The article implies there have been problems with withdrawing your own money. I've never seen that come up in any of the stories over the years. Has anyone experienced that issue?
I am not clear on what you mean. Most of the time when a PayPal account is frozen, you can not get any money out. My PayPal account was frozen for almost 2 months, back in 2002. I had about $1,200 in the account, and I could not get at any of it. It was a painful episode for me, as I was broke and had been planning to use some of the money to pay my rent. PayPal asked for a lot of documentation from me. They wanted me to prove my address, but as I rented and moved around a lot, it was difficult to do so. I had to get a friend to put me on the electricity bill over at their house (the friend's house) so I could get some paper documentation that PayPal would accept. They hung onto my money for a long time.
The TechCrunch article warns that withdrawing too much money from your account can trigger having the account frozen, and recommends withdrawing less at a time. That's what I've not heard of before.
Of course once it's frozen you can't get at the money, that's the whole point of locking down the account. I've experienced it myself, but not with PayPal -- I had over $13,000 held for 6 months.
I don't have any experience withdrawing money from paypal, but perhaps there is a way to make small automated withdrawals constantly? Though who knows, they may flag that behavior as fraudulent as well.
I should add, right now I've a cron job that runs once a night and which pays everyone who is owed money from my PayPal account. I have long worried this might look suspicious to PayPal. But the payments are usually small. On a normal night, at 3 AM EST, my PayPal account makes payments that might look like this:
$34
$17
$14
$9
$7
$7
$5
$4
$4
$3
$3
$3
$2
$2
$2
$2
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
$1
That is a normal night. I use the PayPal MassPay API. On any given day my website gets something like $70 and pays out something like $50.
I assume I'm using the MassPay API the way PayPal wants, so I have not yet gotten in trouble. But the whole thing makes me nervous, so I plan to spend all of January switching my websites over to different payment processors.
However, I have not yet found an easier way to send money than the PayPal MassPay API. I worry I may have to stick with PayPal for awhile, as a way to send automated payments.
I never withdraw less than $5000 at a time...