Deetsie's Heroic Dailies

It was February 6, 2010 when Paypal decided to halt all payments to and from India. Not only was the transactions on hold but all balances were reversed. The mass reversals caused so much trouble for both parties involved in each transaction, in and out of India.

While PayPal responds a template mail to every query about this issue saying the payment be re-sent as gift and that they are working to get the issue resolved within 2 to 3 days, no solution is really workable at the moment. PayPal also stated that it may take a few months to resolve the specific issue on Personal Payments being sent to and from India. How few is few? Good luck!

Initially the main problem was only about the restrictions on personal payments but we all know all transaction types were reversed, including gift and services. This caused much worry and dilemma for all Indians across the Internet who were using PayPal for personal and business transactions. Merchants outside India, who had already shipped the goods found that the payment for them was returned to the buyer. Link builders, writers and other services rendered for off shore clients cannot receive any payment for their hard work.

Speculations arise as to who is the real culprit. Each of these transactions does not cover taxes for the Indian government. The country is receiving so much money in foreign currencies. A citizen who is clearly affected by the issue commented, “A lot of business must be transacted in India via PayPal—business done with personal transactions. So a money-hungry Indian government is aggravated at some perceived revenue loss (taxes, customs, etc.) and (has) put pressure on PayPal to stop the payments either directly or indirectly”.

This is something we are all currently at a loss about. So for payees and merchants outside India who wish to track the reversals, here’s what you can do to keep yourselves busy while waiting for the resolution: Check if the money was in fact returned to your account. We all know PayPal slurps money like an addict so you better make sure of this. This amount should be shown as your current PayPal balance. If you can’t see that, try this:

1. Log in to your PayPal. Go to Reports

2. Click on Download History by setting the correct dates (30 days max, ideally)

3. Open the .csv in MS Excel or Open Office document to view all the transactions.

4. Transaction ID could be used if you are looking for a specific transaction. But if you are not sure about any of those, using the email address would be your best bet. Use the Find (Ctrl+F) option to do this.

5. The report shows one transaction per row. In this situation, where you sent the payment, fund was returned, you tried to reprocess it successfully but it was returned a few days later, you can expect four (4) unique transactions having different IDs and remarks. By using the email address to search through, check if there were any remarks saying Hold, Completed, Reversed, etc.

Tags: How to trace transaction, India, PayPal, Reversals, Solution