As of August 10th there is a new requirement at PayPal that all members have a mobile telephone in order to facilitate their new security and fraud prevention arrangement. Apparently they are unaware that between five and ten percent of Americans do not possess mobile telephones. PayPal is only too happy to jettison these members, such as myself.
Just so nobody ends up telling me this, as if I were unaware, I will add the following:
I have a Google Voice telephone number which is capable of receiving the sort of text messages PayPal wants to send me. But if you think I will give that telephone number to PayPal, or anyone else, you are seriously in error.
The stupidity at PayPal is vivid. Financial institutions, for example, also have really serious security and fraud prevention concerns. But banks offer to contact you, for security purposes, via both email and/or a voice telephone call . . . . to provide a code so you can log in.
PayPal is too mobile telephone focused to offer those options.
They say itās because of security, but itās not really. Itās to keep people from making throw away accounts easily. They end up taking it on the chin when some fraudster makes an account, does the fraudulent transaction, pulls the money, and then paypal is left holding the bag when the credit card company wonāt pay. Without this fraud prevention method, the amount they would lose from scammer accounts created DAILY would outweigh the profits they are losing from people like you over your whole lifetime. Donāt blame paypal, blame thieves.
Uh, why not? You can have more than one Google account, and therefore more than one GV account. Donāt want to give them your main one, give them another. You do have to make sure the GV account stays open, else you could lose access to PP, at least temporarily.
I am pretty sure you can use the same phone number for multiple PP accounts. And even if theyāre smart enough to look out for this, itās not that difficult to get throw-away phone numbers.
This works well for some places. If it works for Paypal, and youāre willing to do business with them ā¦ itās gold, Jerry, gold!
Very true. Sadly, few, if any, of those throw away numbers work for Google, M$, or Apple. It would not surprise me if they did not work for Paypal. Actually, nothing would surprise me regarding Paypal.
Trust me, itās got nothing to do with fraud. If Paypal could make money (and maybe they do) on fraudsters, they would be advertising on the dark web.
Itās got EVERYTHING to do with revenue, or loss/lack_of revenue.
Yes, I said trust me. But letās be realistic - if you canāt trust PĢ¶rĢ¶eĢ¶sĢ¶tĢ¶oĢ¶nĢ¶eĢ¶ a goose, who can you trust.
You younger people are more sophisticated and āwith itā on this sort of stuff than I am. However:
First, you need to know I use Google Voice solely to make telephone calls. I never use the facility to receive telephone calls. By making calls there I save money. That is the only reason why I use Google Voice.
Before Google changed things I was able to use their free service, to make telephone calls through my computer, without providing them any personal information. But when Google went with Google Voice only, for making calls, I was forced to give them my real (landline) telephone number (which I resisted doing) and apply for one of their free Google telephone numbers, something with which a had less problem. But:
My best understanding is that, if somebody calls my Google number and there is no answer, the call will then roll over to my real landline telephone. So I do not ever give out that Google number because I do not want to risk receiving, on my real telephone, a bunch of junk telephone calls . . . . or spam calls . . . . or garbage calls . . . . or however you wish to label them.
It has been so far so good. Only Google and I know about that Google number. There has been no abuse. And I hope that is how things remain.
Finally, to reiterate, the only reason I even have a Google telephone number is because I was unable to sign up for the service without one. And I wanted the service so I could make free OUTgoing calls using my computer. Itās something I do fairly often, and free is cheap.
Why not get a cheap mobile phone and pay-as-you go account? You can get an account for $30/yr or less.
Meanwhile, not using PayPal, you could be missing out on 5% cashback on $1500. If youāre shipping stuff, using PayPal is also cheaper by 5-10% then going through USPS or UPS directly. Seems like the opportunity cost would be greater than the cost to have a mobile phone for this purpose alone.
You can change those settings in Google Voice.
You can specify where incoming calls ring to and turn on/off the web, or home phone.
There is also a ādo not disturbā option to send all calls straight to voicemail.
Just FYI above, but I do totally understand you not wanting your google voice # getting into the hands of the spammers. Spam calls are obnoxiously annoying for the phone #'s Iāve got. For me though half of them are people āinteresed in buying my propertyā for 50% of the value likely.
Exactly. I had to use it with one of my accounts after a number similar to mine was made public by sum dum celebrity with enough fat-fingered fans.
PP is not likely to call you, but they do send SMS for 2FA if thereās no cookie. There are multiple ways to view the SMS: GV app, GV web site, forward to email, forward to cell phone (I know, the last one is not applicable to you).
Heads up ā at least on the T-mo network Red Pocket does not support Conditional Call Forwarding, so it cannot be properly integrated with GV for voicemail. Should be fine for SMS though.
Just for the āhalibutā I tried once again this morning to gain entry into my PayPal account, after having changed nothing and given them no new information of any sort.
It was back to the old way and I was able as before to see my PayPal account without trouble. They did request to know my nonexistent mobile telephone number, but they were not insistent on knowing.
( or a credit card )