Be awere for eCheck by PayPal!

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Cas & Irene
Posts: 252
Joined: Mon Feb 25, 2013 10:19 am
Location: Barcelona - Spain
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Be awere for eCheck by PayPal!

Post by Cas & Irene »

Last week we got late in the evening a last minute booking (for the next day) by phone and email from a son for his parents. We send him the usual info and it was OK. He want to give us his credit card details, but we refused that, and told him that we will send him a PayPal invitation in a few minutes.
So we send the regular PayPal inventation for the 35% down payment.
We never accept down payments in cash or credit card. With a confirmed PayPal payment we have some idea about the identity. (Balance could be paid upon arrival in cash or with credit card)

Their son send us an eCheck “payment “ by PayPal. To be honest we had no clue what this was, never saw or read about this and thought about scam.
After checked eCheck on the PayPal site, we discovered that it was not a payment but an announcement that PayPal would check the buyers bank account and if the balance was ok, they would transfer the money, after 5 working days to our account.

Because the check-out date was before the estimated pay-out date (AND ONLY IF THE BALANCE WAS OK!) we refused this eCheck and send him a new PayPal request. He cancelled that one early in the next morning, without any further notice. So after that we cancelled this booking and advised him to inform his parent because they came from a cruise ship to our boat.

After an hour I noticed a yelling woman on the jetty. “How dare you to call this a B&B, a complete different boat than on your website(?), how do you think to get all our suitecase on board etc etc.”
I went to her, introduced myself and told her that there was no payment done, so no booking and no suitcases on board. I ask her kindly to leave the marina. Then she starts filming the boat and me, so I told her very polite that if she don´t stop doing that, I will give her iPad free swimming lessons in the marina.

Finally they left the jetty (the taxi was still there with all the suitcases) and drove away.
Later on I had hug email chats with his son, who claimed there was legally a reservation and I had to accept the guests. My answer was simple, “why didn´t you do a normal PayPal payment and instead of that eCheck option?”
Well he wrote me, “you didn´t point out that I had to use my credit card with this PayPal payment so I used the eCheck option” I wrote him to have a nice day!

(ps. In case you want to know, yes they were Americans. Otherwise skip this part please :oops: )
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Cymraes
Posts: 519
Joined: Tue Jul 07, 2015 3:31 pm
Location: North Wales

Post by Cymraes »

eChecks have been a feature of Paypal for years so nothing new.

Under the circumstances I'd have refused the eCheck too but I would have taken a credit card payment. I'm not a lover of Paypal - seen too many cases where Paypal pull back the payments for one reason or another and leave the poor seller out of pocket with no redress.
AndrewH
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Joined: Thu Sep 12, 2013 1:17 pm
Location: Kefalonia, Greece
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Re: Be awere for eCheck by PayPal!

Post by AndrewH »

Cas & Irene wrote:...so I told her very polite that if she don´t stop doing that, I will give her iPad free swimming lessons in the marina...
I think I will store that one in memory, in case I should ever need to use it. :lol:
ianh100
Posts: 598
Joined: Thu Jan 10, 2013 4:37 pm
Location: Sherborne Dorset

Post by ianh100 »

I have actually had this issue on the Paypal account I use to take payments as I did not link it back to a bank account. I found that when I made a deposit refund it got into this e-cheque process taking much longer for the gust to get their money back.
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