After two sleepless nights of thinking whether my hard-earned money will end up with PayPal, I finally got my answer. They restored my account’s functionality. $715 is worth 3 months’ salary in UP, poor us minimum wage teachers. Now I can try to sleep, finally.

Personally, I hated the experience. By principle I never grovel and I believe in giving a person what the person is due. And a person is always due what is rightfully his, especially if it’s money. I am glad that I got my account back but I think this is a PayPal horror story on its own.

Here are the documents I sent to clear my account up:

• Driver’s license
• Government employment ID (UP Faculty ID where my sis is named as person to contact in case of emergency)
• Credit card billing to my sister where my credit card is supplementary
• Statement of account of one of my bank accounts (also added to PayPal) where I have my name and address
• Phone bill addressed to my sister to our present address

I guess they were smart enough to make the connection. My prime concern was I don’t have a utility bill to my name. At least they got to connect the dots with all those documents.

I think what prompted them was my attempt to withdraw a sizable amount as my very first transaction with my account. Still, that’s the reason why a lot of us signed up for PayPal, right? To easily get the money that we’ve been decently earning?

I lost a total of $85 from the process and to I don’t think it is a consolation that I got the account back. $85 covers a lot of living expenses already and doing the numbers, I could say that PayPal took away a week’s worth of groceries. Totally unfair.

Businesses should primarily be aware of their markets. PayPal obviously never did with the Philippines. All they had to do was set up the avenues (via banks) and that’s about it. They need to beef up their CRM and streamline processes for their customers. I’ve read that my case isn’t just the lone Filipino case and I am one of the lucky few who got their accounts restored. Malaysians are having a really hard time with PayPal too.

Is it the third world stigma that makes them suspicious of every little thing that we do? Probably.