This story has pushed me over the line, finally triggering me to close my PayPal account. I can't describe the sum total of stimuli that brought me here, it's a gestalt, a gut feeling.
But not keeping money on them is NOT enough as a seller to extricate yourself from that morass.
They will find subtle ways to force-link your real bank account to paypal, and then its game over. They have the keys to the kingdom.
One day you will get some random charge on your account that keeps growing and growing and you don't recognize the transaction at all, but you can't do anything because they can pay themselves from your linked bank account.
I advise all businesses that use paypal that at worst case, link a completely unrelated bank institution to paypal, and then keep this secondary bank to low funds as often as possible.
Otherwise, you will never know when paypal may poison the well and your physical bank business operating account is suddenly unavailable!
> They will find subtle ways to force-link your real bank account to paypal, and then its game over. They have the keys to the kingdom.
for most reasonable sized US banks, once you have one account that has enough money not to be charged fees, you can open additional accounts with them, and easily transfer money between them. You could open a paypal-only account and keep it empty. You could also close it, and open another one whenever you need to verify an account with PayPal again
Thanks. I feel lighter.