I thought I had a clever plan to use my USD balance in PayPal. My brother is based in the US, so I would transfer some dollars to him and he'd gift me Starpoints with the current 35% off promo. Two hours of declined transactions, telephone calls to Paypal, and a hidden 4.5% commission (for sending dollars from one Paypal account to another!!) and I am rather fed up with Paypal... At the same time, it goes completely against my nature to convert those USD into GBP at the abusive FX rate offered by Paypal, only to then buy / spend dollars on a credit / debit card whenever I'm over in the States. So, anybody come across an interesting way of spending US dollars via Paypal (as a non-US resident)? I'm a bit wary of doing the giftcard game. Presumably there are travel companies happy to accept USD, but I wonder how many will want to charge me in £££ once they get a UK billing address (as I suspect Paypal will decline the transaction without a proper billing address...)
I am done with Paypal. There was a fraudulent purchase on my eBay account (an electronic code for a computer game), so naturally I relied on the various "cast iron refund guarantees" from Paypal and ebay. Paypal investigate and, apparently... no wrongfoing detected on my account, no refund. All attempts to appeal the decision were met with "case closed". Eventually managed to claim it back on the direct debit indemnity from my UK bank.
I stopped Ebay as well because unscrupulous buyers would claim "the product didn't arrive" and Ebay would take my money back. When you're reselling low to medium value stuff, you can't afford to consistently pay for "signed for" postal delivery. Ebay / PP are charging more than enough to pay for these "guarantees" out of their profits, not mine... I would love to be done with PP as well, but that's how we get paid!
