YSK It costs PayPal £550 every time they receive a complaint to the Financial Services Ombudsman in the UK.
If PayPal (or any other financial institution for that matter) has limited your account for an arbitrary reason and they refuse to allow you to withdraw funds etc, then forward your complaint to the Financial Ombudsman Service.
They are an independent body who have a legal duty to arbitrate between banks and financial companies when a customer feels their complaint has not been dealt with properly.
Yes, £550 is pocket change to PayPal as a company, but each department has financial targets to meet, and £550 being paid to the FSO every time they limit a customers account will eventually make them change their thought process.
It will also make them look at restoring your account quicker because the FSO will want a detailed report on how they have handled the complaint.
My PayPal account was limited several years ago because apparently it was 'connected' to another person's account and they refused to even discuss it with me despite them holding over £2,000 of my money. The FSO stepped in and within a week, I received a phone call from their head of customer relations who apologized profusely and said that the connection was 'extremely weak' and could have been something as simple as connecting to the same public WiFi network as the other person. My account was reactivated within minutes.
The second time was a year ago when I tried to change my bank account and it kept giving me a 'Server Error' message. Their call center in the Philippines refused to even raise a complaint about the issue, citing that if I can't add a bank account then I should just 'spend the money' in my account on eBay.
Another complaint to the FSO and within a week I had another phone call explaining that it wasn't a 'Server Error' at all and it was another false-positive picked up by their security software.
When PayPal treat customers like dirt, hit them in the only place it hurts them - their pocket!
