If you got a “reminder” from Paypal that you still need to claim a payment from someone, there is a very good chance that it is legitimate, and not a scam. This seems to be triggered mostly when you get a payment from another country, in another currency.

One of the more frustrating things about Paypal is how seemingly impossible it is to delete old shipping addresses from your account. Recently Paypal has taken to requiring you to select a shipping address each and every time you send money, even if you are sending money for something that requires no shipping address, and the list of old shipping addresses can require you to have to page down through several screens to get to the last option, “No Shipping Required”. If you are one of the legion of people who has been searching all over the Paypal website, and all over the web, for an explanation of just how to delete old shipping addresses from Paypal, search no further! Here is the definitive answer.

It’s happened to the best of us: you’ve forgotten the PIN number for your credit card or debit card. Specifically, this time, you can’t remember the PIN for your Paypal debit card. Never fear, because changing the PIN for your Paypal debit card is as simple as just creating a new PIN number for your Paypal debit card, which you can do easily from within your Paypal account – and you don’t even need your old PIN number to do it! Here’s how.

Several email providers that normally compete with one another, like Google Gmail and Microsoft Hotmail, have teamed up in an effort to better protect email users from spam and fraudulent messages. The new system is called DMARC, short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. With a united front, the war against spam may have a powerful new weapon.

Paypal’s Terms of Service (TOS) regarding disputes for “significantly not as described” (SNAD) section lead to a heartbreaking situation in which an eBay buyer who requested a refund when he decided that an antique violin for which he’d paid $2500 was a fake, was ordered by Paypal to first destroy the violin (why the buyer didn’t just arrange with the seller to return it for a refund is beyond us). This is a fine example of why it’s such a bad idea to do business with a company that controls both halves of the transaction (Paypal and eBay are now two sides of the same company.)

Just this afternoon a rash of fake Paypal emails was let loose on the internet, coming “from” notice@ppal.com, and claiming that “You have changed your PayPal email address”, and going on to say that you have added some random email address (most seem to list andrew1987@btconnect.com as the supposedly-added address). The email advised you to send back the attached form, “Personal Profile Form – PayPal-.htm”, if you did not authorize the change.

Every once in a while someone will try to use their Paypal debit card, and the transaction will be declined with this interesting message: “Tender has not been approved.” It’s incredibly frustrating, and not a little embarrassing, to have your transaction declined, and not be authorized, especially when you know that you have enough money in your Paypal account to cover the charge you were trying to put through when your Paypal debit card was declined. You log into your Paypal account, and you see nothing wrong! No messages, no holds, nothing. Here’s what’s going on, and what you need to do to fix it.

One of the more useful features of Paypal is that you can set up an automatic subscription payment – i.e. a regularly recurring payment – so that if you have a monthly payment to a business that is the same each month, you can set it up once and forget about it, safe in the knowledge that your automatic payment will be made on time each month. (The merchant with whom you are setting up the Paypal subscription will give you a link to create the subscription’s recurring transaction.) These Paypal recurring subscription payments are very convenient, but what about if you want to stop them? How do you cancel a Paypal subscription payment? Here’s how:

The growing backlash against the arrest of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, and the suspension of Internet hosting and financial funding services such as MasterCard, Visa and Paypal (through which Wikileaks was receiving donations) have led to retaliation by so-called ‘hacktavists’ in the form of DOS and other cyber-attacks against the websites of MasterCard, Visa, Paypal, and those Internet hosting and DNS services which have disconnected Wikileaks, in some cases bringing the services to their knees. Paypal was brought down yesterday, as were MasterCard and Visa.

If you have reason to send money by Paypal to anyone in India – or if you are someone in India needing to receive money via Paypal – well, you may be out of luck, unless you can legitimately claim that the funds sent by Paypal are not for personal use, but, rather, are a business transaction for the purchase of goods. That is because Paypal has suspended all personal payments to India, and has even taken the radical step of reversing some personal Paypal payments to people in India that were already paid (leaving the hapless recipient with a negative balance), all at the demand of the Indian government, over concern that funds earmarked as ‘personal’ may actually be money being sent home by Indian citizens working overseas (known as a “remittance”).

This is a classic example of the problem when one entity with too much control owns the entire sales stream – from start to end – from offer to sale to payment: Paypal has started withholding payments that buyers have already paid until the seller not only ships the item, but “as long as the buyer doesn’t report a problem or leaves positive feedback”! “Your funds are pending – please process this order” demands the notice from Paypal “…This money is being temporarily held in your pending balance… It will be held for up to 21 days… It may be available sooner if we can confirm that the item was delivered or, if this is an eBay item, your buyer leaves positive feedback.”

If you are used to getting payments sent to your Paypal account, you may have noticed in the past couple of weeks that you are suddenly being charged a fee even for Paypal to Paypal payments! In other words, where it used to be free to send and receive payments between Paypal accounts, suddenly (and seemingly without warning), Paypal users are getting hit with fees for inter-Paypal transfers! It has to do with their new, amended Paypal terms of service, which we include below.

Millions of Paypal users around the world found Paypal down, and were told that it was a Paypal internal server error, and to contact webmaster@paypal.com. “Internal Server Error The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request. Please contact the server administrator, webmaster@paypal.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error,” said the error.

As Paypal went down yet again – and this time in what appears to have been an outage lasting several hours and affecting people on several continents – people are looking for Paypal alternatives. But are there Paypal alternatives? The answer is a resounding yes – there are alternatives to Paypal, and they are looking better all the time.

In an interesting move that may or may not be tied to the economic times, Paypal has introduced a new service in which it exhorts you to proposition people and offer to pay them to do stuff. Or, as they say in one of their online ads, “Get stuff done for money”. “Get stuff done for money,” says the ad. “Use PayPal’s “Do Stuff for Money” to get your friends to do stuff for money. Because sometimes just asking isn’t enough.”