Anil Sharma

Open letter to Paypal business head – blocked services in India

Dear Farhad

Hundreds, maybe thousands on Indians, particularly young people from the IT software industry are dependent on Paypal for receiving payments from abroad. After few years of service, Paypal faces some issues with RBI and it suddenly decides to stop all payments and withdrawals to bank accounts.  You must currently be holding thousands if not millions of dollars that belong to people in India.

It raises several questions about the whole way in which the issue is being handled and the ethics at work :

a) There is NO official information on paypal.com/in about the difficulties you are facing. Why are you hiding the issue from customers ?

b) People who initiated withdrawal processes 15 days ago have neither received their refunds, nor has the withdrawal process been stopped.

c) You have sent no email to customers informing them of the situation.

You are casually mentioning about a major issue like this in your blogs instead of making all your customers aware about it.  
Is this a way of trying to make your blogs popular or are you trying to help customers here  ?

Further, even the responses in the blogs are vague.  

” 2. When will personal payments be turned back on?
Personal payments to and from India will be suspended for at least a few months ….. 

3. When will local bank withdrawals be available?
Customers should be able to withdraw their funds to a local bank within the next few days…  “

How many days are few days and how many months are few months ?

“During this time, customers can still make commercial payments to India but merchants cannot withdraw funds in Rupees to local Indian banks.”

Interpreted correctly, this means “Please continue paying Paypal but Paypal won’t pay you”.
Why do you want to keep receiving funds when customers can’t withdraw ? Why don’t you suspend all services till you’ve cleared all pending payments ?

Services like Paypal are the backbone of web, when they fail, not only do they cause short term problems, they cripple the trust of many people in new age systems.
Situations like these may arise with any company (Toyota is experiencing one now) but can be handled better, you and your team are not setting the right example. 

I hope to see immediate action, including official notices, and transparency in this matter.

Regards

Anil Sharma

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