A lawyer talks about how to fight and win against 'PayPal's merciless account BAN'



Many people use PayPal, an online payment service, when shopping on the Internet. Although I have been using PayPal for many years, a lawyer whose account was suddenly closed for no reason one day published the measures taken to restore the account.

I Fought The PayPal And I Won - by Yassine Meskhout

https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/i-fought-the-paypal-and-i-won

Writer and attorney Yassine Meskhout's PayPal account was suddenly suspended around 2018. Meskhout has been using PayPal for 14 years and had no problems until his account was suspended, so I don't know why it happened.

In terms of timing, it overlaps with the timing of writing a review of a book published by journalist Jesse Single , who is often controversial in reporting on social issues. has been permanently restricted', so I don't know if this is the cause.



Meskhout repeatedly contacted PayPal by phone and email, but the response was always 'Because you violated their terms of service,' without explaining what exactly they had done. So, when Meskhout decided to read PayPal's terms of service again, he noticed that there was an

arbitration clause there.

Arbitration is a procedure for resolving a dispute by a third party based on the agreement of the parties, and it is often used as a means of resolving disputes because it does not matter what the content is as long as the parties agree. .

Regarding this arbitration clause, Mr. Meskhout said, ``PayPal's terms of service are ridiculously long, reaching 60 pages. I know PayPal well, but I was a lawyer, not an ordinary person.'

Mr. Meskhout, who immediately started the arbitration procedure, first sent an objection to PayPal's inquiry form. The message is simple: 'My account has been suspended, but I don't know why. Please restore it.' In addition, Mr. Meskhout printed out the contents of the objection and mailed it to PayPal by certified mail.

The appeal mailed by Mr. Meskhout was certainly received by PayPal's legal department, but after that there was no news from PayPal for 30 days (45 days at the time of writing) of the grace period stipulated in the terms of use. has passed. Therefore, Mr. Meskhout, who started full-scale arbitration proceedings, sent an arbitration request to the American Arbitration Association (AAA).

According to the terms of service, if the value of the request is less than $ 10,000 (about 1,470,000 yen), PayPal will bear all the fees and shipping costs required for AAA arbitration. And since there was no money in Mr. Meskhout's frozen PayPal account, Mr. Meskhout had nothing to lose in the process.

One week after AAA received Mr. Meskhout's request, I received the following e-mail from PayPal to Mr. Meskhout's e-mail address. It reads, 'After further review of your case, we have determined that your account does not currently violate our Acceptable Use Policy. Therefore, the restrictions on your account have been lifted. We sincerely thank our customers for their use and apologize for the inconvenience caused by this service suspension.' It is almost a complete surrender.



In addition, a senior member of PayPal's legal team later told Mr. Meskhout directly, 'We understand that your request for arbitration to AAA has been resolved, and we are contacting you. has been terminated and you now have full access.We therefore request that you contact the AAA to withdraw your request for arbitration.' did.

Mr. Meskhout, who was pleased with the desired result, contacted AAA and withdrew the request for arbitration, and then charged PayPal for the postage of $ 16.99 (about 2500 yen) used in the procedure so far. 'I could have asked for more, but I wasn't interested,' Meskhout said. If I knew that it was, I was satisfied with that,' he commented.

After that, Mr. Meskhout paid all the billed costs and continues to use PayPal without any particular problems. Also, when journalist Colin Wright encountered the same thing, I helped him recover his account by telling him the steps Meskhout did this time. Mr. Meskhout is looking forward to the follow-up report, as it is not yet known at the time of writing the article whether Mr. Wright was able to successfully regain his account.



Meskhout notes, ``Arbitration is not an effective silver bullet in any case.'' The reason for this is that although this case turned out exactly as Meskhout hoped, it may have just happened by chance. In other cases, some companies may have provided only a token arbitration clause to avoid liability.

Also, if a Japanese PayPal user encounters a problem, the Japan Payment Service Association and the Tokyo Bar Association Dispute Resolution Center are supposed to accept complaints instead of AAA. For more information, please refer to PayPal's Terms of Service at this link .

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in Web Service, Posted by log1l_ks