Howdy, Stranger!

It looks like you're new here. If you want to get involved, click one of these buttons!


Paypal payments in pending state (Union Pay) - BIG MESS
New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.

All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.

Paypal payments in pending state (Union Pay) - BIG MESS

dccdcc Member, Host Rep
edited October 2014 in General

In the last few days we are being hit by a very strange issue. From what we understand it is related to the way Paypal interacts with Union Pay (China).

Here's what happens:

1) Customer sends a payment to us

2) Customer confirms the money is gone from their bank account and records in their Paypal account clearly state the payment is sent and completed.

3) We receive a standard email from Paypal about the received payment

4) We do NOT receive an IPN (which means our invoice is not marked as paid)

5) Customer contacts us: "Uhmmm, where is my money?"

So, at this point the money is clearly gone from customer's bank account and from their paypal account. But, in our account the payment shows as "Pending". For more fun, when we try to access the payment directly by transaction ID, Paypal simply says there is no such transaction at all.

...... Which also means we cannot refund the transaction.... This is the part where customer goes WTF!?! and opens a dispute.

So we go to the dispute page, and try to refund the payment from there, right? No, we get:
"You cannot refund this type of transaction."

We contact Paypal. Guess what Paypal does? They just close the dispute. We still cannot refund the payment, and our customer probably thinks Paypal is getting a kickback from us for helping us steal his money.

Similar nonsense occurred a few DOZEN times in the last 48 hours (and this never happened before).

We've been on the phone with Paypal a few times today. Each person says different things. Examples:

Person1: there are new regulations in China - customers must now call their bank to "approve" these transactions

Person2: there are no issues that we can see with either your account or sender's account

Person3: we confirm the issue and we are working on it (no ETA).

So far all we could achieve is - we had Paypal block all payments from Union Pay to our account so that the size of the mess does not increase. This issue does not affect any other payment method but Union Pay.

We will keep bugging Paypal until they fix this mess. But the main question is: anyone else got hit by this or we're special?

Comments

  • Tagged:
    paypal
    omfg

    Yeah, this sounds like a shitty scenario dude! :(

  • Sounds messy, sounds like you need some big red writing on any signup/payment pages indicating this (hopefully temporary) mess.

  • A possible temporary solution, block who do not add a credit card or are not verified ?

    I saw on a Chinese hosting forum just only one opened a thread complaining about related issue but seemed resolved by calling Paypal.

  • very rare scenario.

  • @nullnull said:
    A possible temporary solution, block who do not add a credit card or are not verified ?

    I haven't used PayPal in a couple years, but I believe they removed the ability to do that MANY years ago.

  • I have seen a post 14 hours ago from a student using union pay said he have delay pay to digitalocean, so maybe it's not special.

    @dcc
    Low price, low latency, stable, change location from control panel, multi IP

    All these makes bandwagon a perfect hosting for bypass service, a lot of people run shadowsocks (a nice, low resouce socks5 proxy) on your vps for private use and love it.
    If you are facing pending and dispute problem, add a notice to order page or send this by tickets may help customer understanding what happened.

    http://pastie.org/9669718

  • We are experiencing exactly same issue. hoping that this would be resolved soon, first i thought someone trying to hijack my account as the transaction is not even listed on account. then from the email copy if i click on transaction id directly, it is hyperlink in email, then it showed pending state, even then i had check the url twice that, this is not phishing link and correct one.

  • dccdcc Member, Host Rep

    Hi guys,

    Thanks for the suggestions. We are already in touch with all customers involved. Paypal also blocked Union Pay for us completely, so there is no need to add a warning to our website (this will not affect new accounts as they will not be able to pay with Union Pay).

    @slicebox have you contacted Paypal, what did they say? Do you process these transaction manually hoping the funds will be released later or ... ? I wonder how do you deal with this?

  • qpsqps Member, Host Rep

    We've also seen this on a few transactions, but we aren't even receiving e-mails notifying us of the payments, and I can't find the transactions at all in our account.

    Thanked by 1Maximum_VPS
  • dccdcc Member, Host Rep

    Another call with Paypal: this issue has been escalated to Critical priority and they are working on getting this resolved for everyone as soon as possible. They were unable to confirm what will happen with the transactions which are already in Pending state (they will most likely go through eventually but there is a small chance they will have to reverse all of these payments). They also have no ETA but they expect this to get fixed quickly, probably in a few days.

    I know this is not much but at least some info. Paypal finally fully acknowledged that there is an issue and it is good to know they are working on it.

    Thanked by 1qps
  • dccdcc Member, Host Rep
    edited October 2014

    Another conversation with Paypal: this has not been resolved yet, and there were no updates in their internal system (looks like the reps on the phone have no idea about it anymore/they don't follow it). Now they suggest to send them a ticket via https://www.paypal.com/mts/ for further updates (we already sent one and awaiting for response).

    I know this is hardly helpful but I felt this could potentially save people some time.

  • Nick_ANick_A Member, Top Host, Host Rep

    I didn't see this thread before - we ran into the same issue. PayPal told our clients (who we directed to contact PayPal) that they would automatically refund those payments soon.

  • dccdcc Member, Host Rep

    @Nick_A
    In our case Paypal told us they will most likely not refund the payments, so we were manually crediting all these payments. Wow...

    Anyway, we have just got an update from Paypal:

    PayPal is working on recovery all affected orders and updating them to the correct payment status. The current ETA for completion is the beginning of next week.

  • so far we had only one hard issue, the other ones, customers called paypal and cleared those payments from their end. the payment is hung in the middle for past 10 plus days in pending state, customer has opened a case of non receipt 2 days ago.

  • Running into the same issue here aswell.

  • dccdcc Member, Host Rep

    Just got a confirmation from Paypal that this has been resolved. Additionally, they reversed all transactions.

  • qpsqps Member, Host Rep

    Looks like this is happening again.

  • dccdcc Member, Host Rep

    Yeah, the issue is back...

  • Nick_ANick_A Member, Top Host, Host Rep

    Yep, can confirm. Multiple reports in the last 24 hours.

  • Same here.

  • If you use the union bank card to check out.
    You will get this trouble problem!
    It's too normal,many people come from china and got this !

    Solve it just use a virtual card

Sign In or Register to comment.