PayPal banned an account that was 17 years old because I used SSH

I was using PayPal for over 17 years:

With my account over the years I have been an eBay seller (with 100% feedback rating) used it for business pushing over $150,000 in transactions and countless other random purchases. I also made use of the instant PayPal.me transfer system, which meant that PayPal got a nice $2 commission on some transactions.

Until recently I was more-or-less happy with PayPal. The fees were a bit high, but I had never had any disputes and I found it easy to use when checking out on eBay. In addition, I haven't done anything new with my account in terms of my identify information for many years. This was a big surprise to me because one day I tried to make a transaction and it failed, then a few minutes later I received this automated e-mail:

My account was permanently banned without any warning and PayPal says they will keep my money for up to 6 months. I called customer service and the customer representative read the message above verbatim while apologizing. They offered no explanation on what "fraudulent or stolen information" was involved, because I can guarantee there is none.

So, what really happened?

There was one thing that changed about the moment I got banned and I think it entirely explains the whole thing, sadly. I've attempted to communicate this to PayPal support, but I think they are just running paypal.exe and not really capable of doing anything meaningful. Immediately before getting banned I (and other customers of the same ISP I use) began experiencing connection problems. Our Internet didn't go down entirely. Some services, such as GMail or YouTube were still accessible, but some other Internet routes were not. My usual workaround to this is to SSH into my server and tunnel my connections through it:

ssh -D 127.0.0.1:8999 me@myserver.com

This gives me a SOCKS5 proxy I can configure in Firefox to easily test and workaround the issue. However, this does make my IP address appear as if I'm coming from a different state. The server is rented from a reputable company and that IP address is only used by me for the months to years I have rented the server.

When my connection got weird I decided to login to my ISP and check if they had any known problems or if maybe my bill was overdue. When I logged in I saw that everything was fine but that my bill was ready to be paid, so I decided to pay it.

My ISP doesn't directly accept PayPal, but I have a credit card issued from PayPal that allows me to spend the funds. However, I don't have it configured to automatically take money out of my account when it's charged, so I manually move the money from PayPal into the card. I went to move the $180 into the card and it failed to transfer.

I figured this was some kind of data center problem or Internet backbone problem that was affecting multiple companies, not just my ISP, so I didn't think much about it. I went back to watching YouTube via the SSH tunnel and figured I would try to restore connection without the tunnel after about an hour. About an hour later I checked my e-mail and saw the "You can no longer do business with PayPal" message. I confirmed it's authenticity and logged into my PayPal account to be greeted with the same message.

Like most, I figured this was a simple mistake and would be corrected. I tried contacting PayPal through various support channels and it became really clear that while they offer customer support, it doesn't appear they can really do anything besides read you the content of what the website already says. I received a lot of apologies, which, frankly, isn't worth much to me. Certainly it's not worth the thousands of dollars they have in frozen assets.

I thought these kinds of things only happened with new shady accounts or people doing business that is "high risk" like selling products that have high chargeback rates, etc. But, nope, it happened to me: a regular PayPal user of nearly two decades.

Moving forward I'm sure I'll get my money back and move it into another account, but that won't happen for months and in the meantime the way some clients send me money will have to change. I recommend Bitcoin Cash wherever because it's cheap and easy to use for payments, but the reality is that I have many clients that aren't "crypto people" and for them I'll be using a combination of Stripe invoices and and Cash App.

I really like the simplicity of Cash App, but a while ago I tried to use the app to make a purchase and it declined it (for "my protection") without an option to override. This makes me wary because it feels like I'm back into a PayPal-like situation where I'm just waiting for a single company's machine learning algorithm to flip out and do the "auto-layoff thing". For that reason, I try to educate clients and friends to use the Bitcoin.com wallet instead. In many ways it's as simple as Cash App for moving money from a credit card to the wallet, but it doesn't have the same risks because once you own the crypto you can use it with any wallet or company you want.

TL;DR - Don't expect PayPal to always work. They have fraud models that are inaccurate and you too could become a victim for completely benign reasons.