Jim sent a message to Daniel Schulman that said:
Hi Dan,
I am a frustrated privacy-concerned customer of PayPal, and I think there is a simple solution to the issue I came across.
THE ISSUE:
I tried to make an account on PayPal with my email and a Visa prepaid gift card as a payment source. Long story short, nowhere in the process of account creation was it made evident that trying to use a Visa prepaid gift card would result in an account lock down. The Terms of Service do not count as a valid expectation of the account creator to read, but of course are your legal safety net.
Once the account is locked, there is no possibility for me to change my name (the name on my prepaid card -- Prepaid Cardholder), or to change anything else, because the information can't be tied to a personal ID document. This yields the account unclosable, and the email for the account is permanently unusable, going forward.
Given this was being held for future business use (a personal startup a couple years out), I now have no choice but to do some hacked up way to use PayPal for that, and can't use the desired email address -- ever.
SOLUTION:
This could simply be avoided by telling people in the account creation process, even tucked away behind some hover-over pop-up icon (just not in the Terms of Service), that if you don't provide valid info (including an attempted use of a prepaid gift card) out of the gate, your account will be rendered useless for all of time, and the email locked away.
If you could forward this to someone on your web UI team, that would be the best ask I have. I would really appreciate it, and hope that the PayPal experience will not be this frustrating for the privacy-concerned community, going forward.
Thanks,
Jim
