I am usually a huge fan of Paypal. They have updated many aspects of the financial system to be appropriate for the Internet age. The banks have been so slow to adopt the needs of Internet commerce. It makes sense that a start-up like Paypal, now part of eBay since the acquisition several years ago, could be nimble enough to pull it off.
Paypal has a number of great API options. We have used the paypal mass payment APi for a long time for those pieces of work we outsource to India. As you know, we keep as much of our work in America as possible. More specifically, we have tried to keep the work in the local Rochester NY area to support our local economy. That being said, there are some jobs that the Rochester workforce just don't want. Those very repetitive and low-paying jobs we send to India.
Well a few days ago a number of our workers in India contacted us saying that Paypal was reversing their payments unexpectedly. Apparently, on or about February 4th, Paypal stopped processing personal payments to people in India. But the funny thing about our reversals is that we never make personal payments. We use the Paypal mass payment API.
So it seems to me that the Paypal Mass Payment API has a bug. It is inappropriately being categorized as a personal payment. This was enough to trigger the reversal from our workers in India. But the money was never returned to us. The money from these paypal payments was essentially stuck at Paypal. I spent over an hour on the phone with Paypal today to try and get this worked out. To their credit, they quickly saw the issue and owned it. But they have not yet resolved it.