Yahoo Finance PayPal introduces new £9 fee for inactive accounts
People with dormant PayPal (PYPL) accounts are set to be slapped with new fees from next week, the company has revealed.
Users must sign in before the 16 December deadline to prevent being charged £9 ($11.90) a year. The fee will apply to accounts that have been inactive for at least a year, but still have money left in.
This includes accounts that haven’t sent or received money for 12 months, or been logged into. PayPal will not charge a fee for those with a zero balance or where a credit or debit card is linked to the account.
The company confirmed it would only take the fee from the account balance itself and not from a linked card or account.
Users, who will receive a warning in advance when the fee is set to be charged, can avoid the fee by simply logging into their accounts. PayPal said that it has no plans to close accounts and that it would notify customers 60 days, 30 days and then seven days before the fee is set to be charged.
In a statement PayPal said: "We are establishing an inactivity fee for accounts that have been inactive for at least 12 consecutive months.
"This provision does not apply to PayPal users registered in Ireland and to personal accounts registered in Hungary."
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Earlier this week, the payment platform was accused of failing fraud victims. Consumer group Which? said it is calling for PayPal customers to be covered by the same consumer protections as other forms of payment.
It has also called for the government to use the end of the Brexit transition period as an opportunity to tighten protections for online payments and the victims of fraud.
While PayPal holds a banking licence and is signed up to the Financial Ombudsman Service, users do not have the same protections offered by other financial products, Which? said.
PayPal offers its own Buyer Protection policy that promises to safeguard users against breaches of contract, including missing deliveries, or when items turn out to be fake or faulty.
However, “it is not part of the voluntary code for authorised push payments, which commits banks to reimbursing customers who have been tricked into parting with their money,” the consumer group said.
PayPal told Yahoo Finance it “recognises that authorised push payment fraud is a serious issue. We take all incidents of fraud very seriously and will carefully consider Which?’s proposals.”
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