PayPal just blocked my account for using F&F

PAYPAL has ALWAYS been a SCAM.

The extra layers of PAYPAL just allows them to skim off fees, AND they profit from marketing your financial and spending info!

DUH !! they are a for profit company that makes their money facilitating the transfer of funds. OF COURSE they charge fees .. they aren’t a charity.

You recommend the CC companies, but do you really think the CC companies aren’t selling your financial and spending info?  AND BTW.. they also charge fees.

Estimates are that PayPal processes around 40,000,000 transactions a day

26,000,000,000 in 2024

No doubt that out of billions of transactions some don’t go well. That does not make them a scam. No, I am not a PP fanboy or shill, I just recognize that they provide a valuable service and therefore deserve to be compensated for it, and that like any business doing a huge volume of anything, mistakes are inevitable.

Your appeal to authority with your university credentials does not in any way validate your claim that PP is a scam.

I used Zelle to make a down payment on a car. You simply have to call your bank to increase your max payment.

@herman - I never bothered to read the whole thing, but it makes sense. Their game, their rules.  Kind of like not putting money in the meter because you hoped the attendant wouldn’t come by to check where you parked.  Another example of people getting away with stuff they shouldn’t. BTW, years ago, I once had a horrible university professor and got burned.  Everybody knows university professors have always been…

Its all messed up. Too bad so many gov scams and other scams.

I’ve used Paypal for the last 10 years, many transactions, both as buyer and seller. This F&F vs G&S debate is a painful topic for me. A few relevant facts:

1 - It is lunacy for sellers of big ticket items to demand F&F from total strangers. I don’t care how good their feedback is, or how many places have feedback for them. If I don’t know them, I’m not floating 4 figures to a complete stranger in the hope they won’t rip me off. It’s offensive to repeatedly be asked this as if it’s normal.

2 - I’ve been a member of Head-Fi & SABF for 10 years. Both sites explicitly recommend that users not purchase using Paypal’s F&F, for obvious reasons (ie, toprevent members from being scammed). It’s not just me & my opinion at work here.

3 - And the irony is that as far as I can tell from periodic research into this issue, the IRS has yet to actually document "profits" from the sale of audio gear, at least not in my case, and I’ve sold some fairly big stuff in the past couple years, well within the time word was going around about the IRS getting into sellers’ Paypal transactions. 

4 - Even IF that ever happens, I’ve never attempted to sell anything at a profit. It’s always a loss (a loss that’s as small as I can arrange it). I could readily document what I original paid for the item vs what I just sold it for--zero profit.

So yes, as a seller I always price the 2.9% G&S fee into my price. I never ask for payment via F&F, though once or twice people paid me that way because I was well known to them. 

FWIW, none of this is a defense or shill for Paypal. That’s a pretty awful company whose business model chaps my ass in multiple ways. But it’s the only safe transaction method I know of in this crazy hobby.