raised for PP transactions to account for these factors. In these cases, making a transaction as F&F might be a viable strategy to reduce the risk of a chargeback, and plant a deterrent to frivolous chargebacks, as the scammer would have to compromise the reputation of either their PayPal account or their Credit card provider. In other words, they may be able to scam one or two merchants, but repeated use of this method would soon end with a locked paypal account or a heavily reduced credit card limit.

In the case of credit cards, they are linked to real names, and credit scores with ever expanding impact. To compromise ones credit card score for some stupid videogame would be very retarded. So if you get scammed with a F&F transaction, you can at least be assured that the scammer will probably get the worst of it. Kind of a mutually assured destruction scenario.

 

delete your paypal

 

no. Anytime I've used paypal the buyer charges back or finds some other excuse as to why it wont work.

 

As other users have mentioned, do not use their service, it is dog shit awful.

 

Pretty sure if you log on a Paypal account from a separate IP address from what your normally on you can easily chargeback.