No one said they were legit, man.
I don't trust them at all, which is why I don't put myself in ay position to have anything become a problem.
Here are the rules I go by:
1. Move all the money in and out of the account once daily, to or from your bank. ( If you don't have a bank account, use a pre-paid debit card from netspend.com or greendot.com ).
2. Guarantee all refunds, no questions asked on all products and services that you offer the feature on. If it is something people can still use after, such as software, script, or other virtual product, that paypal doesn't have a policy for protecting consumers on at all, keep the fee and state it is non-refundable, offering a cheaper discount trial period, that they can try it out first. Otherwise, post ' Non-refundable ' or charge/keep shipping cost out of the original sale price to have them return it to you and a 15% restocking fee for products.
3. Keep the best records you can. You do NOT have to disclose how you got the money, as that can be protected as a trade secret. You DO have to account for where the funds came from and for trade of what product or service.
You can prove that with your paypal account records for the customer support access at any time. IF you can and do prove where your money came from and handle any and all refunds as they come up, you should be fine. Sure, there are issues that come up but if you can prove you have done right, that shows in your accounts and you keep records of your activities so that you can reference what you do during a project, you will be able to verify or smoke any claim anyone puts against you.
From what you've stated, you didn't do the same thing I practice and stated to do above. You had those accounts that were held with different information and according to what you are saing ' hardly any real information ', which is your problem and where you went wrong. All of my accounts are open, running and fine with legitimate addresses, my contact information and business number for those given sites/accounts, as well as the banking information required for them to be verified 100%.
Secondly, if you have thousands of dollars in paypal accounts, why wouldn't you move them into a real bank? Even with the worst possible credit, if you have $5,000, a bank somewhere will give you a second chance for moving it into their system from paypal...as long as you can account for where/for what you got the funds for. I think that was a HUGE mistake on your part and I'm sorry to hear that happened to you that way.
The fun thing about rules is that you have the option to pick and choose which ones you live by. If your own personal rules protect you from violating the rules of others, as well as prevents them from taking advantage of you, there you have it. Beats the hell out of living in fear of someone else's rules taking your money out of your pocket and leaving you waving the turned out lining with a smile ever again.
Food for thought.
If you follow aftershock's advice, realize that if you have a problem with any one account you'll have problems with all your accounts. PayPal will limit all of them if one gets limited. I have many PayPal accounts and go to great lengths to keep them separate and not connected in any manner.
I learned 6 years ago what can happen if you "for a second" think PayPal is a legitimate, honest or even a reasonable business partner. I will NEVER forget that lesson that cost me thousands of dollars and many headaches. Rather than build a partner relationship with me, they chose to ignore my pleas and daily requests for an explanation. It took almost 2 weeks before they'd even explain why all my accounts were limited with thousands in them and what I needed to do to get my money back.
Since that time, I've had 3 accounts limited with negative balances and I walked away leaving PayPal on the hook for negative balances. Not a single thing on those accounts contained real information. Now I have 9 active accounts without a bit of real information, all verified and some with more than 9,000 verified transactions. PayPal taught me very well how to protect my assets and the methods explained above will make sure all your accounts are tied together as one account. You can "think" they are all separate and each their own entity but wait until you have a problem. They will all go down, I guarantee it.
